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If you had turned on TVW last Thursday night, as I did, you would have seen majority Democrats in the Washington House devote nearly three full hours to debating – with fired-up Republicans - a wrongful death bill championed by trial lawyers.
As statehouse Democrats worked into the night on a priority bill of a key political constituency, Washington voters were no doubt safely distracted helping winnow the latest crop of "American Idol" contestants.
Good thing for Democrats. While broadening tort liability in Washington may be a top priority of the plaintiffs' bar, Washington state residents say taxes, government spending, and unemployment are the biggest problems facing Washington state.
That's according to a recent poll conducted by the Portland-based, non-partisan polling firm Davis, Hibbitts & Midghall, Inc. (DHM Research) in collaboration with the Northwest Health Foundation and public radio stations throughout the Northwest. (Note: I work for public radio.)
The poll also finds 47 percent of Washingtonians think their state is headed in the "wrong direction" as opposed to 36 percent who said "right direction" and 17 percent who don't know.
And finally a whopping 64 percent believe lawmakers "should not suspend obstacles to raising taxes such as the supermajority requirement because taxes should be difficult to raise."
Too late. Majority Democrats in Olympia have already suspended Tim Eyman's Initiative 960 for the next year and a half in preparation for raising something under $1 billion in taxes to help close a $2.7 billion shortfall through June 2011.
As the 60-day Washington legislative session lurches toward a scheduled adjournment this Thursday, the gulf between the public and their government is at a 30-year peak, says DHM Research's Adam Davis. "People are very concerned about government performance at this point in time. They do not feel they are getting a value for the tax money that they're paying. They continue to feel that there's a lot of waste in government."
It's against this backdrop that Democrats will have to hit the campaign trail this spring — all House members and about half of state senators are up for re-election this year — to try to talk the electorate out of giving them a drubbing at the polls this fall.
In one sense, Democrats are lucky. They'll have a full seven months to try to un-muddle the decidedly muddled message they've sent this legislative session. But it won't be easy, especially for vulnerable swing district Democrats. They'll have to bear a yoke around their neck of higher taxes, government reforms proposed but not enacted, and not much in the way of job creation.
On top of that, fair or not, they'll be tagged as followers of Sen. Lisa Brown, who wants to bring an income tax to Washington. One must wonder what prompted the Senate majority leader last Thursday to, in the course of a single day, resurrect the idea of a high-earners income tax.
It began innocently enough with a blog post, but by the end of the day, the powerful Senate Ways and Means Committee was holding a hastily scheduled, "no notice" public hearing on a borderline-Kafkaesque proposal.
Basically, the legislature would raise the state sales tax by three-tenths of 1 percent, but then let voters in November roll back that increase, plus reduce the sales tax another penny and, in their place, impose a 4.5 percent income tax on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and couples making more than $400,000.
The idea appears to have died as quickly as it was hatched. But it certainly provided Republican political consultants with another arrow in their quiver for the upcoming campaign season. You can just see the ads now. "When Democrats in Olympia should have been focused on jobs, what were they doing instead? Debating an income tax."
It’s not that Democrats have ducked their duty. When all is said and done, they will have made another round of agonizing budget choices and closed a gaping hole in the current two-year budget without any help from Republicans. It’s a difficult and thankless job.
In the end, the Democrats can fairly and accurately go home and tell voters that they cut more than they raised in taxes and still managed to preserve core services. But it’s not clear these are the kind of take-home messages that will easily appease an electorate that’s very clearly scared and angry.
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Comments:
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 9:05 a.m. Inappropriate
I guess we'll find out if there is any reward in heaven for attempting to legislate a path through the budget shortfall thicket. One can disagree with particular choices, but overall the plan appears to be a responsible approach. Mr. Austin obviously subscribes to the conventional wisdom that Democrats will be punished electorally for raising revenue in any form for any purpose, suspending the Eyman cap and even mentioning any type of income tax. I suppose that is what passes for "high quality local journalism" in this unhappy era, but I for one would appreciate more emphasis on the substance of what is being done and less on the tiresome political sideshow.
