The View From The Cheap Seats
Being a state legislator has got to be a pretty crappy job. You get paid enough to qualify for public assistance, you have to abandon your home and family for two or three months a year, lobbyists and constituents assault you every fifteen minutes expecting you to fully understand and solve their problems, you spend a lot of time locked in a caucus room with the same old faces fighting about the same old things, and no matter what you do, you can pretty much count on half the people being mad at you. That’s when you’re in session. When you’re not in session, you have to spend most of your time sucking up to people for money so you can get reelected and go do it all again next year. And, as with college football players eyeing the NFL, the odds of moving on to the true fame and fortune of the other Washington or the Governor’s mansion are pretty damn slim.
So when we here at the blog look toward Olympia and wonder what the heck they could possibly be thinking, we do so without in any way meaning to question the good will and genuine commitment to public service that animates most of our elected representatives.
But geez.
The governor, the house, and the senate have now all laid their budget and revenue cards on the table, so you’d expect to see some clarity beginning to emerge. But all we really know now is that we don’t know much. Almost from the minute they hit the web, the tax packages started to fall apart. Even the things that everybody thought were no-brainers, like taxes on private jets and cigarettes, have gone wobbly as squads of luxury jet manufacturing lobbyists have parachuted into Olympia and 7-11 owners have delivered petitions on behalf of future lung cancer victims everywhere. The senate’s third-of-a-penny sales tax hike was pretty much dead on arrival, the most striking evidence of which was the spectacle of Senator Rodney Tom voting against the budget he wrote.
Maybe the most peculiar thing about the Democratic caucus meltdown is that it has come in midstream. New taxes were always going to be a two step process and the Dems took the first step without a hitch. The suspension of Initiative 960 brought a lot of noise and some lame photo ops for Tim Eyman, but the vote was never in doubt. With all the blather about flouting the will of the people, it’s a pretty safe bet that the Fall line of Republican attack ads are already in the can. Democrats could now go home on March 11 without having raised taxes one dime and still have to face the tax-and-spend charge in November.
So suspending I-960 and then losing the nerve to actually raise some taxes seems a little bit like getting half a root canal—all of the pain with none of the relief.
The Republican and “Road Kill” Democrat position (and the rationale that Senator Tom offered in voting against his budget) is that the legislature hasn’t done the hard work to reduce state government’s “footprint.” Perhaps the most credible evidence that this is nothing more than union-busting bullshit is that the Republicans, when called upon to offer a budget-balancing plan of their own, can do nothing more imaginative than demonize state workers. When the smoke clears after this session, the legislature will have permanently cut at least $4 billion from a $30 billion state budget. Two-thirds of that budget cannot be cut due to constitutional protections and federal mandates. That means that the final damage will be around 30% to 40% of what was available to be cut.
No, the hard work that hasn’t been done is the hard work of genuine tax reform. Washington has the distinction of being a relatively low tax state with an incredibly regressive tax structure. The taxes that are now being proposed would solve some short-term problems and prevent a lot of suffering over the next couple of years, but they will do nothing to reform Washington’s fundamental tax structure. Until we wake up, join the twenty-first century, and move toward income taxes and away from sales taxes, the current chaotic way of doing things will remain the norm.
Part of us hopes that the collapse this time is complete, that the legislature goes home having done nothing, and that the ensuing disaster will help create the political will to follow the Economic Opportunity Institute and Bill Gates’s daddy toward sane tax policy.
But in the all politics is local department, no new taxes means more cuts than have been proposed in anybody’s budget so far. And the universities are the first place they usually come looking for more cuts.
So here’s hoping that the legislature gets it together enough to kick the can a little further down the road.