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Friday, August 30, 2013

Obama Administration Won't Fight Marijuana Legalization in Colorado and Washington State

     Chalk this up to another thing we wouldn't get if a Republican were in the White House.

      "The Obama administration said Thursday that it would not challenge laws legalizing marijuana in Colorado and Washington state as long as those states maintain strict rules involving the sale and distribution of the drug."

      "In a memo to U.S. attorneys in all 50 states, Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole said the Justice Department is “committed to using its limited investigative and prosecutorial resources to address the most significant threats in the most effective, consistent and rational way.” He stressed that marijuana remains illegal under federal law."
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/obama-administration-will-not-preempt-state-marijuana-laws--for-now/2013/08/29/b725bfd8-10bd-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboPN

     No doubt, we need the end to the wasteful, counterproductive War on Drugs. Often progress on this front has seemed very slow to nonexistent. What we now see though is some states decriminalizing or legalizing hemp and a question was how the Obama DOJ would react. We have an answer. While the White House won't consider legalization at the federal level for now, it is not going after states that make the move.

      Now in more news that shows why we're lucky Obama is President, he continues to do what he can do through executive action alone about gun control, and specifically the loophole:

      "Striving to take action where Congress would not, the Obama administration announced new steps Thursday on gun control, curbing the import of military surplus weapons and proposing to close a little-known loophole that lets felons and others circumvent background checks by registering guns to corporations."
     "Four months after a gun control drive collapsed spectacularly in the Senate, President Barack Obama added two more executive actions to a list of 23 steps the White House determined Obama could take on his own to reduce gun violence. With the political world focused on Mideast tensions and looming fiscal battles, the move signaled Obama’s intent to show he hasn’t lost sight of a cause he took up after 20 first graders and six adults were gunned down last year in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn."
     Still more such news, that is good news that wouldn't be happening if Obama weren't President: the IRS will recognize gay couples even if their state does not. 
     "The U.S. federal tax system will recognize gay couples' marriages even if they live in a state where gay marriage is not legal, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced in a statement Thursday.
     "This ruling, which creates a uniform policy for the IRS, "assures legally married same-sex couples that they can move freely throughout the country knowing that their federal filing status will not change,” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said in a statement.


     Sumner gives Obama credit for not giving Colorado and Washington state trouble but is complaining that gay couples now have some unfair advantage over straight couples based on the IRS' new policy. He has long complained about the so-called marriage penalty, which I think is basically overdone-in some ways the law may seem to favor single people but in other ways it favors married. Overall, the law has always at least tried to favor married people. 

    Sometimes it hasn't been successful. It blatantly favors those with children vs. those without in all kinds of ways-huge tax credits for one thing. Yglesis argues that the new policy is pretty shrewd by the Treasury as it's a de facto stimulus-though a very small one:

    "We had a shrewd move today from the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service today who will be implementing federal tax recognition of same-sex couples' marriages in a way that's likely to stimulate the economy."
    "This starts with the fact that on a forward-looking basis, taxing same-sex married couples the same as opposite-sex married couples will increase tax revenue. Some couples get a marriage bonus and others get a marriage penalty, but in the aggregate the penalty impact outways the bonus impact. So more long-term revenue."
    "But here's the trick. The IRS says that it will let couples go back as far as 2010 and amend their tax filings if you were married according to state law but the IRS didn't recognize that marriage due to DOMA. The key point is that you can do this but you don't have to do it. So in practice only "marriage bonus" couples are going to refile and get refunds. Nobody's going to pay extra. So in the short-term, you'll get a one-off increase in the deficit while in the long-run you get a lower deficit due to structurally higher tax revenue. It's a textbook fiscal stimulus plan, albeit on a very small scale."
    The problem has never been Obama-though I am concerned about what I'm hearing regarding his thinking on the next Fed Chairman. In saying this I don't mean Obama has not made any mistakes or that he's been right about everything, but at least his heart is in the right place and on many issues he has been right. What we need is to send all these obstructionist GOPers home for a permanent vacation. The real problem of our time remains that though the majority of people agree with Obama and the Democrats on the issues, the agenda is thwarted in so many places. 
    This is due in large part to our system of government which gives the minority so many ways of obstructing the majority. In truth if we had a system more like either Hamilton or Madison had wanted we wouldn't be having this problem. A big part of it is the untoward power of states, including small states. If there were less state power we'd have a much less dysfunctional country.
    
      

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