So just in case you haven’t read enough Olympia post mortems, here’s the blog sine die edition, with a special recurring tax theme.

The legislature finally put a stop to the bi-partisan tax increases they’ve been leveling on students for the last four years.  Next year, there will be no higher ed tuition increases.  Both sides want to claim credit for this, but a review of the tape shows that it was the House Democrats, Frank Chopp and his band of social services zealots, who finally managed to stop the higher ed bleeding.  The Senate Republican budget first proposed no tuition increases, but that budget continued to punish students with no increases in state support.  No state reinvestment and no tuition increase would have meant fewer classes and longer time to graduation and greater expense for students. 

The House Democrats originally proposed a 3 percent tuition increase in order to make up for no investment of state money.  As the budget negotiations wound down, the Senate Republicans, looking for a campaign season headline at the expense of students, continued to insist on no tuition increases.  The House Democrats refused to go along without a significant reinvestment in higher ed.  And in the end they got it.

And they got it with a tax.

Almost all of the money recovered by closing the telecom loophole went to higher ed and that will allow our colleges and universities to responsibly not raise tuition.  Closing the telecom loophole, for those of you not keeping score at home, was really just a fix that acknowledged that we live in the wireless 21st century and avoided a billion dollar lawsuit against the state.  It was something that probably should have been done at the beginning of the session, but the Senate Republicans insisted on holding it hostage to their dream of punishing injured workers right up until the bitter end. 

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But before we start to look like unabashed homers for the Democrats, lets not forget that for the sixth year they once again lustily joined their Republican colleagues in imposing a harsh tax on Washington’s desperately underpaid teachers.  Both sides have been crowing about how they’ve added a billion dollars to K-12 education, but as our friend Goldy over at SLOG points out, the legislature’s own budget document shows it to really be only 648 million.  That’s because the legislature once again suspended Initiative 732, screwing teachers out of voter-mandated cost of living raises for the sixth straight year (and here at the blog, we’re sure that the Tim Eyman/Pam Roach press releases decrying this assault on the will of the people will be out any minute). 

Washington state teachers have by far the worst salaries on the West Coast.  Unlike Boeing, they wouldn’t even have to go all the way to South Carolina to do better.  The Washington state Supreme Court’s McCleary decision made it clear that teacher compensation is an ample part of amply funding public education.  The court also made it clear that they expected the legislature to have education fully funded by 2018.  At the rate of this year’s budget, they’ll actually get there in about 30 years.  By then, everyone still thinking about teaching will have left for places they can get a modicum of respect. 

But education was not the only sector making headlines at the end of the session.  The legislature went home without doing anything about transportation, which was a bit of a surprise as transportation was the number one priority of business in this legislative session.  While the Senate Republicans are fine with taxing teachers, they drew the line at a 10 cent gas tax. 

Which surely must be somewhat vexing to their business donors.  You can find lots of argument about whether or not a gas tax is regressive, but at the end of the day, like the sales tax, it’s mostly a tax on regular people, which is the kind of tax that business likes.  Business needs roads and rails to ride on and stadia to play in, but they don’t want to pay for those things with income taxes or capital gains taxes or estate taxes or closed corporate loopholes.  But it would be impolitic to say out loud that the only bad taxes are taxes on rich people, so the corporate mantra has usually been an Eymanesque populist anti-tax yowl.  Unfortunately, some of business’s favorite politicians, bless their hearts, have taken that message a little too literally.  And so the senate killed the transportation package, even in the face of business protests and bridges falling down. 

And the I5 bridge lying in the Skagit River is probably the most appropriate image for where we are politically in this state.  When Senate budget writer Andy Hill announced the budget deal to his caucus, he framed it as a struggle between the social services Democrats and the education Republicans.  That’s a standard paradigm in Washington state political discourse, but more and more it has little basis in reality.  The real struggle in Washington state is between those who believe in public services and infrastructure and those who don’t. 

Now, the Senate Republicans are walking away feeling like winners because the House Democrats largely failed in closing tax loopholes.  And what actually happened in the budget was a secondary concern.  As Ross Hunter, the House budget writer, pointed out, the final budget looked a lot like the last House proposal, only it was funded by stealing half a billion dollars from the capital budget instead of closing tax loopholes.  So we’ll have more crumbling buildings and sewers and fewer construction jobs. 

But at least something got cut.  If the senate budget writers had had their way, that something could have been higher ed again or social services or health care.  And if McCleary had never happened it would have been fine if it had been K-12 education.  In the end it was the cut that mattered to the Senate Majority.

They were pretty flexible about where it came from.