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 12:17 p.m. Inappropriate
Despite all the talk of agonizing budget cuts, State spending actually increased over a billion dollars as a result of this session. That's added on top of the 33% growth in State spending over the last two sessions. The power-happy oligarchs in Olympia are strangling the golden goose. Eventually, even in this state, the taxpayers will revolt.
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 12:22 p.m. Inappropriate
Woofer,
Thanks for your feedback.
In my mind, this legislative session there's been no shortage of reporting and information on the details of the budget and tax plans the Democrats are writing and passing.
What is lacking, I would agrue, is analysis of how Olympia works and how politics impact policy decisions down here. That's what I'm trying to provide to Crosscut readers.
Furthermore, to clarify, I'm writing a weekly column for Crosscut. My day job is reporting stories for NPR stations throughout the Northwest. In those stories you'll hear a lot more policy.
Typically, I agree political reporters and editors over-emphasize the horserace - especially in coverage of Washington, D.C. But actually I think we have the opposite problem here at the state legislative level. The trick is striking the right balance.
Finally, I will just note that my piece today was driven by recent polling on the mood of voters. I spend most of my time trying to explain Olympia to the public. Sometimes it's healthy to get out from under the dome and look from the outside in for a change.
Cheers,
Austin
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 12:27 p.m. Inappropriate
dbreneman,
To be accurate, state spending is down. Spending, if you include federal dollars, is up. Typically Democrats and Republicans in Olympia focus on the near general fund, which is down.
Jason Mercier at the Washington Policy Center has done some good analysis of this for readers who want to delve deeper into the different pots of money: http://washingtonpolicyblog.typepad.com/washington_policy_center_/2010/02/comparison-of-house-and-senate-budgets.html
Austin
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 12:30 p.m. Inappropriate
This author's misrepresentation of the State's fiscal difficulties merely sows further confusion, rather than inform. The author could clear up the confusion by discussing the anatomy of the budget "short-fall." Unfortunately, Crosscut routinely substitutes politics for serious economic and financial analysis. An actual examination of the State budget shows that the State is constrained by growing costs, not revenue short-falls. Budget woes due to "falling revenue" have yet to actually constrain the State; expenditures have merely peaked, lagging behind rising costs.
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 1:03 p.m. Inappropriate
The link the author provided does not describe the "short-fall." The anatomy of the short-fall stems primarily from poor forecasting, and rising costs (via Sunshinereview.org):
Revenue declines:
$686 million June forecast
$238 million September forecast
$237 million tax lawsuit
$32 million October revenue collections
$65 million November revenue collections
Rising Costs:
$659 million increased demand for health care, schools, prisons
$12 million forest fires, landslides, dam failures, other possible emergencies
$71 million lawsuits blocking planned cuts
Poor forecasting and rising costs represent $1.5 billion of the state's "short-fall," while falling tax revenue reflects less the 5% of the State's budget "short-fall."
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 1:53 p.m. Inappropriate
"To be accurate, state spending is down. Spending, if you include federal dollars, is up."
Mr. Jenkins, I see your point, but why would one not want to include federal dollars? This state has a long history of taking windfalls and treating them like perpetual revenue streams. Besides that, all of that "federal" money is still the taxpayers' money; it's just been passed through the least efficient "middleman" imaginable.
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 2:28 p.m. Inappropriate
Austin
I heard your piece a couple days ago on KUOW which referenced the same poll. I've had the opportunity to travel down to Olympia this spring to lobby as a citizen activist and heard the Governor make her case for more revenue.
It strikes me that the message from the polling should be that the general populace has no friggin' idea of where the revenue comes from and where tax funds are spent. Hence voters will be making decisions in upcoming elections not based on facts and data but on perceptions.
In particular, the Governor, Democratic leadership, and the media (including yourself) have done a poor job explaining that suspension of I-960 is required because there is insufficient time to place an initiative on the ballot and maintain continuity in government services. And they've done a poor job of explaining that 70% of the state's budget is mandated expenditure with only 30% the budget available for cuts. One wonders what the response to the polling would be if voters were more educated on the budget situation.
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 4:56 p.m. Inappropriate
Austin Jenkins not only condemns the notion of forcing the rich to pay even a tiny fraction of their fair share of state taxes. He ridicules – with breathtakingly misogynistic venomousness – the economic justice of taxing the rich, dismissing it as an aberration “hatched” by Sen. Lisa Brown.
