Time has come to legalize pot in Connecticut
Connecticut has a tax problem that is likely to get worse in 2021 as the legislature and local governments confront the economic carnage wreaked by COVID-19.
For years, progressives have been pressuring Gov. Ned Lamont to push harder for tax hikes.
Meanwhile, we’ve seen property tax bills go up, up, up even as property values decline or sit stagnant — a trend that may be worsened by the pandemic, especially in towns whose main appeal was easy proximity to New York City.
According to the Tax Foundation, “Connecticut’s ... effective property tax rates on owner-occupied housing (are) now among the highest in the country at 1.7 percent of housing value.” This is occurring even as Massachusetts and New York have prioritized constraining property tax hikes.
While Lamont may be less aggressive on the taxhiking than the most leftwing in the Nutmeg State might like, the reality is, without the measures these two neighboring states have in place, there is no limit to the pain potentially facing a ton of us.
With COVID added to the mix, next year, we’ll be facing a gruesome fiscal picture that tax-hikers will use to justify hammering even harder taxpayers who are already getting hammered hard by property taxes.
This is one reason why Connecticut needs to prioritize legalizing marijuana in 2021: We don’t have a ton of new revenue lines, and those that we do have (e.g., soaking the rich) could well deplete our tax base further.
By the way, that is a non-starter: The ultrtawealthy are highly mobile, and will flee high-tax states. And people are fleeing Connecticut: In 2019, data from U-Haul and United Van Lines pegged us as a net-migration-out state. According to United Van Lines, we were among the top 10 such states last year; per U-Haul in 2020, we slipped from 21st in its list of growth states to 34th — reflecting that people just aren’t coming here and our tax base will decline.
By fully legalizing marijuana, we can put new revenue from a new industry on the table and minimize the pain the rest of us, especially homeowners, will sustain to our wallets.
According to a new study from the University of Connecticut’s Fred Carstensen, direct new revenue from legalization could go as high as $48 million in the first year of legalization and as high as $223 million five years in.
Currently, we are projected to be facing a $3.5 billion hole in the 2021-22 fiscal year.
Paying down our rainy day fund will help with this, but even if it were all paid out, we’d come up $400 million short.
If we want to minimize how much of that deficit can potentially be shoved onto existing taxpayers, putting new sources of revenue on the table makes sense — even if we won’t see hundreds of millions from it for a few years down the line.
It’s worth noting that both Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the National Taxpayers Union do not regard taxes on newly-legalized marijuana as “tax hikes” as long as the rates applied are more or less in line with those applied to similar product categories.
That means that any Republicans who might be worried about a vote for legalization forming the basis of attacks on them as “tax hikers” can rest easy. And the rest of us will see some more money in state and local coffers that mean we’re not walking around with targets on our backs for those who favor copycatting California’s direction on tax policy.
Of course, for many opponents of legalization, their objections are nothing to do with questions of revenue and income, taxes and spending. People query whether the “social” implications of legalization make it worth any potential financial upside.
Personally, I haven’t used marijuana in any form since 2002; I also stopped drinking that year; my only “sinful behavior” these days is the occasional bingeing on chocolate chip cookies.
I see the downsides of
both drugs and alcohol (and the cookie-bingeing) in very personal terms (usually, it’s in the tightness of my yoga pants).
But I also recognize that my experience is not universal, and that recent studies show that marijuana can be useful in treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) including among veterans, and in enabling opioid addicts to move off of these deadly drugs and onto something that might, if you believe Afroman who sang about what he failed to get done that day “because he got high,” make you lazier but won’t actually kill you.
This, and not the fiscal impact of moving away from our current marijuana regime, is why you have fairly conservative Republicans such as Ohio Rep. David Joyce backing federal legislation that would allow states to legalize marijuana.
That is on top of superTrumpy members of Congress such as Rep. Matt Gaetz, libertarian-conservatives such as Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Tom McClintock, and more moderate Republicans such as Sen. Cory Gardner who all take marijuana-friendly positions (plus all the Democrats who support it, such as vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris).
If legalized marijuana can help our veterans and those suffering from addiction to oxycontin or heroin, it’s hard to argue for keeping it bound up in even the relatively limited red tape associated with medical marijuana or decriminalized marijuana. Ditto when anecdotal evidence indicates it can help seriously ill people suffering from, say, epilepsy and for whom traditional pharmaceuticals don’t work. That is especially so when few of us are logging any real driving distances anymore and staying close to home 24-7 — and bear
ing in mind that positive experiences of telecommuting during the pandemic may turn that into a much more permanent condition, regardless of what happens with a COVID vaccine, establishment of herd immunity, or anything else.
There is one big, final reason that Connecticut needs to proactively legalize, not just decriminalize, marijuana and it is racial equity and criminal justice.
The sad reality is that decriminalization does not do enough to prevent African-American men, in particular, from being stopped, abused and, yes, even killed by police.
This summer’s wave of Black Lives Matter protests emphasized to the nation the need for systemic reforms to tackle racial disparities in policing and curtail police brutality against Black and Brown Americans. It’s not enough to simply better train police, ban chokeholds, or end qualified immunity — I support all of those measures, too. We need to eliminate the pretext for so much excessive law enforcement activity targeting minority men, especially, and the pretext very often is to do with drugs, including marijuana, even where it has been decriminalized.
In the toniest parts of Fairfield County, these latter two arguments for full legalization will likely carry less weight than the fiscal ones. But they are all important reasons for pursuing legalization in 2021. The legislature should act accordingly and give taxpayers, veterans, those trying to kick opioids, gravely ill people and young minority men a break.