Politics
Legal weed clashes with child care. Why a cannabis tax cut could spell trouble for children
A fight over taxes consumers pay for cannabis products has prompted a standoff between unusual adversaries: child-care advocates and the legal weed industry.
On July 1, California’s cannabis excise tax increased from 15% to 19% as part of a political deal struck in 2022 to help stabilize the fledgling legal market. But the industry now says the increase is untenable as it faces a sharp decline in revenue and unfair competition from the growing illicit market.
An industry-sponsored bill moving through the Legislature — and already passed by the Assembly — would eliminate the tax increase and lower the rate back to 15% for the next six years. This would reduce by $180 million annually the tax revenue that the state contributes toward law enforcement, child care, services for at-risk youth and environmental cleanup.
The losses include about $81 million annually that would have specifically funded additional subsidized child-care slots for about 8,000 children from low-income families.
“They are choosing the cannabis industry over children and youth,” said Mary Ignatius, executive director of Parent Voices California, which represents parents receiving state subsidies to help pay for child care.
Child care faces setbacks
The tension over taxes for legal weed versus child care — both industries in crisis — highlights the inherent pitfalls of funding important social services with “sin taxes,” whether it’s alcohol, weed or tobacco — funding that experts say is often unstable and unsustainable.
Engage with our community-funded journalism as we delve into child care, transitional kindergarten, health and other issues affecting children from birth through age 5.
The measure’s next stop is the Senate. All bills in the Legislature must be passed by Sept. 12, and the governor must sign them by Oct. 12.
“We can both support the legal cannabis industry and protect child care. If the measure reaches the governor’s desk and is signed into law, we will work with the Legislature to ensure there are no cuts to child care due to this policy change,” said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom.
But it’s unclear where money to backfill the losses would come from, as the state grapples with declining finances and federal funding cuts.
The money from cannabis taxes represents a fraction of California’s $7-billion annual child care budget. But as federal cuts to social services for low-income families, including Head Start, continue, any potential loss creates a sense of panic among child care advocates who say California ought to be shoring up revenue options right now — not reducing them.
“Every single dollar needs to remain in the programs that are serving our children and families. What may seem like a small amount to some is everything for advocates who are fighting for it,” said Ignatius.
The past decade has been a time of progress for child care advocates, as the state rebuilt a child care industry decimated by cuts during the Great Recession. California has more than doubled spending on child care since the recession low, added about 150,000 new subsidized child care slots, eliminated the fees paid by families, increased pay for child care workers and added a new public school grade level for 4-year-olds.
But despite these efforts to bolster the market, California’s child care industry still suffers from low pay for workers, unaffordable costs for families, and a shortage of spaces for infants and toddlers.
The waiting list for subsidized child care slots is still so long that some parents have taken to calling it the “no hope list,” said Ignatius. Those who join the list know they could wait years before a spot opens up, and by that time their child may already be in kindergarten or beyond.
Jim Keddy, who serves on an advisory committee to help determine what programs the tax will finance, opposes the proposed reduction.
“If you don’t work to promote and hold on to a funding stream for children, someone eventually takes it from you,” said Keddy, who is also executive director of Youth Forward, a youth advocacy organization.
The cannabis industry, however, argues that while the causes the tax supports may be worthwhile, market conditions are so abysmal that it cannot weather an increase.
Legal cannabis industry struggles to remain afloat
“It is sad that the cannabis industry is being pit against social programs, childhood programs and educational programs,” said Jerred Kiloh, president of United Cannabis Business Assn. and owner of the Higher Path dispensary in Sherman Oaks. “The reality is, if our legal industry keeps declining, then so does their tax revenue.”
In 2022, when the cannabis industry agreed to increase the excise tax, quarterly cannabis sales were at their peak. The agreement offered the new industry temporary relief by eliminating the cultivation tax passed by voters under Proposition 64, the 2016 initiative that legalized cannabis. In exchange, state regulators would be able to increase the excise tax after three years to make the change revenue neutral.
But since then, sales have plunged to their lowest levels in five years, due in part to the growing illicit market that is siphoning off sales from legal dispensaries.
In L.A., Kiloh said that between state and local taxes, his legal dispensary customers end up paying 47% in taxes on their purchase. But if they shopped instead at any of the thousands of stores in L.A. selling cannabis products without a license, they could avoid state and local cannabis taxes entirely.
