Notable Colorado figures for marijuana tax revenues for 2014

This new AP article, headlined “Colorado collected about $76 million in recreational and marijuana pot revenue in 2014,” reports on the latest official reporting of tax revenues collected on legal marijuana sales in Colorado for last year. Here are some of the details and some context for what they mean:

Marijuana makes money. But legalizing it doesn’t eliminate the black market or solve a state’s budget problems. Those are the lessons from Colorado’s first full year of tax collections on recreational pot. The year-end report, released Tuesday, tallied about $44 million in new sales taxes and excise taxes from recreational pot.

Add fees and pre-existing taxes from medical pot, which has been legal since 2000, and Colorado’s total 2014 pot haul was about $76 million….

Colorado started selling recreational weed on Jan. 1, 2014. But its first month of sales resulted in only $1.6 million for the state. By December, that figure was $5.4 million. The reason for the increase? Regulatory delays. Red tape meant stores opened slowly, with many municipalities waiting months before allowing pot shops to open….

But legal weed isn’t an overnight flood of tax money. “Everyone who thinks Colorado’s rollin’ in the dough because of marijuana? That’s not true,” said state Sen. Pat Steadman, a Denver Democrat and one of the Legislature’s main budget-writers….

Colorado’s pot regulators have struggled to establish a wholesale pot price to collect excise taxes. “Taxing a percentage of price may simply not work,” said Pat Oglesby, a former congressional tax staffer who now studies marijuana’s tax potential at the Chapel Hill, N.C., Center for New Revenue. He pointed out that the two latest legal weed states — Alaska and Oregon, both still working on retail regulations — will tax marijuana by weight, similar to how tobacco is taxed.

Every state in the union, liberal to conservative, has a market for marijuana. And making pot legal doesn’t guarantee those consumers will leave the black market and happily sign up to start paying taxes. In Washington state, medical marijuana isn’t taxed. It is in Colorado, but all adults are allowed to grow up to six plants on their own. That means the states’ new marijuana markets had legal competition from Day One. And that doesn’t account for the black market, which of course is completely free of taxes and regulations.

Lawmakers in both Colorado and Washington are looking for ways to drive pot smokers out of the lower-taxed medical pot market and into the recreational one. But obstacles are stiff. “If there is untaxed medical pot, the taxes are voluntary. When you make it voluntary, people won’t necessarily pay,” Oglesby said.

The marijuana market is far from settled. Colorado benefited from first-in-the-nation curiosity and marijuana tourism. As more states legalize, Colorado and Washington will face competition. “Colorado is probably kind of a best-case scenario” for pot tax collections, said Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard University economist who studies the drug market. “If a number of other states legalize — and two of them already have — then bit by bit, Colorado revenue is likely to decline.”

There’s an even bigger uncertainty looming for states considering legal weed — a new president in 2016. “The huge unknown is still federal policy,” Miron said. “A new president can radically change state policies toward legalization.”

I believe that Colorado’s official year-end accounting can be found in this link/document, and I notice that there appears to be no column for state (or federal) income taxes paid by persons now working legally in the state-legalized marijuana market. Though certainly direct taxes on marijuana manufacturing and sales is the most tangible and measurable consequences of marijuana reform, I tend to think the biggest long-term economic impact for a state comes from creating a (huge?) industry with collateral businesses all of which will provide lots of jobs for individuals who will pay (lots of?) income tax on what they make in this new industry.