Yahoo Autos Governor Muses That Marijuana-Tax Revenue Won't Be Enough to Fix Roads
Michigan's newly elected Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, doesn't think the state's taxes on legal marijuana will generate enough revenue to fix its roads.
In order for that math to work, every resident of the state would need to purchase thousands of dollars in weed annually.
The state is estimated to require over $2.5 billion in road repairs, and Whitmer ran on a platform of "Fix the Damn Roads."
In several states considering or in the process of legalizing marijuana, the revenue that they could theoretically pull down from taxing marijuana sales is often touted as a magic solution to all sorts of budgetary problems-including fixing crumbling infrastructure. Michigan's newly elected governor, Gretchen Whitmer-who ran on the slogan "Fix the Damn Roads!"-doesn't think taxing marijuana sales would fix her state's busted streets, and she said so publicly this week.
Speaking at the Mackinac Policy Conference Thursday, Whitmer sought to debunk the idea that legal weed (which voters approved last fall, in the same election where they decided her fate) by saying this: "Every man, woman, and child would have to smoke about $2500 worth of marijuana per year to fix our roads." She added that, "At that level, no one is going to care about the damn roads."
Indeed, though Michigan's roads are pretty rough (we're headquartered on that section of the moon-we mean, the United States). But, more important, her figures weren't as pessimistic as they should have been. As reported in the Detroit paper Metro Times, Michigan's proposed 10 percent tax on marijuana products would only generate $875 million in usable revenue based on $2500 in sales per citizen. That's because only 35 percent of the tax revenue is allowed to go toward infrastructure; the rest is for schools and localities.
To make enough to pay for the $2.5 billion in work that Michigan's roads need, then, and assuming we are whittling down the population to include only residents who can legally purchase weed (those 21 and over), the Metro Times calculates the necessary per-resident marijuana haul at more than $10,000 annually.
On the upside, if legal Michiganders were to get high often enough, they could always turn to Cheech and Chong's classic Up in Smoke: "Cause when I'm high, the world below don't bother me." That, we suppose, includes potholes-as well as a designated driver.
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