“A 30% increase in an excise tax that is already egregious is just kind of the breaking point for a lot of consumers,” said Kiloh.
Even before the excise tax hike went into effect, just 40% of the cannabis consumed in California was obtained from the legal market, according to the California Department of Cannabis Control.
The measure to drop the excise tax, AB564, received widespread support from Assembly members, including stalwart supporters of early childhood education like Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D-Winters), chair of the Legislative Women’s Caucus.
“Revenues from legal sales of cannabis are already dropping and if we keep raising the tax they’ll drop even more. That penalizes cannabis businesses who are doing the right thing and working within the legal market. And, it makes illegal sales from cartels and criminals more competitive,” she said in a statement. “We need to fund our kids’ education through the State General Fund, but if we want to supplement education and youth programs, cannabis tax dollars will only exist if we steady the legal market and go after those illegal operators.”
How reliable are sin taxes?
Lucy Dadayan, a researcher who studies sin taxes at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., said the California predicament reflects a larger problem with sin taxes.
If a sin tax is successful and consumption drops — as it has with tobacco — “the tax base shrinks. And in the case of cannabis, there’s the added wrinkle that a high tax rate can push consumers back into the illicit market, which also reduces revenue,” she said.
This is not the first time services for the state’s youngest children have been affected by reductions in a sin tax.
In 1998, California voters slapped cigarettes with a hefty surcharge to pressure smokers to give up their habit. The state used the money to fund “First 5” organizations in every county, which are dedicated to improving the health and well-being of young children and their families. But the less people smoked over time, the less money was available for early childhood programs, and the First 5 system now finds itself confronting an existential crisis as it faces a rapidly declining revenue source.
Meanwhile, the critical social services like child care that come to depend on sin taxes tend to get more and more expensive, creating a “mismatch” in the tax structure versus the need, said Dadayan.
“In the short term, these taxes can raise a lot of money and help build public support for legalization or regulation. But in the long term, they can leave important programs vulnerable because of shifting consumption patterns,” she said.
This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.
Doug Burgum highlights American innovation at Great American State Fair
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum joins ‘Fox & Friends’ live from the Great American State Fair in Washington. He emphasizes America’s legacy of innovation and entrepreneurship, discussing the impact of AI and free markets. Burgum also addresses recent vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 22 and the upcoming July 4th opening of the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library.
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is defending President Donald Trump’s many initiatives to address infrastructure in Washington, D.C., calling it a visible reminder that the country needs to actively press back against decline.
“Nations don’t crumble by fate — they decline by choice,” Burgum told Fox News Digital.
“From rehabilitating and installing historic memorials, statues, and fountains to removing hundreds of instances of graffiti and cleaning up crime on our streets, this administration is proving that American greatness is built through action,” he continued.
Burgum’s reasoning, which came ahead of the United States’ 250th Independence Day anniversary, addresses criticisms of the administration that have surfaced in recent weeks, casting doubt on whether Trump’s many renovation and construction initiatives in Washington, D.C. have been worth their price tag.
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Split of sample tests in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. (@realDonaldTrump via Truth Social)
As part of the 250th celebration, Trump has spent $14.7 million to restore the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool, allocated $250 million to restore the Kennedy Center and is on track to spend over $400 million on the construction of a ballroom at the White House.
Trump, in a Truth Social update about the reflecting pool, framed the efforts as part of a larger effort.
“We’ve cleaned, renovated and beautified over 45 monuments and memorials, 28 statues and 22 fountains in Washington, D.C. Things are really looking good in our nation’s capital. Add to that the fact that when I became president, crime was rampant. And now Washington, D.C. is one of the safest cities anywhere in the United States,” Trump wrote.
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reacted during a meeting with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez at the Miraflores Presidential Palace on March 4, 2026, in Caracas, Venezuela. (Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)
The Department of the Interior, which has overseen many of the improvements, further updated its accomplishments ahead of July 4.
The city has removed 510 instances of graffiti, removed 154 homeless encampments, applied 212 tons of repair materials to roads and parkways, restored 280,000 square feet of roadway paving, rehabilitated 1,301 benches and fixed 1,913 lights.
Burgum said the repairs were emblematic of the administration’s aggressive posture towards addressing problems that had gone ignored in the past. In addition to these major improvements, DOI has restored and cleaned dozens of monuments and statues around DC.
