This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 15, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One takeaway from election 2016 is that marijuana polled as well or better in many states than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

Legalization initiatives passed in several states.

As important, these were also taxation initiatives.

What is the state of marijuana legality and taxation now?

Joe Henchman is a vice president at the Tax Foundation.

We talked Pot and Taxes last week.

Sure, well, it was on the ballot in five states and it's passed clearly in three of them and that's

California, Massachusetts and Nevada.

Maine is still too close to call as of right now it was 50-50 with 90% of the vote in when I last checked.

And then it failed in Arizona.

So yesterday, the day before election day, about 5% of the American people lived in a state with

legalized marijuana and today it's over 20%.

When it comes to taxes the various, there are different regimes in the different states to tax and make use of

tax revenue from marijuana, what does that look like now, generally for states that have legalized marijuana for some purpose?

Well, the tax rates are coming down.

So Colorado and Washington were the first two states to legalize marijuana and their tax rates were in the

thirties of percentile. So Washington State about 37 percent Colorado about low

thirties. The states that legalize yesterday, California and Nevada, about 15% and then

Massachusetts actually only 3.75% plus the state sales tax. So it's about 10% and then there's some local taxes but

This is an area where you know prohibition I guess that's like a hundred percent tax and then Colorado and Washington state were more 30% tax and now we're talking more 15 10% tax and that's not an accident.

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