Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Tax Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law and Economics

SelectedWorks

2014

Food and Drug Law

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Tax Law

Curb Your Enthusiasm For Pigouvian Taxes, Victor Fleischer Mar 2014

Curb Your Enthusiasm For Pigouvian Taxes, Victor Fleischer

Victor Fleischer

Pigouvian (or "corrective") taxes have been proposed or enacted on dozens of products and activities that may be harmful in excess: carbon, gasoline, fat, sugar, guns, cigarettes, alcohol, traffic, zoning, executive pay, and financial transactions, among others. Academics of all political stripes are mystified by the public’s inability to see the merits of using Pigouvian taxes more frequently to address serious social harms.

This enthusiasm for Pigouvian taxes should be tempered. A Pigouvian tax is easy to design—as a uniform excise tax—if one assumes that each individual causes the same amount of harm with each incremental increase in activity on …


The Smokable Goods Tax: Crafting A Constitutional Marijuana Tax, Nima H. Mohebbi, Samuel T. Greenberg Mar 2014

The Smokable Goods Tax: Crafting A Constitutional Marijuana Tax, Nima H. Mohebbi, Samuel T. Greenberg

Nima H. Mohebbi

Marijuana legalization and decriminalization has become a hot policy issue. Roughly twenty U.S. states have partially legalized marijuana (generally for medicinal purposes) and two states – Colorado and Washington – have legalized it for general adult recreational use. Given the likely hyper-growth of the cannabis market in view of the possible wide-scale legalization of marijuana, states might enjoy a potential budgetary windfalls from marijuana excise taxes. Marijuana, however, remains a federally controlled substance, the sale or use of which is subject to substantial penalties. For the states, this presents a potential problem in collecting excise taxes on marijuana – namely, …