DOI also recently helped transform Meridian Hill Park, which got high praise on social media by DC residents, into a desirable place to visit with a restored fountain that had been under construction for years with very little movement. They also cleaned and restored some of the statues in the park, including the Joan of Arc statue and the James Buchanan Memorial.
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Washington DC city workers dismantle tents and remove personal belongings during a sweep of a homeless encampment in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood in Washington, DC, on August 14, 2025. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
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“While others accept decline, President Trump and the Department of the Interior are restoring the heart of our nation’s capital,” Burgum said. “The Golden Age of America isn’t just a slogan, it’s being rebuilt, one landmark, one street and one victory at a time.”
Politics
Commentary: Birthright citizenship ruling was a win for democracy — and a warning about erasing history
This week’s narrow Supreme Court decision protecting birthright citizenship is rightly being hailed as a triumph for the American experiment.
By some, anyway.
Check out MAGA world and you’ll quickly find Trump surrogates and even elected leaders spouting a kind of extremist anti-immigrant sentiment that once, not so long ago, was considered intolerable in the public sphere.
This has included suggestions that go as far as banning pregnant women from traveling to the United States for fear they might give birth here, and — no joke — one notable commentator writing that demanding female immigrants be sterilized might be a solution.
President Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said after the ruling that children of immigrants might not be “qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country.”
“We have people from all over the world, from Third World nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel, and they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for it by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen,” Miller said.
Before you tell me that the Supreme Court has spoken and this is a done deal, no matter if there’s more gross Miller mush, let me tell you about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s written opinion and why it matters. It is, if read in the right light, a warning for what comes next — a fight to rewrite history to serve political aims.
“The odds were long and the stakes were high,” Jackson wrote about the creation of the 14th Amendment in 1866, which has long been understood as granting citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil and which was the focus of this case.
Still, she wrote, despite the unlikeliness of post-Civil War America rising to the challenge of inclusiveness, the amendment was always meant to do just that — because free Black people, recently emancipated but denied citizenship, “fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
Signs sit available for protesters to demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court as President Trump arrives to attend oral arguments on April 1 in Washington, DC.
(Heather Diehl / Getty Images)
An alternative interpretation by MAGA world of this amendment and this history was the center of this case.
To greatly simplify, the 14th Amendment was originally a response to a Supreme Court decision, the Dred Scott case, that said freed Black slaves could not be U.S. citizens. MAGA world was arguing that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended much more than that — citizenship for ex-slaves and their descendants.
While concurring with the majority of the court, Jackson also wrote her own summary that makes a vital point: Without history that includes the Black experience — as most of the arguments in this case did — we are left bereft of the suffering that has shaped our values and which gives us the empathy required to be a pluralistic society.
Black history — any non-white history, really — is the history of resistance and the road map to recovery from this dark era of hate.
It’s hard to call someone your fellow citizen if you take away their humanity — which is exactly what this case was attempting to do by splitting into factions those who would fight for equality and rewriting history with only the voices that match the current administration’s goals.
It was disappointing that the court, whose individual justices bounced around arguments from a myriad of sources outside of their erstwhile adherence to the ideas of originalism, did not call out that erasure more forcefully, and that it was left to Jackson to do so.
Jackson took that narrow idea that Black people — and the white legislators sympathetic to their cause — had only themselves in mind when crafting the 14th Amendment and attacked it head-on, arguing that if we just look at what Black people were saying at the time, the larger intent of the amendment becomes clear.
“This alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing,” Jackson pointed out of the MAGA version of events. “Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
That “universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” she wrote, “eventually won the day.”
The 14th Amendment was largely written by Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who took much of the basis of it from the legal arguments of Black intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, the most influential Black statesman of the era.
Trumbull then argued in Congress that the amendment was meant to be inclusive — even of so-called “gypsies” and Chinese immigrants, who faced extreme racism, especially in California.
One congressman opposed to the measure warned that if it passed, Chinese immigrants would “overrun” California and “will double or treble the population.” At the same time, the Romani would likely continue to “wander in gangs” and “have no homes, pretend to own no land, live nowhere, settle as trespassers where ever they go, and whose sole merit is a universal swindle,” he warned.
Asked if the amendment would grant citizenship to those two controversial groups of immigrants, Jackson points out that Trumbull gave an unapologetic “undoubtedly,” again drawing on the universalist ideas of Douglass and others.
