President WEED WHACKER!
"Ouch! Ouch! stop Mr. President you're hurting us!"Good Day Folks:
We'll send Ms Eagan a copy of our posting to show how much we enjoyed today's column.Clare L. Pieuk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WEED WHACKER: The President said in his town hall meeting on Thursday that legalizing marijuana would't be a 'good strategy.'
Yes We Cannabis? Joint Resolution: Taxing Pot just makes cents
By Margery Eagan, Boston Herald Columnst
Sunday, Marc
h 29, 2009
It’s time to legalize marijuana, tax it to death, then let struggling Joe Citizen - instead of Joe Dope Dealer - reap the pot profits.
The most popular question at President Obama’s town hall meeting Thursday? Whether legalizing marijuana would help the economy and create jobs. You know: Pottery Barn goes Pottery Bong.
Now the pot posse may have stacked the e-mail deck. Still Obama, who once wanted to decriminalize pot, laughed off the inquiries. “I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” he quipped, then did his post-election about-face. “No, I don’t think this would be a good strategy.”
Actually, it would be a very good strategy. He’s wrong. Enough already with these ancient mariner moralizers like ex-drug czar Bill Bennett, who preached reefer madness while gambling millions in Vegas and smoking two packs a day. A different generation’s in charge now. Millions of Americans understand that you can get stoned in high school, in college, every post-collegiate Saturday night, yet remain a responsible, upstanding, taxpayer. They know because they’ve done it.
Ignoring hysterical politicians and law enforcement types around here, Massachusetts voted nearly two to one in November to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana. Has your neighborhood gone to pot? If we took the next step - legalize and tax it - we might not need toll hikes or 19-cent gas tax hikes and they’d surely be hiring at “Roach Brothers,” or “Best Buds,” or maybe even, I can’t resist, “Restoration Weed-Wear.”
If we legalized nationwide, we’d save billions immediately in enforcement and jailing costs. We’d reap many billions more per year in taxes. When Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron published his legalize-pot tax estimates in 2005, more than 500 professional economists, including Milton Friedman, signed on.
Miron was on CNN this week discussing the horrific drug war on the Mexico/U.S. border. He’s long argued that violence is the inevitable norm in illegal, not legal, markets, whether in drugs, gambling, prostitution, or alcohol. We just never learn.
But legalizing pot isn’t only about money. It’s about our ridiculous citizen passivity. Why do we let congressional liars and thieves dictate what we can do, responsibly, in our living rooms? Who are they to take away our children’s student loans over a joint?
NORML (The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) typically gets about $900 a day in online donations. Thursday and Friday, they got $3,500 each day.
“By every possible metric I can employ,” said NORML’s executive director, Allen St. Pierre, “these last 24 hours have been the busiest I’ve seen.”
Though St. Pierre was disappointed with Obama’s flip-flop Thursday, he also knows the president could be his best advertisement. You may not like Obama’s politics, but nobody would argue that pot-smoking and cocaine-snorting scrambled Obama’s brain.
Herald Pulse
Should marijuana be legalized and taxed?
Yes
No
Not sure
posted by Clare L. Pieuk at 10:10 AM
1 Comments:
I respect Obama he is a talented politician, President Obama seems to posse’s insightful, reasonable judgment on many issues, although in the case of marijuana prohibition laws I find Obama’s choice to answer with mocking humor to be lacking. Smoking marijuana is an easy thing to laugh about, it seems there is something about being stoned that brings a smile to people’s faces, however marijuana prohibition is not a joke. We should not be making jokes as millions of Americans are arrested for being caught on the wrong side of moral politicking, we should not laugh as we spend over 30 billion dollars a year going after Americans for smoking weed, we should not giggle and poke fun as we watch billions of dollars in tax revenue slip through our fingers each year, and should we not be jolly as thousands of people are murdered by cartels profiting from America’s moral hypocrisy. I believe there are profound latent consequences in prohibition that are not even factored in to our assessments of the effects of illegality, such as how we view the rule of law and the role of law enforcement in the community, the divisiveness between users and non users, the stigma of mental shock of incarceration. I say pot prohibition is no joke it has real costs paid for in real lives. Freedom is achieved in a country by placing responsibility in the hands of the citizen and not by the state legally enforcing morality.
SunflowerPipes.com
Post a Comment
<< Home