Drug Prohibition Not Fiscally Responsibl

drug prohibition is not remotely consistent with fiscal responsibility. This policy costs the public purse around $70 billion per year, according to my estimates, yet no evidence suggests that prohibition reduces drug use to a significant degree.

Clipped from www.cato.org

The Tea Party and the Drug War

by Jeffrey A. Miron

Voter dissatisfaction with Republicans and Democrats is at historic levels, and the tea-party movement is hoping to play kingmaker in the November elections. The country's current breed of discontent is ideal for the tea parties, because economic concerns are foremost, allowing the movement to sidestep the divisions between its libertarian and conservative wings.

As the elections near, however, voters will want to know where the party stands not just on the economy but on social issues. A perfect illustration is drug policy, where conservatives advocate continued prohibition but libertarians argue for legalization. Which way should the tea party lean when this issue arises?

Fiscal responsibility means limiting government expenditures to programs that can be convincingly said to generate benefits in excess of their costs. This does not rule out programs with large expenditures, or ones whose benefits are difficult to quantify; national defense is guilty on both counts, yet few believe that substantial military expenditure is necessarily irresponsible. Read more at www.cato.org

 

Give GOP Liberty & they'll support Pot

legalization can appeal to conservatives, especially if the arguments emphasize freedom, personal responsibility, and the Constitution, along with up-front clarity about the goal: legal production and use of marijuana for adults, whatever their motivations.

Clipped from www.cato.org

Why Did California Vote Down Legal Pot?

by Jeffrey A. Miron

California voters have just rejected Proposition 19, the ballot initiative that would have legalized marijuana under state law. Where did Prop 19 go wrong?

Prop 19 failed in part because many proponents emphasized the wrong arguments for legalization. Many advocates promised major benefits to California's budget because of reduced expenditure on marijuana prohibition and increased revenue from marijuana taxation. Other supporters claimed that Mexican drug violence would fall substantially. Read more at www.cato.org

 

Drug Decriminalization in Mexico and US #FastandFurious #DrugWar

This is a good plan. Prohibition clearly did not succeed and the US and Mexican War on Drugs is not succeeding either. Legalize it. Tax it and stop enforcement. This will free up so much money for the state and federal governments of Mexico and the US. It will also reduce the overcrowded prison burden, and lower government spending - because that costs money too.

Clipped from www.cato.org

RT: [eksit101] Is the #ENDTHEFED victories the October surprise? Just all seems fishy. #NWO #RESTORETHEREPUBLIC http://t.co/UXpSahotsE f...
— #New World Order (@nwohashtag) October 1, 2013

Mexico's Failed Drug War

by Jorge Castañeda

What is going on with Mexico's drug war? Why are we in our current mess, and what are the possibilities of getting out of it in any reasonable time frame?

We are in this mess today, as opposed to over the last 40 or 50 years, because when the current president, Felipe Calderón, took office over three years ago, he felt that he had no choice but to declare a full-fledged, no-holds-barred war on drugs. He declared this war after a three-month transition period, which was very rocky because of the controversy surrounding the elections. And he declared this war because he had the impression that it was as if a patient had come to him and said, "I have a stomachache." Thinking it was a problem of appendicitis, he opened the patient up and found that the entire abdominal cavity was invaded by cancer. He had no option other than to go in with everything he had to fix it. This was the country Calderón said he found. He had to declare a war on drugs because the drug cartels had reached a level of power, wealth, violence, and penetration of the state that made the situation untenable. Read more at www.cato.org

End Drug Prohibition-Increase Revenues

...The report also estimates that drug legalization would yield tax revenue of $46.7 billion annually, assuming legal drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco.

Clipped from www.cato.org

The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition

by Jeffrey A. Miron and Katherine Waldock

Jeffrey A. Miron is a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Professor Miron earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chaired the economics department at Boston University prior to joining the Harvard faculty. Katherine Waldock is a doctoral candidate at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

State and federal governments in the United States face massive looming fiscal deficits. One policy change that can reduce deficits is ending the drug war. Legalization means reduced expenditure on enforcement and an increase in tax revenue from legalized sales.

This report estimates that legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. Of these savings, $25.7 billion would accrue to state and local governments, while $15.6 billion would accrue to the federal government.

See more at www.cato.org

 

Prohibition: Impact on TAX Revenues!

Prohibition removed a significant source of tax revenue and greatly increased government spending. It led many drinkers to switch to opium, marijuana, patent medicines, cocaine, and other dangerous substances that they would have been unlikely to encounter in the absence of Prohibition.