The “child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen as the child of a European,” Trumbull said (and Jackson quoted, drawing from an amicus brief by Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University and Jed Sugerman of Boston University).
“There is a serious breakdown on the court that reflects the breakdown and echo chambers in America,” Sugerman, the professor, told me Wednesday. “When it comes to history and originalism, you have to read more broadly than just the founding fathers that you liked.”
So the history of the 14th Amendment is right there — equality not just for Black Americans but for immigrant Americans — but it required Jackson to write her own opinion to put it on the court record.
Legal scholars aligned with Trump did Olympic-level gymnastics in this case to parse what the authors of the 14th Amendment meant with the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” — words that MAGA claimed were meant to secretly exclude undocumented immigrants.
Brown instead reminded us that outside of those white-only discussions when the amendment was written, it was the activism of Black people — their demand for colorblind equality — that actually shaped the final words that granted citizenship to all babies born within our borders.
Solidarity — the unbreakable strength of American democracy.
After the ruling, Trump wrote on social media that Congress could write legislation undoing birthright citizenship. Some pundits say that wouldn’t work, but I’m here to say Trump has managed a bunch of stuff that the pundits said wouldn’t work.
More chilling, and direct, were more comments from Miller.
“It’s an abomination,” he said of the ruling.
But “because of President Trump’s courage and leadership, we are now on the precipice. Yes, we were dealt a setback, but because of his courage alone, we’re on the precipice as a nation of being in a position to end this travesty once and for all, and that’s what we have to fight for.”
Miller and his ilk are seeking to rewrite history to justify their vision of the future of America.
Jackson alone in the court offered us both a warning and a path — a reminder that our history holds indisputable facts despite politics, and we erase them at our own peril.
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President Donald Trump marked the eve of America’s 250th anniversary with a sweeping patriotic address at Mount Rushmore on Friday, declaring the United States the “most exceptional nation ever to exist” and vowing that it would “never be a Communist country.”
Speaking beneath the granite likenesses of four of his predecessors — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — Trump touted American exceptionalism as festivities marking the nation’s 250th anniversary ramped up across the country.
“In all the chronicles of the ages, never before has any nation celebrated so magnificent a triumph as this one,” Trump told the crowd.
TRUMP KICKS OFF FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND WITH SYMBOLIC SALUTE TO AMERICA’S LEGACY
President Donald Trump delivers remarks at Mount Rushmore on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“At 250 years, America is the oldest republic on earth,” he continued. “We are the freest people on earth. We have the most righteous and enduring Constitution on earth. We are the strongest and most powerful country on earth. And by the grace of God, the United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.”
Trump praised the nation’s history and argued that no other country had achieved as much as the United States.
“The birth and survival of the American nation under God is, quite simply, the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands, ever,” he said. “No other country has done more good for this world than the United States of America.”
AMERICA’S NEXT 250 YEARS DEPEND ON PASSING FAITH AND FREEDOM TO OUR CHILDREN
Fireworks explode after President Donald Trump spoke at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Before Trump took the stage, the new Air Force One flew over Mount Rushmore as spectators cheered. After his remarks, the president stayed to watch a fireworks display over the Black Hills.
Trump argued the country was facing what he described as a growing communist movement that sought to undermine America’s “exceptional character” and “alienate us from our history.”
The president said the movement had raised the question, “What does it mean to be an American?”
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President Donald Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Trump described communism as “the greatest threat” facing the United States.
“It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let this happen to us. Believe me, we’re not letting it happen, because communism is the enemy of free people.”
“Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — it is death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil,” he continued.
“But we will not let them win,” he added. “They have no chance against us.”
Trump issued a clear directive: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
President Donald Trump speaks beneath Mount Rushmore during a celebration ahead of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
As Americans face those choices, Trump pointed to the nation’s past sacrifices as a guide for its future.
“Our American ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves, radicals and lunatics could come in and loot, pillage our nation,” he said.
Trump also highlighted the four presidents carved into the mountain behind him, saying they represented America’s founding ideals.
“They were men of action, men of ambition, men of daring, men of destiny, and men of truly great intelligence,” he said. “Above all, they were great men of history. Tonight, on the threshold of our 250th year, we stand beneath the monument of these heroes, a true group of unbelievable people. And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants.”
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Trump is scheduled to deliver another speech Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. before a fireworks display celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“We know that this is not an ending,” Trump said. “This is only the beginning of the golden age of America.”
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