If that were not sufficient proof of his real values, Jenkins refuses to denounce the DemocRats for cravenly preserving the obscenity of Washington's unequaled tax-exemptions for the rich – never mind that the super-wealthy members of the Big Business and Wall Street aristocracies pay less in personal state and municipal taxes here than anywhere else in the U.S.
Jenkins also suppresses the undeniable fact most of the state's increasingly ruinous economic problems originate entirely from it's role as the plutocracy's national tax-haven.
Hence Washingtonians are tyrannized not just by the most oppressively Third World state-tax structure in the nation but by devastating reductions in public services – for example the radical downsizing of public transport – every time Ponzi-profiteering by the Ruling Class hurls the economy into one of capitalism's characteristic nosedives.
As a November 2009 blog-item in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted, Washingtonians earning less than $20,000 per year pay 17.3 percent of our family income in sales, excise and property taxes. But those making between $99,000 and $198,000 per year pay only 7.6 percent of their family incomes in state taxes. And the top 1 percent – the rich and super-rich fat-cats making more than $537,000 a year – are virtually exempt, paying no more than 2.9 percent of their huge annual incomes in Washington state and local taxes.
The figures so cited are from a November 2009 study by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, available here: http://www.itepnet.org/whopays3.pdf
These numbers prove why economic downturns invariably savage Washington's state and municipal finances.
Do the math: when those of us who bear the greatest tax burdens are denied jobs, we can neither make the purchases that fund the sales taxes nor pay the rents and mortgages that generate the property taxes -- precisely why bankruptcy, foreclosure and eviction worsen the deficit.
Meanwhile rich and super-rich remain immune to all such hardships. But their contributions to the revenue base are so minuscule they do nothing to alleviate the economic privation.
And since the Ruling Class has outsourced the economy from which any new living-wage jobs might have been created, “jobless recovery” is literally forever – as is the decline in tax revenues and, as a result, the ultimately murderous reductions in public services that have already begun.
Predictably, the Ruling Class revealed last summer how it would respond – not with reforms but with the Big Lie: for example, Sen. Patty Murray's demonstrably false claim (via a 12 July 2009 press release), that she had ensured “elderly residents, commuters, and families are not left without the transit services they rely on every day.”
Next, in a display of cunning so deftly Machiavellian it would do a Byzantine emperor credit, Murray silenced all her most authoritative potential critics by arm-twisting local transit officials to put their imprimaturs on her deceitfulness.
One of the officials so manipulated was Pierce Transit Chief Executive Officer Lynne Griffith, quoted in Murray's press release as saying the senator's bogus legislative efforts “will allow Pierce Transit to keep valuable service on the street and jobs in our community, while addressing a 15 percent (nearly $10 million) decline in revenue.”
The following month the truth came out: Murray saved neither jobs nor services, and Pierce Transit – eliminating some routes and slashing its already Third Worldish schedule to one bus per hour on several more routes – is now contemplating an additional 57 percent service reduction.
Other transit systems are similarly plagued.
Likewise social services – all this carnage, all these atrocities (and that is precisely what they are) – in cravenly slavish submission to the aristocracy's dictum that their parasitic wealth should exempt them from state and municipal taxes: the Barons of Big Business and their country-club Antoinettes who proclaim “we don't use public schools or public services, so why should we have to pay for them?”
Horrified by the brutally jackbooted rhetoric of the GOPorkers' brazen servitude as capitalism's storm-troopers, we elected the DemocRats to rescue us from such tyranny.
But increasingly now all we see is how deftly the DemocRats hide behind the Big Lie of “change we can believe in” even as they serve as the stealth-factotums of the Ruling Class – the true source of the populist rage now convulsing Moron Nation.
Jenkins refusal to report or even consider such outrages combines with his obvious pander-to-the-Ruling Class bias to reveal the unspoken premises from which he writes.
His deliberate choice of a male-supremacist code-verb – “hatched” – demonstrates his solidarity with the bigoted, clitoris-envying contempt for females that characterizes his more obviously demagogic colleagues.
