see, this part of the thing doesn't bother me.

hot boxing your car is fine. driving it afterwards isn't.

just remember that the key part is prevention. this is about education, not enforcement; people don't make the crucial choice to not get in because they're worried about getting caught, they make it because they're worried about getting dead.

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/reevely-pot-legalization-brings-tougher-penalties-for-all-impaired-drivers-in-ontario

just take out a bill.

what does it say on it?

does it say it's your property?

no: it says it belongs to the government you pay taxes to.

it's not yours.

"so, let me get this straight: you're going to track down all of my secret stashes of hidden funds, and....destroy it all?"

"sure."

"you're not even going to give it to charity?"

"nope. we're just going to burn it. it will no longer exist."

"i don't underst...."

"you're not spending it."

i've been terse about this because i don't think it matters a whole lot. all i've pointed out is that if gerald butts thinks it's great politics, he's probably in for a surprise when he looks at his party's coffers this time next year and the potentially negative poll movement from it.

the council of canadians is a kind of left-populist front in canada, and it's a useful organizing tool for what it does. but, the reality is that populists are terrible at economics - even left-populists that call themselves socialists tend to fall into these inherently right-wing zero-sum concepts of budget management, and these naive ideas about balancing budgets that make conservatives giddy.

this article doesn't mention a thing about any kind of meaningful economic goal, it's just pushing the idea that the government needs to collect money to cover costs - which is completely false in a fiat monetary system.

here's the option in front of voters: the conservatives want to continue to "starve the beast" by pushing structural deficits (and using them to agitate for cuts), while the liberals want to close tax loopholes in order to collect tax revenue to pay down debt. if the liberals take the money and destroy it (which is what debt repayment is), they're actually reducing the amount of money circulating in the economy, which is broadly recessionary. they should be printing money, not destroying it. if the conservatives let the money sit in bank accounts, perhaps offshore, it's just accruing interest rather than promoting growth. this is actually less bad in theory, but it's probably not a measurable difference.

i'm in favour of keynesian-style government spending, but that's not what the liberals are doing, and it's not underlying the narrative: if this is a wealth transfer, it's a transfer from independent businesses to trust funds, banks and much larger corporations that get a credit boost from the debt repayment.

it's fundamentally dishonest to argue that you have to increase revenue in order to increase spending. but, if you're going to walk down that path, you'd be better off lifting the corporate tax rate. i mean, if that's what this is really about - revenue - then they're taking a highly inefficient path in doing it. taxing doctors isn't going to balance the budget....but taxing oil companies might.

and, how did we get here? the answer is populist economics, and that flawed zero-sum concept of budgeting.

so, what is the actual outcome of this policy?

- it won't make any substantive difference on the deficit.
- it won't increase the amount that the government can spend.
- it doesn't look like the government is looking to increase the amount it spends, anyways.

what actually happens?

- a transfer of wealth from independent business owners to large banks and multinational corporations.

if the liberals were floating these tax loopholes to increase infrastructure spending, that would be another thing. it would still be unnecessary, but it's one way to present the information, anyways - if they think that works for them politically, that's their prerogative. they're not doing that.

i know the council thinks anything that looks like redistribution is a good path, but it should reconsider this in the context of reality, rather than through the filter of populist economic thinking.

https://canadians.org/blog/council-canadians-supports-fair-taxation-end-income-sprinkling-wealthy

this is another point that i'm trying to get across, though: a lot of the market estimates are ridiculous.

eight grams a month? given that you can get at least 10 persies on the gram, you'd be smoking 2-3 joints a day.

that's not recreational. that's medicinal. if you're buying stocks based on the idea that the market is going to move 8 grams a month, you're projecting fantasies.

a moderate-to-heavy at-parties only user (aka the market) is going to buy at most one gram of marijuana in your average week. a statistic would probably be something like 0.75 g/week. that's about 3-4 g/week.

most users will smoke about as much as they drink, which is a few times a year. and, they probably rarely pay for it.

and if you know anybody that is smoking 8 g/month - month over month - then you may want to consider getting them counselling, because they have a problem with marijuana addiction.

http://www.thesudburystar.com/2017/09/17/pot-use-will-surge-poll

this is a better analysis.

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/fischer-ontarios-cannabis-regulations-a-good-start-but-with-a-few-wrinkles-to-fix

i'm not going to take the conspiracy theory view on this.

if you pay enough attention to queen's park, you know those characters. wynne. sousa. naqvi. these are people that have never smoked marijuana, have never been around marijuana and have lived their entire lives in this out-of-touch bubble where marijuana is something done by undesirables: addicts, criminals and just run-of-the-mill poor people.

the thing underlying the legislation, more than anything else, is class. the new rules around marijuana are ultimately designed so that wealthy people don't run into it when they're walking their dogs. if there's a public health component, it's not about cutting costs so much as it's about keeping it away from people that see it as this scourge of the proletariat class.

let's ask this question: what do you think that the government expects on july 1st? because, it's probably not what you think.

i would suggest that the government probably expects marijuana users to carry around a concept of shame with them - that this is going to be a discreet thing that nobody admits to each other, nobody talks about and is just broadly kept out of polite conversation. they may consequently expect people to prefer mail order so that they don't have to show their shame in public; it would be the kind of thing that would lead to audible gasps in the room, should it come up.

so, they likely believe that they are being fiscally prudent in not investing too heavily in a product that they do not believe belongs in polite society and will consequently not develop a serious market.

what is going to happen on july 1st is going to legitimately shock a lot of people inside the government, and it may lead to a tweaking of policy. it's going to be hard  to imagine the government resisting calls for more stores to meet demand, anyway - not so long as it thinks it's future depends on balanced budgets (of course, it doesn't).

this is what happens to liberal governments, in the long run: they end up to the right of public opinion, and refuse to come to terms with it. at that point, they must go. then, when they split the vote and lose to the conservatives, they don't understand what happened.

we should be able to get the ndp in this time, so long as the ndp co-operates by remaining on their left flank.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mike-schreiner/ontario-liberals-pot-monopoly-is-designed-to-fail_a_23208862/