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New York governor Eliot Spitzer is getting pilloried left and right for his kind of stupid proposal to tax illegal drugs. He introduced it as a (serious? Nobody really knows) proposal to close the state's budget gap by laying taxes on coke, weed, and smack. In reality, many states use these drug taxes as a tool to seize assets from dealers under tax evasion charges [WP]. Right-wingers hate the idea because it appears to be soft on crime. Left-wingers hate the idea because it reveals the underlying hypocrisy on the war on drugs. But why should you, the average Philly-rolling person on the street, hate the idea? Because if it actually happened, those dime sacks would get a lot smaller.

Spitzer is proposing a marijuana tax of $3.50 per gram. That works out to $98 an ounce, or $1,568 per pound. If you're the type who buys half-ounces of White Widow for $350 and whatnot, the tax is small. But consider that for the dirt weed that's usually sold in nickels, dimes, and twenty sacks, the amount of the tax is actually greater than the total cost of the herb the dealers would be buying (which can be less than $1K per pound). That means the corner stores would have to start selling really tiny nickel bags, because they'd have to be half as big to get the same profit.

Luckily, no sane drug dealer pays taxes. Suck it, Spitzer.