This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 29th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One of the key platform planks of the campaigns to legalize marijuana is tax revenue. Jeff Myron, a senior fellow at the Cato

Institute and co-author of the Cato study, the budgetary impact of ending drug prohibition,

argues that money for the government is not exactly the strongest argument

for legalizing pot.

So a frequently made argument is that if we were to legalize marijuana that we would both

reduce expenditure for police who make arrests for prosecutors

involved in the cases for prison incarcerations for people who are locked up

for marijuana charges and on the other side of the budgetary ledger we'd collect

some tax revenues by taxing marijuana like other goods or even more by taxing

like alcohol tobacco and that's of course completely valid. If it's true legalization, if the market comes

completely out of the shadows and is like other businesses, we will both save the expenditure

and generate the tax revenues. The question is, is the magnitude of that huge or is it

relatively modest? That was one of the explicit arguments that was made during

the legalization struggle in Washington and Colorado was we can let cops focus on these other things

will make money for the schools etc this was like one of the planks of the platform to legalize.

Right, the budgetary benefits have been a frequent plank in the arguments,

specifically in the two states that just voted to legalize marijuana,

whereas an important plank emphasized if anything much more when California

considered a legalization initiative in 2010 that one failed and my concern is that

while of course there will be budgetary benefits,

...