Listen, I Can Fix This Debt Thing

Okay, so the national debt is up to something completely ridiculous now, right? 300 gazillion or something? Sigh, you're going to make me look it up aren't you? Alright, alright. Per http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us, today's federal debt is: $17,494,842,866,000. (Holy crap that's a lot of numbers!)  I just had a brilliant idea on how to pay off this debt.

It all started with a headline that reads: Colorado collects $2M in recreational pot taxes. Yes, that's right, they collected two million dollars from taxing their legalized marijuana sales. In the single month of January. This means they could potentially have 24 million dollars at the end of 2014. The cool thing? The voters not only approved the tax, they decided where the money would be allocated. (The first 40 million will go to school construction.)

Okay, so let's practice my (very rusty) math skills. If one state could get 2 million in one month, what could 50 states get? Since not all states are as big and populated as Colorado, I don't think all of them would get as much as 2 million. Unless a lot of stoners lived there. So, maybe 85, 90 million a month? Multiply that by 12. (Per my calculator, 90,000,000 x 12= 1,080,000,000.) Okay, that many digits makes a trillion, right? (I'm overtaxing my high school math concepts right now. I mean, the ones I remember from all those years ago.) If the government legalized sales and taxes for all 50 states, we could start dialing down that huge ass national debt we're accruing. Sure, it would probably take awhile to get it down to zero, but it's a heck of a lot better than right now. (Considering we aren't decreasing it at all. In fact, they're saying it's estimated to  be 21 trillion at the end of 2014.)

Okay, now that I've outlined my obviously brilliant plan for eliminating the national debt, can I just take a second and say, "Holy crap there are a lot of pot heads and elderly people with glaucoma in Colorado!" I can't help but wonder how many of the purchases were made by actual Colorado residents. Remember how Vermont got a reputation for being the state gay couples ran off to so they could get married? Colorado now gets a reputation for being the state you run to if you have, uh, a medicinal need for marijuana. Yeah, that's it. Medicinal and stuff. (As well as an all new high for the amount of cheetos and ring dings sold.)

So considering that weed not only helps glaucoma but also helps fund school construction, shouldn't we find a nice slogan for it? Maybe this one: Pot, helping to better our education system one joint at a time. Or maybe this one: Don't throw out the "weed" in your garden, sell it to better your children's future!

Hey, maybe this one: Marijuana, the answer to all of your problems.