So if you’d called your bookie a month ago and said, I’ve got a thousand bucks that says the United States Congress will pass sweeping health care reform before the Washington State Legislature will pass a supplemental state budget, you probably could have gotten pretty good odds.

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Unlike their big brothers and sisters in D.C., the Republicans in Olympia aren’t doing parliamentary somersaults or calling anyone baby killers, they’re mostly just waiting to go home. This is all about Democrats in all their diversity—the blue-greens, the road kills, the legislators in swing districts, and most of all leadership. The official story is that this standoff is about sales tax, but those in the know seem to think it boils down to a staring match between the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader.

Here at the blog, we’re feeling a little bit like Republicans, relegated to the sidelines and living the life of a bargaining chip. The proposed cuts to state university operating budgets in the house, senate, and governor’s proposals are bad, badder, and worse, respectively, but the worst could be yet to come. That’s what happened to us last year, when the 11:59 deal-making of the reconciliation budget ended up cutting us more than either the house or the senate proposals.

In Monday’s paper, we got a roundabout reminder of why that possibility means a dimmer future. The Seattle Times took a break from its daily blaming of state employees for everything wrong in the state of Washington and ran an Op-Ed piece from Department of Commerce Director Rogers Weed. Mr. Weed set out to smack down Idaho Governor Butch Otter and set him straight on how much better our state is for business than his. He cites our “skilled work force” as one of the primary reasons why businesses should choose Washington, and then goes on to give the misleading impression that we grow that work force at home:

We invest in our people because companies need great talent to innovate and grow. Washington has more adults with at least 12 years of education (over 30 percent with bachelor’s degrees) than any Western state and ranks sixth among all states.

Mr. Weed should count himself lucky that he didn’t get struck by lightning for using the words “invest,” “Washington,” and “education” in the same paragraph. We have a lot of educated people in this state, but most of them were educated somewhere else. Washington ranks 48th in four-year college participation rates and 3rd in the importation of people with college degrees. Washington ranks 45th in the nation in K-12 funding and 48th in higher ed funding. We yap a lot in this state about the value of education, paramount duty, blah, blah, but when we look up at the reality of the funding scoreboard, it’s painfully clear that we don’t even come close to walking that talk.

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What separates Washington from Idaho is what Mr. Weed calls an “enviable quality of life,” which boils down to a beautiful and temperate west side and the Pacific Ocean. If Washington were where Idaho is and we invested as little in “our people” as we do now, we’d make Idaho look like this side of paradise.

The $18,000 dollars that the state is spending each day to fund the special legislative session would pay for three plus years of tuition at Western Washington University. And the most depressing thing is that we’re spending that tuition money on the short strokes. We’re paying for pissing matches and arguments over tenths of percents instead of discussions of how to permanently right the ship. As wrong-headed as much of the “reform” and “footprint of government” talk can be, at least it’s trying to take on something big.

Washington ranks 35th in the nation in total taxes as a percentage of personal income and at the same time we have the most regressive tax structure in the country, taxing poor people at more than 5 times the rate of rich people. We’re a low tax state that dumps most of the burden on low-income people. Neither of those problems will be fixed in this special legislative session.

But imagine what we could do if we just started taxing the right people and just bumped our tax base up to say, 30th in the nation. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to invest in so many people educated in other states.