Clipped from www.cato.org

Alcohol Prohibition Was a Failure

by Mark Thornton

National prohibition of alcohol (1920-33)--the "noble experiment"--was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. The results of that experiment clearly indicate that it was a miserable failure on all counts. The evidence affirms sound economic theory, which predicts that prohibition of mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure.

The lessons of Prohibition remain important today. They apply not only to the debate over the war on drugs but also to the mounting efforts to drastically reduce access to alcohol and tobacco and to such issues as censorship and bans on insider trading, abortion, and gambling.[1] Read more at www.cato.org

 

Prohibition: Alcohol Then, Marijuana Now

Prohibition represented a conflict between urban and rural values emerging in the United States. Given the mass influx of immigrants to the urban dwellings of the United States, many individuals within the prohibition movement associated the crime and morally corrupt behavior of the cities of America with their large immigrant populations. In a backlash to the new emerging realities of the American demographic, many prohibitionists subscribed to the doctrine of “nativism” in which they endorsed the notion that America was made great as a result of its white Anglo-Saxon ancestry. This fostered xenophobic sentiments towards urban immigrant communities who typically argued in favor of abolishing prohibition.[15] Additionally, these nativist sentiments were a part of a larger process of Americanization taking place during the same time period.[16]

In the 1916 presidential election, both Democratic incumbent Woodrow Wilson and Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes ignored the Prohibition issue, as was the case with both parties' political platforms. Democrats and Republicans had strong wet and dry factions, and the election was expected to be close, with neither candidate wanting to alienate any part of his political base.

In January 1917, the 65th Congress convened, in which the dries outnumbered the wets by 140 to 64 in the Democratic Party and 138 to 62 among Republicans. With America's declaration of war against Germany in April, German-Americans—a major force against prohibition—were widely discredited and their protests subsequently ignored. In addition, a new justification for prohibition arose: prohibiting the production of alcoholic beverages would allow more resources—especially the grain that would otherwise be used to make alcohol—to be devoted to the war effort. While "war prohibition" was a spark for the movement,[17] by the time Prohibition was enacted, the war was over.

Clipped from en.wikipedia.org

Prohibition in the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Prohibition in the United States, also known as The Noble Experiment, was the period from 1920 to 1933, during which the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol were banned nationally[1] as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The United States Senate proposed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 18, 1917. Having been approved by 36 states, the 18th Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919 and effected on January 17, 1920.[2] Some state legislatures had already enacted statewide prohibition prior to the ratification of the 18th Amendment.

The "Volstead Act", the popular name for the National Prohibition Act, passed through Congress over President Woodrow Wilson's veto on October 28, 1919, and established the legal definition of intoxicating liquor, as well as penalties for producing it.[3] Though the Volstead Act prohibited the sale of alcohol, the federal government did little to enforce it. By 1925, in New York City alone, there were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy clubs.[4] Read more at en.wikipedia.org

 

NPR Under Fire By Right Wing

This is just WRONG! FOX is way right, MSNBC leans left but leaves out anything that looks bad for large corporations like its parent GE and NPR has been the last bastion of centrist information, untainted by the large megacorporations that control the media in this country.

NPR needs to be left alone.

Clipped from www.npr.org

NPR CEO Vivian Schiller Resigns Categories: News Media, National News

NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller has resigned, NPR just announced.

This follows yesterday's news that then-NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller (no relation) was videotapped slamming conservatives and questioning whether NPR needs federal funding during a lunch with men posing as members of a Muslim organization (they were working with political activist James O'Keefe on a "sting.")

See more at www.npr.org

 

Eliminate TBTF, Support Local Banks

Couldn't tax subsidies for renewable energy be subject to banking with local players?

TeaParty Backed By Billionaires

URL:  http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/billionaire-...

 

 

Let me get this straight:

TeaParty wants smaller government so they back billionaires for elected seats, and take money from the Billionaire Koch brothers to fund their efforts.

Meanwhile, governments are starved for revenues because their tax base shrank as US corporate profits are at an all time high...

Republican leaders supported Mr. Scott’s primary opponent, Bill McCollum, and poured money into negative advertising that portrayed Mr. Scott as untrustworthy and fraudulent. Mr. Scott resigned in 1997 as the head of Columbia/HCA, the nation’s largest hospital chain, amid an F.B.I. investigation. That inquiry eventually led to $1.7 billion in criminal and civil penalties for Medicare fraud

US Sleeping Giant in Solar

With enough solar-generating capacity in the American southwest alone to meet the nation’s electricity needs seven times over, the U.S. is the sleeping giant of the global solar industry.

