The morality of taxes

Oh the joy! It is the time of year to be working on income tax. It is a task that I have always accomplished on my own; admittedly over the past several years with the assistance of a software package for my computer. It is as always a learning task.

Doing your own taxes is a great, if sobering, review of how one is doing financially. Not only personally but also what is happening politically that trickles down to affect one’s bottom line. I’m forever intrigued with my father’s advice that there should be no withholding of taxes, that all should come due just before Election Day. Then only those who have paid taxes should be able to vote. Such would focus attention on any politician that votes to spend our taxes foolishly. It’ll never happen yet I still think it a good idea.

A week or so ago our Governor Pete Ricketts wrote a piece “An honest look at marijuana.” that was printed in the Gazette. Unlike a lot of politicians Gov. Ricketts is against the legalization of the weed and promotion of its use in the variety of forms we see today. Colorado has legalized the recreational use of marijuana and as a result has seen doubling the rate of fatal traffic accidents by drivers under the influence.

Currently there is a big effort in Nebraska to push the sale and use of oil extracted from the marijuana plant. CBD they call it and it is a remedy for anything that might be causing pain in one’s body. Harmless, it contains no THC which is the ingredient from marijuana that affects the minds of those that use the drug for whatever reason. Yeah right! Who or what governmental regulating body checks on the potency of the drugs in CBD? Why is it that the FAA who regulates what medicines can be legally used by pilots bars the use of CBD?

Marijuana, the scientific name is Cannabis, originated in Central Asia. Under the generic name of hemp was imported to the US in the era of WWI as it was a source of fiber that was necessary in the manufacture of rope. Rope was a necessity of sailing ships and farmers were encouraged to grow it. When sailing ships, and most usages of rope in the farming industry, fell out of favor the growing of hemp also went by the wayside. The plant adapted itself to our farmlands and continued to grow unaided as a weed.

I grew up on a farm just a few miles south of McCook. Our neighbor, Bob Kelly had acres of river bottom pasture and Bob, a WWII pilot veteran pointed out the patches of marijuana that grew in several areas. Bob was somewhat younger than my dad and would laugh about livestock eating too much of the plant and acting goofy. He also mentioned that some dummies smoked the stuff to get “high”. To my knowledge no one in this area ever used the stuff.

Probably some 25 to 30 years later I was raising a family and was stationed in the San Juaquin Valley of California. That was the time of hippies and war protestors and drug use was a way to step out from the world. With family we were strolling in the Merced City Park one evening when walking past a group of young people the familiar smell of weeds burning in the road ditches, scenes and smells from my childhood back home in Nebraska, came vividly back to me. Ditch weed burning; the young people there were smoking marijuana. Some later a California friend Jim Glidden who worked in the County of Merced Division of weights and measures was chiding me about Merced County having a higher gross dollar output of agriculture than the whole state of Nebraska. The next revelation that the highest value of any crop produced there was thought to be marijuana. It was grown openly and the really good stuff was produced in hippy’s basements under controlled lighting conditions and water bed mattresses were popularly used as water reservoirs to grow the stuff hydroponically. That was some 50 years ago but reportedly the same kind of operation is currently happening in the old WPA school building close by in Traer, Kansas.

Prohibition back in the 1930s is always cast as a failure. Well in respect to taxes, funds raised for government, it was. However if one observes that there was a whole lot less alcohol brought across the Kansas-Nebraska border in the trunk of the bootleggers cars than comes across regularly now by semi-trailer. Probably the same will be true, marijuana in the trunks of drug trafficker’s vehicles coming from Colorado now than when it becomes legal and will be imported by the semi- load if legalized in the future.

In the mid 1940s my father sold a section of ground, mainly grassland, to Ed Oren, neighbor and well known bootlegger. Ed liked Fords because they were fast and he told one story of being pursued by the Feds. He was running lights off at night and pulled off the country road into a canyon filled with tumble weeks. Ed hopped out, threw some weeds over the hole in the weeds that he had made on the way in and kept quiet. The Feds never found him that long night.

On settlement day to purchase our farm, Ed showed up at the lawyer’s office to do paperwork. He also carried a couple of brief cases containing stacks of cash, ones, fives, tens and twenties. No checks just cash plus one loaded 45 caliber pistol. Humm I wonder where all those cash notes came from? Do you suppose that he paid taxes on the proceeds of the multiple sales of “goods” from his trunk?

The trouble with prohibiting drugs like marijuana and alcohol is that people will find a way to get them anyway and the government will miss its cut. Best I can tell is that taxes from the sale of liquor in 2018 brought in some $360+ million to the State of Nebraska’s coffers. Governor Ricketts and our Legislature are looking hard for a way to reduce property taxes. I consider Governor Ricketts a brave and moral man to overlook the easy money that legalizing recreational marijuana could bring in taxes. I agree with him that the human cost of approving the use of marijuana would not be worth the tradeoff and I applaud his stance on the matter.

That is the way I saw it.

Dick Trail