The governor’s call to raise state taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products and impose a new 15% sales tax on vaping products and consumable hemp products has narrowly failed in a Senate Committee.
Republican Senator Kara Warme of Ames, chair of the Health and Human Services Committee, started the discussion by echoing the governor’s arguments for the tax hike. “I don’t like raising taxes on anyone,” she said. “I also don’t like that Iowa has more of our people dying of lung cancer than very many of our other states across the nation.”
Warme’s bill would have diverted the new sales taxes on vapes and consumable hemp products into a state fund that would be used next year to assist victims of human trafficking and plug $1 million into Iowa’s Double Up Food Bucks program that helps low income Iowans buy more fresh fruits and vegetables. Senator Janet Petersen and other Democrats called those surprising additions. “I have always been a proponent of doing what we can to promote cancer,” Petersen said. “…I find it frustrating that a one-time fund was stuck in this bill.”
Warme’s bill wound up getting nine votes, which is one short of the 10 necessary to win committee approval.
