Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

So let's do some back of the envelope math

Colorado: 5,268,367 people (2013 est.)

Pot Tax Revenues: $98 million

That's $18.60 per person.

Assuming demand is constant across the U.S. (which is probably not true, but let's go with it)

U.S. population: 317,580,230 (current est.)

That's $5,906,992,278 in tax revenues for the entire country.

2014 is expected to be even bigger.

So what could the nation do with $6 billion+ extra dollars every single year?

Of course even a basic analysis of the situation shows that the money earned/saved is far greater than this: reduced need for enforcement, reduced prison requirements, reduced etc.

The U.S. spends about $74 billion per year on just prisons. What if we could reduce that number by 1/3rd? I wouldn't mind an addition $25 billion/year sloshing around in more productive uses (in addition to the $6b/year in sales tax).

I'm sure there's some more detailed analysis on what the actual numbers might look like, but I'm guessing nationwide, it's something nearing $100 billion/year of money that might be repurposed for things that aren't stupid.

Much bigger than the direct costs of arresting/prosecuting/imprisoning people is the economic loss they represent -- assuming those people could do something productive, they'd be contributing a lot more to society than they cost to lock up today. On top of the costs of locking them up. And, the competent people currently working in law enforcement who could be doing other things. And the deadweight losses, etc. from people (rightly, in many communities) being distrustful of law enforcement and the government.

Ending the drug war would be a positive of around the same order of magnitude that the War on Terror has been a negative; hundreds of billions per year on an open-ended basis.

Here's a longer, but still mostly back-of-the-envelope calculation: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/05/marijuana-much-more-tha...

It turns out that the tax benefits pale in comparison to the slight reduction in car accidents caused by drunk drivers (because pot use seems to displace alcohol use.)

Well, that's not exactly what was said at http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/05/marijuana-much-more-tha... -- but I appreciate that you linked there because with some careful record-keeping, some actual data could be collected in Colorado.

Quoting now from http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/05/marijuana-much-more-tha...:

  Costs from legalization compared to current system: 200 kQALYs and $2 billion
  Benefits from legalization compared to current system: 260 kQALYs and $7 billion

Although it’s not going to be necessary, we can interconvert QALYs and dollars at the going health-care rate of about $100,000/QALY ($100 million/kQALY):

  Costs from legalization compared to current system: 220 kQALYs
  Benefits from legalization compared to current system: 330 kQALYs

And get:

Net benefits from legalization: +110 kQALYs

Except that this is extremely speculative and irresponsible. By far the largest component of the benefits of legalization turned out to be the effect on road traffic accidents, which is based on only two studies and which may on further research turn out to be a cost. And by far the largest component of the costs of legalization turned out to be the effect on IQ, and we had to totally-wild-guess the QALY cost of an IQ point loss. The wiggle room in my ignorance and assumptions is more than large enough to cover the small gap between the two policies in the results.

So my actual conclusion is:

There is not a sufficiently obvious order-of-magnitude difference between the costs and benefits of marijuana legalization for a evidence-based utilitarian analysis of costs and benefits to inform the debate. You may return to your regularly scheduled wild speculation and shrill accusations.

$6 Billion? Think of all the prisons we could build!!

You know what will happen when the prison industry revenue and budgets get slashed and x number of prison employees are displaced? We will subsidize the industry. I can't substantiate that claim, but it just seems like the way it will go. Still I'd be for any movement which keeps substance a users out of prison if substance abuse was the only 'crime' that put them in prison in the first place.

How about just giving the money back to taxpayers?

Nah, they'll probably just waste it.

> So what could the nation do with $6 billion+ extra dollars every single year?

Bong hits for NASA

You could also raise that much money by raising income taxes.

There are good reasons to legalize pot, but the ability to raise tax revenue isn't one of them.

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