Marijuana
Payton Guion at NJ.com has some details on the marijuana bill set to go to the legislature, which includes “several social justice provisions aimed at helping people who have been negatively impacted by marijuana prohibition.”
The bill puts a tax of $42 on each ounce of marijuana grown, and individual municipalities can add their own sales taxes. Towns that ban sales don’t get any revenue.
Lakewood Funding
Meanwhile Adam Clark has a story about the Lakewood School District, which is getting a 63% increase in state funding, with an additional $14.9 million that’s not called for in the funding formula.
There are 6,000 public-school students and more than 30,000 private-school students in Lakewood, per this story.
“This is the first time in many years that there appears to be a realization that Lakewood, in fact, does not fit the funding formula,” the school board attorney said.
Your Economic IQ
Frank Pallotta, a former Goldman Sachs executive who is mulling a run for Congress, has an op-ed in the valuable Spotlight where he argues America “desperately needs to upgrade its economic IQ if we are to maintain our prosperity.”
It can by physically disorienting to sit in a city with a 40% poverty rate in a county with a massive foreclosure crisis and be told anything about our current economic situation should be “maintained” least of all the “prosperity” but the important thing to remember is these guys broke the global financial system in 2008, required the intervention of the federal government to save the world and then became magically richer in the aftermath, so they have been living in an alternate reality for a good decade or so.
Few things terrify me more than the party led by a six-time bankrupt mercantilist with an 87% approval rating among Republicans expecting you to trust it re: the economy.
Unless they are talking about real wage growth, which has been nonexistent since the 1970s, I would urge you to de-prioritize the economists, who are vastly overrepresented among policymakers. We could use some historians, who might tell us, for instance, that the big corporate-tax subsidies, which have so exercised austerity advocates, are repackaged trickle-down economics from the 1920s, 1980s, etc. The reason they repackaged them is that everyone hated them.
NJ has raised taxes and fees on alcohol, Uber, divorce. Now you could pay more for guns–Over the past 20 years, New Jersey has slapped new taxes and fees on rental cars, cigarettes, fertilizer, hard alcohol, Uber rides, vehicle registrations, wine, Airbnbs, e-cigarettes and divorce filings, to name just a few examples. www.northjersey.com
Nearly $2 billion has been bet on sports in N.J. since it was legalized last year–Nearly $2 billion has been wagered on sporting events in New Jersey in the nine months since such betting became legal last year. www.nj.com
SMALL PRICE BLIP FOR ACE CUSTOMERS AS BPU EYES $12B IN RATE INCREASES ALL TOLD–Atlantic City Electric customers will see typical residential bills rise by about $7 per month in April, but that is only a pittance to what utility customers can expect to pay over the next few years. www.njspotlight.com