Grow it, tax it
Grow it, tax it
Two letters to the editor next to one another (Tribune-Herald, Your Views, Oct. 10) might solve some big money problems for Hawaii, it seems to me.
One letter, “Legalize pakalolo,” decried our state’s overly restrictive and expensive medical cannabis program and how we still are arresting adults for small amounts of pot. The second letter, “Rent control needed,” bemoaned the high cost of living in Hawaii and how difficult it is to find jobs and affordable housing.
These letters express the truth about real problems. Might they provide at least a partial solution?
Imagine if growing pot was legal, even for small quarter-acre home plots. Imagine if such family growers could legally sell their pot crops to distributors who could legally sell that pot for medical use as well as legal recreational use.
Imagine if the state and counties could tax those crops when sold for recreational use. Imagine! The state would have more money, the counties would have more money and families growing pot would have more money — more to spend in our island economies.
The police would have more space in their jails and maybe less of an income from confiscating land and houses, but the counties would presumably have enough money to fully fund our police forces with their extra pot tax income.
Seems like a win-win-win to me. What am I missing?
Andrea Rosanoff
Pahoa
The lessons of fear
We have not learned the lessons of misplaced irrational fear.
We baby boomers are the Vietnam War generation, a war engaged in because of the fear of communism, and yet a sitting president, Richard Nixon, was credited with opening trade with China.
Communist China enabled by a president and Wal-Mart did all but destroy the American middle class, and history shows that despite the war and communism, U.S. and Vietnam relations couldn’t be better!
We have been sending our children to war in Afghanistan for 15 years, and there is no outrage. And at home, the current president seems to be stoking the fear of immigrants as well as any domestic resident who does not think the same way he thinks. Where is the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” in that?
Your freedom ends where mine begins, and that requires tolerance. Pay attention to your life, not mine, and things around us will automatically be more peaceful.
Lastly, if you like your religious freedom, then let me have mine and keep them ALL out of our government in any way, shape or form. Do you realize that the more you impose your religious dogma into politics, the more we become like our Middle Eastern enemies?
John Begg
Pahoa