So the legislature found a bunch of money in the couch cushions and now it looks like everybody might get to go home on time to start what promises to be a rollicking 2012 election season.  Both the House and Senate Democrats have proposed sane budgets that don’t include any contentious revenue/referendum items.  A special tip of the blog hat to Senators Ed Murray, Lisa Brown, and Derek Kilmer for writing a budget that doesn’t include any new cuts to K-12 or higher education.

But there are some long faces around Olympia, despite the good caseload and revenue news.  The changing winds have sapped the sails of the R&R (Republican and Road Kill) caucus, some of whom were salivating at the prospect of holding revenue hostage to what they like to call “reform.”  As the budget proposals have come forward and the revenue fight has disappeared, the R&Rs have fallen back on metaphors of childhood games and talked a lot about kicking cans down the road.

Here at the blog, we’ve never been shy about stealing a good line, so we too would like to encourage the legislature to not just keep kicking the can of our revenue problem down the road.

The Hunter and Murray supplemental budgets are what they’re supposed to be, temporary solutions trying to make the best of a bad deal.   They don’t do anything to address the structural problem of Washington’s incredibly regressive nineteenth-century tax system.

But today, on the extra day that the clash between the universe and the Gregorian Calendar gives us every four years, two bills showed up in the House Ways and Means committee that represent a, um, big leap forward.

The first one, Representative Reuven Carlyle’s HB 2762, we’ve spoken of here before.  It would put mandatory sunsets on almost all current tax breaks, forcing the legislature to make sure they’re still benefiting the state and maybe rake back some of the cash that’s only fattening corporate reserve accounts.  This should be a no-brainer.  The tax exemption that made perfect social and economic sense fifteen years ago may be nothing more than something a lobbyist is desperately trying to keep out of sight today.

In principle, the state senate endorsed this idea on February 11 when they passed SB 6088 by an Eyman-killing vote of 45 to 3.  6088 would put sunsets on all future tax breaks.  Admittedly, it’s easier to vote to end loopholes that don’t exist yet than it is to end the breaks for big campaign donors.  But the principle’s the same.  The rights of the unborn tax exemption should also be available to the exemptions living among us.  HB 2762 is the rare tax bill that actually could get the bi-partisan two-thirds it needs to pass.

Not so much with Representative Laurie Jinkins’s HB 2563, which would impose a 5% excise tax on capital gains.  This is a tax on rich people (about 3% of Washingtonians), which shouldn’t be a problem since they pay, on average, less than a fifth the percentage of their income in taxes than poor people do.  Forty two of the fifty states in our union already do this, many of them at a rate higher than 5%.  Once it were up and running, this tax would generate about $500 million dollars a year, which would leave our legislative budget writers not so dependent on what they can dig out of the cushions.  It would also be a big step toward dragging our tax code out of the cellar.

Neither of these bills will do anything to solve the immediate budget problems that the legislature is currently wresting with.  But they will eventually help us stop kicking the can by writing budgets that keep kicking people in the head.