You'd have to get rid of the war on drugs. And then you'd have to prevent the government from pulling the same thing with a new "enemy" like terrorism.
Currently laws doesn't have alpha or beta testing phase during which problems with it are identified and fixed. They go straight to production and then they are not maintained with changing times.
That's not totally true. Very often the congress will authorize pilot studies or regulatory agencies will grant waivers to run experiments. Additionally, congress will put in sunset clauses into laws so that they must be reviewed periodically or automatically expire.
However, these tools are not necessarily used consistently at any level of government....
take the case for usa freedom act or patriot act or any law that snoopers cite in their support. i've never seen any pilot studies on them whatsoever. please dont cite private studies or studies conducted by snoopers themselves. all laws needed to be tested, not just some or atleast when its abused massively, the law should be reviewed.
This would not solve the issue at hand. The issue at hand is local governments do not have enough money. They solve that by taxing or seizing any kind of vice, and when they don't have enough of that, they stretch whatever excuse they have.
Before prohibition, up to 75% of New York's budget was funded by taxing alcohol. Once a national income tax was introduced, the federal and state governments no longer needed the alcohol tax, and in comes The 18th Amendment. After the 11 Billion dollars in lost revenue, know what The 18th Amendment helped create? Organized crime.
The War on Drugs is, effectively, Prohibition, but with the incidental effect that since there has never been taxes on recreational drugs for us to benefit from, we instead learned to profit from what we could - mainly, prisons. The losses include the lives of those in the illegal drug trade (similar to the relentless violence in Chicago in the 20's), the 41 billion we spend on enforcing the drug war, the 46 billion in lost revenue from not taxing drugs, and the many foreign conflicts we've forced ourselves into. Plus, of course, the new-and-improved drug cartels.
Get rid of the war on drugs, and they'll just find another scapegoat to tax to fill their coffers rather than do what they should be doing, which is direct taxes to fund local government, which literally no politician today will support unless they're crazy.
tl;dr the war on drugs does nothing for us, the war on terror is a huge economic and foreign policy burden, the only taxation fixes split the country in two politically so we have no way out but bitter political turmoil
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The war on drugs was mainly a sort of war to enforce the US's policy of not legitimizing drug use, partly a method to keep the fervor over the crack epidemic and quickly worsening ethnic communities from bringing real social change, and perhaps partly a way to exert some control over the countries that generated the products.
The war on drugs didn't really help anyone, though it made a small industry (prisons) more profitable. I would say it's mainly about pursuing a simplistic political agenda, and less about money or anything else.
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The war on terror is a product of 9/11, a gigantic behemoth of a money-maker for the military industrial complex, and a way to gain influence over the middle east in order to control/influence the nations which have huge oil revenues - the most widely traded commodity in the world.
The war on terror has had a similar effect to Prohibition in that it reduced revenues to the country when it was in a depression. But it actually has been much worse than that: the deficit has increased dramatically in the intervening years, in part due to borrowing to pay for the war on terror, in combination with tax cuts at the same time, which is basically criminally stupid economics. But any tax cut feels good to the people being taxed.
Realistically, the war on terror should be making people way more pissed off than it is, but there's an ace up the sleeve in the vein of fear and patriotism. Both of those, when amped up to hyper-realistic levels, result in immense support by the population. All we would need is a new depression for people to start lynching Muslims - the way the English lynched innocent people living in the UK during WWII just because they were German, or the way we imprisoned civilian asian-americans after Pearl Harbor.
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At this point, the only way to make people happy and tax ourselves back to profitability is to take either the extreme-left or extreme-right options.
Extreme left: Heavily tax the wealthy, close loopholes for corporations to hide their taxable revenue, heavily reduce spending on the miltary and intelligence community, and further economic and foreign policy reforms.
Extreme right: Remove most "entitlement" spending, reduce regulations on companies to allow more exploitation of natural resources, continue to try to influence oil-rich nations in order to eventually control the cost of oil, give tax cuts to corporations and the rich, offload the rest of the tax onto the general population.
The problem with either of these scenarios, though, is in either one there will be a very loud group pissed off at either having less money or having less social services/environmental protection. Until you can find one solution that makes everyone happy, none of this shit will work.
