It was inevitable, really, given Wisconsin’s Republican legislators: last month, the state’s budget committee struck 384 items from the budget proposal brought forth by Gov. Tony Evers, including marijuana legalization. In total, the Republican committee removed nearly $3.5 billion in revenue from the governor’s plan, punching an irreparable hole in the 2021-2023 state budget.
Measures that the Republican lawmakers chose to strike from the budget include raising the minimum wage, investing in underserved communities, investing in education, allowing undocumented immigrants to get a driver’s license, allowing collective bargaining by public workers, as well as a slew of measures that would have reduced taxes on the poor, increased taxes on the wealthy and ended dark store policies that enable large corporations to dodge taxes.
Evers’ proposal regarding marijuana, which was to legalize its adult use and regulate it like alcohol, is extremely popular: A 2019 survey by Marquette University found that 59% of Wisconsin voters support recreational marijuana and 83% support medical marijuana. This is in line with the results of the 2018 advisory referendum on marijuana across Wisconsin, where a bipartisan coalition of voters overwhelmingly approved the legalization of both recreational and medical marijuana for our state; yet another resolution that Republican lawmakers chose to sweep under the rug.
But beyond the numerous moral, humanitarian and common-sense reasons to legalize marijuana in Wisconsin, it would have been a great boon for our state’s finances. Evers’ plan would have added an important new revenue source to Wisconsin’s portfolio, netting an estimated $165 million per year, as well as greatly decreasing the costs for law enforcement and the justice system to pursue small marijuana charges.
Filling Up the State’s Coffers
To invest in local communities and subsidize businesses, the state government needs money. Money that, by Evers’ own plan, would have been reinvested into Wisconsin schools, underserved communities and smaller businesses. Not only did the governor’s plan include a tax increase among wealthier Wisconsinites and corporations, it also included accepting more federal dollars which our institutions are entitled to but Republicans chose to block. Now, by forcing the creation of a $3.4 billion budget gap, Republican lawmakers have to slash investments in our state and communities accordingly.
For now, let us focus on the loss of money relating to marijuana exclusively: According to his “Budget in Brief” explanation, Evers plans to impose a 15% excise tax on all wholesale sales and an additional 10% excise tax on all retail sales of marijuana products, as well the usual sales tax on all recreational products.
By basing expectations of future marijuana use on reported sales and consumption numbers in Colorado, the governor’s budget team came up with the expectation that Wisconsinites would spend on average enough to gather $19 per person annually. That projection implies that more than $65 million would come from wholesale and retail taxes each, with an additional $33 million in sales tax revenue.
Fortunes Spent on Pot
As it currently stands, Wisconsinites are already spending a fortune on legal marijuana—the money is just not spent in Wisconsin. More than $81 million dollars were spent by out-of-state residents on weed in Illinois just in the first three months of 2021, according to the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. That number is in constant expansion: Out-of-state customers, a large portion of whom come from Wisconsin to legally purchase marijuana across the state line, spent $8 million in January 2020, $16 million in July 2020, $23 million in December 2020, and $33 in March 2021. By refusing to legalize marijuana, Wisconsin is diverting tens of millions of dollars of monthly revenue to neighboring states, while residents still get their hands on pot.
While Illinois is sucking up Wisconsin’s potential income, a potentially better state to compare us with is Nevada, which has the same tax framework for marijuana as what was suggested by Tony Evers. With almost precisely half of Wisconsin’s population, Nevada collected $105.2 million in cannabis tax revenue in 2020.
PolitiFact found that expecting an annual increase in tax revenue equal to $165 million per year from the legalization of cannabis seemed plausible. Wisconsin residents are already spending that money, and they are already buying and consuming marijuana at rates comparable to what we would see in Wisconsin if the state legalized it. The only differences are that Wisconsinites are currently risking being punished for a harmless act, and the state is losing out on a potential $165 million per year in additional revenue. Revenue that Republican lawmakers want to ensure we never receive; revenue that could and should be reinvested in our schools, infrastructure and local businesses.
GOP Will Never Stop Standing in the Way
Every single Republican on the Joint Finance Committee voted against Evers’ proposal, while every single Democrat voted in favor of it. Republican senators Marklein, Stroebel, Kooyenga, Felzkowski, Bernier and Ballweg, as well as representatives Born, Loudenbeck, Katsma, Zimmerman, Rodriguez and Kurtz acted in unison to stop investing in our communities and the legalization of marijuana. It is nothing short of a coordinated campaign by a political faction to hurt our state’s future prospects, as led by Republican leadership on the federal and state level, starting with State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.
“I am still trying to find a way to [legalize medical marijuana] so that people accept the fact that we are not going to legalize recreational marijuana,” Vos declared. Rather than doing what is morally right or following the overwhelming majority opinion among his constituents, he and every Republican member on the budget committee chose to let us know that they will never let progress happen on their watch.
While Vos is certainly telling the truth about the fact that a Republican legislature will never allow recreational marijuana to be legalized in Wisconsin, he is lying through his teeth regarding his purported support for medical marijuana. As the Shepherd Express pointed out before, the only form of medical marijuana that Republican lawmakers support in Wisconsin is “the sort that is inefficient, impossible to grow at home, hard to access, expensive and serves the interests of the very same people who manufactured the opioids crisis in the U.S.” They want medical marijuana in pill form, non-psychoactive, impossible to grow at home and exclusively in the hands of the large healthcare corporations who finance the campaigns of the very same politicians currently standing in the way of progress.
Vote after vote and survey after survey find that Wisconsinites, regardless of color, party or creed, support many of Evers’ budget proposals, in particular the legalization of marijuana. It means that hundreds of thousands of voters are voting for the legalization of marijuana, then voting for the Republican candidates who will do everything to make sure cannabis is never legalized. To these voters: Please take note of how your representatives are acting and adjust your own vote accordingly.
