Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Cannabis here in Thailand. And here recently, I have been discussing a lot of tax stuff because one, there's a lot of discussion about changing the Tax Rules here in Thailand; again nothing has really fundamentally changed since the turn of the last calendar year. That being said, what we are seeing now is kind of a limbo, in fact I kind of doubt we're going to see major tax changes, but they're talking about a lot of proposals especially on taxing foreigners and coming up with all the hair brained schemes including Negative Income Tax in order to get everyone into the Tax System and require that they all verify their income etc., etc. I don't think any of these things are good ideas. At the end of the day, they are varying levels of Socialism and when you take money out of the economy in the form of tax, you really do decrease the overall economic activity, and it results in less tax revenue as time goes on. JFK of all people knew this quite well; he talked about it a lot during his Presidency that you take tax burdens off the business sector, the revenues in the business sector rise and you end up making more money. That generally speaking has a proven track record of working. Meanwhile, though okay, Government is going to Government, I get it. Governments all love taxes because they want more money to do whatever it is they think they need to be doing.

To my mind sitting here in Thailand, instead of talking all these notions of doing a Digital Wallet so that we have these tokens that can be tracked and traced everywhere, going after the foreigners in terms of taxes etc., I think we would be a lot better off by just looking at the obvious target for some serious tax revenue. And I hate to say this, and the people in the Cannabis space, you can hate me if you want, but this is inevitable, this is going to happen; better we do it in a more planned way which is tax Cannabis. That was I thought what the point was to legalization in the first place. Now I do get that things got kind of derailed because an Act failed to be passed in Parliament, we are still awaiting that, but that said it looks pretty clear to me that Thailand is in a good position economically and could be in an even better position long-term by just doing one thing. It's not hard either. Just create a new Excise Tax, just like with tobacco or alcohol. Create an Authority, do a separate Authority, a new one like a Cannabis Control Board or something of this nature and just extract taxes from that sector. Again I know there are those who are going to probably not love that I'm making this video and sort of saying this, but again believe me, politicians are not unaware of this and again it seems like; I discussed in another video how President Trump is talking about this and he kind of is non-committal while at the same time saying it's a good thing. Look politicians are never going to come out and just say like well some of them will, but a lot of them, especially the Conservatives, are not going to come out and say "oh yeah we need legalize all of this." But when it's framed as "well look, you need to do it cost/benefit analysis. Does it kill a lot of people? No. Does it have less detrimental health impacts than for example alcohol or tobacco? Well in certain ways, Yes, very much so in fact. But can it be taxed and is it not being taxed? If the answer to that is "Yes", and you're looking for more revenue, to my mind that's the perfect place to go after it, rather than scaring off foreigners by talking about new taxes on them; rather than taxing an already burdened standard economy, sort of the regular economy that we're used to dealing with, especially in light of the fact that you shut down the economy for three years and this economy has had to try to rally back. There's a clear place where new tax revenue could be obtained and it's like they just don't want to look at it, and I guess it's because they're worried about how they look politically. Well stop worrying about that. Worry about fixing the problem. If the problem is Government revenue and you have this untaxed sort of just barren virgin resource as it were in terms of tax revenue, let's maybe look at that.