Clipped from www.sungevity.com

Green Jobs

Home Solar creates green jobs.

One bright spot in the US economy over the past few years has been the growth in green jobs. In 2009, the solar industry created 17,000 new jobs in the USA alone. California, in particular, has seen much of this upside. According to Next 10, a non-partisan think tank, California has enjoyed 36% green job growth, compared to 13% overall job growth, since 1995. In 2007-08, green job growth in California grew by 5% while total jobs fell 1%. Read more at www.sungevity.com

 

Renewable Energy is Key to TBTF

The Solar industry could be the key to eliminating too big to fail - that is the industry is a better fit for small and local businesses rather than large mega corporations and banks

Check out this podcast on iTunes:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=135363982

Replace CFTC's Dunn @barackobama

http://www.plattsenergyweektv.com/story.aspx?storyid=117396&ca...

 

 

Pledge Allegiance to the Corporate State

URL:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/america-is-...

 

 

Did you support the Big Transfer of Wealth to the 400? 400 people have 50% of America's wealth. 6 banks control an unheard of percentage of the US assets.

Goldman Bonus Contracts Are Sacrosanct

URL:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/07/state-pension-...

 

 

When news of Goldmanesque bonuses first sparked public outrage, both Wall Street and the White House combated the criticism with a persistent argument: Yes, it might be deeply frustrating to see taxpayer dollars used to further enrich already wealthy bankers, but these bonus deals were were contractual obligations and America is a nation of laws. You just can't tear up contracts, the argument went. So, with few exceptions, the bonuses stayed.

Yet now, with state leaders planning pay cuts for teachers, firefighters and other public workers, contracts aren't described as so sacrosanct anymore...

Yes. OUTRAGE IS NECESSARY!!!

Why are Goldman compensation contracts sacrosanct when pension plans and collective bargaining rights for teachers are not??

Civil War in Ex Colonies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_war#Civil_wars_in_the_19th_...

 

 

Following World War II, the major European powers divested themselves of their colonies at an increasing rate: the number of ex-colonial states jumped from about 30 to almost 120 after the war. The rate of state formation leveled off in the 1980s, at which point few colonies remained.[20] More states also meant more states in which to have long civil wars. Hironaka statistically measures the impact of the increased number of ex-colonial states as increasing the post-WWII incidence of civil wars by +165% over the pre-1945 number.[21]

Global Ideological Warfare

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_war#Civil_wars_in_the_19th_...

 

 

The two major global ideologies, monarchism and democracy, led to several civil wars. However, a bi-polar world, divided between the two ideologies, did not develop, largely due the dominance of monarchists through most of the period.

The monarchists would thus normally intervene in other countries to stop democratic movements taking control and forming democratic governments, which were seen by monarchists as being both dangerous and unpredictable.

The Great Powers, defined in the 1815 Congress of Vienna as the United Kingdom, Habsburg Austria, Prussia, France, and Russia, would frequently coordinate interventions in other nations' civil wars, nearly always on the side of the incumbent government.

Given the military strength of the Great Powers, these interventions were nearly always decisive and quickly ended the civil wars.[16]

Buried Secrets About Lincoln Exposed

URL:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_lincoln_colonization

 

 

I mean buried on purpose to hide the truth. Wow. This is serious. The Civil War COULD NOT have been fought over slavery if freedom was the warning...

Read on:

Abraham Lincoln's ... jarring remarks in 1862 to a White House audience of free blacks, urging them to leave the U.S. and settle in Central America.

Lincoln continued to support colonization, engaging in secret diplomacy with the British to establish a colony in British Honduras, now Belize.

Lincoln even referred to colonization in the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, his September 1862 warning to the South that he would free all slaves in Southern territory if the rebellion continued

Would GOP rid NFL of its Union?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_Player...

 

 

MegaCorps: Destroying The Middle Class

Why Aren't Corps Paying Their Taxes?

This is a great podcast - as always from Chris L Hayes. A similar conversation was started in the "Your Call" broadcast with Rose Aguilar, KALW

Clipped from www.thenation.com

The Breakdown: Why Aren't Corporations Paying Their Taxes?

While pressure mounts for both sides of the aisle to pursue more fiscally responsible budget plans in Washington and around the country, many are rightly wondering why generating more revenue from uncollected corporate taxes isn't on the agenda. There's even a citizens’ movement called US Uncut afoot to hold corporations accountable for their tax evasion. On this week's episode of The Breakdown, DC editor Chris Hayes talks with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Cay Johnston about the manifold maneuvers corporations carry out in order to avoid paying their share of contributions to civil society.  Read more at www.thenation.com