Thus despite his public-radio credentials he shows himself to be yet another propagandist for the plutocracy that has reduced all this nation's government and governance to the sole function of perpetuating capitalism -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for the rest of us.
Jenkins diatribes are no more “high quality local public journalism” than der Voelkischer Beobachter was a vessel of ethnic truth.
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 6:31 p.m. Inappropriate
Wow, Mr. (or is it "Ms"?) Lorenbliss. That's a mouthful. I feel bad for Mr. Jenkins --- I wonder how long he has suffered from clitoris envy.
What does "fair share" mean in the context of state taxes? I believe that so-called progressive income taxes are inherently unfair, penalize the most productive members of society (ie, those who generate the most income) and generally lead to higher costs of capital and lower economic growth. This, in turn, hurts the most disadvantaged members of society.
I have not seen any argument from high income Washingtonians that they should be (to quote you) "exempt ... from state and municipal taxes." Nor do I see data that demonstrate what percentage of state and local taxes are paid by people making less than $20k per year, between $99k and $198K per year or above $537k per year. Instead, you give the data as a percentage of their income. That percentage is entirely irrelevant. If you have data that show that Washingtonians in those income ranges actually DO pay less in state and local taxes --- in absolute dollars --- please share the data.
"These numbers prove why economic downturns invariably savage Washington's state and municipal finances." They do no such thing. New York and California have very progressive state (and even local) income taxes. Are those states' finances faring well in this recession? I think not.
You talk about a decline in Washington tax revenues. This suggests that revenues in this budget cycle declined from the prior (or any other) budget cycle? Simply false. Tax revenues are higher in this state budget cycle than they have ever been.
Perhaps you should stick to arguments about male supremacist code verbs. How about first defining the term, then explaining how "hatched" fits the definition?
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 10:03 p.m. Inappropriate
Thank you, PJS, for your eloquent presentation of some of the notions derived from capitalism -- that is, from the economic (and therefore also political, moral and theological) philosophy of infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue -- and thanks too for sharing some of the obfuscations and outright lies commonly used in their defense. Indeed your response adds precisely the one footnote my own contribution lacked. Thank you again.
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 10:13 p.m. Inappropriate
Austin, what was "Kafkaesque" about the tax proposal? Did it involve people turning into cockroaches or standing trial for crimes they didn't commit? You don't do your argument any favors by using such prejudicial language.
@Flyintheointment: of course state costs have gone up. That's what happens in economic downturns, more people need help and so costs go up, at the same time that sales tax revenues go down. This is basic economics.
Posted Mon, Mar 8, 10:14 p.m. Inappropriate
Mr. Lorenbliss -
Obfuscation and outright lies? Please elaborate --- or are facts irrelevant to your argument?
"Infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue" --- I have no idea what that means.
You chose not to address any of the points I raised in response to your polemic. One can only assume this is your admission to the bankruptcy of your own arguments.
Come on, dude --- at least enlighten us as to what "male supremacist code verbs" are! Do they have anything to do with Mr Jenkins's alleged clitoris envy?
Posted Tue, Mar 9, 6:01 a.m. Inappropriate
lorenbliss writes: "...Washingtonians earning less than $20,000 per year pay 17.3 percent of our family income in sales, excise and property taxes." [accent added -DB ]
Maybe if you didn't demonstrate such loathing and contempt of the economic engine of prosperity (a free economy) and the people who provide the vast majority of jobs (the "infinitely greedy" capitalists) you might be able to hold down a well paying job.
Posted Wed, Mar 17, 4:05 p.m. Inappropriate
And finally a whopping 64 percent believe lawmakers "should not suspend obstacles to raising taxes such as the supermajority requirement because taxes should be difficult to raise."
Gee whiz! What a shock! Next you'll be pointing out that vast majorities believe beer and pizza shouldn't make you fat. Making it easy to raise spending and hard to raise taxes is exactly what got California into it's current financial predicament. If you want to suggest that all budgetary bills require a super-majority I'll listen, but otherwise you're just arguing for fiscal irresponsibility. Personally I like simple majority rule and would prefer to see an amendment to the State's Constitution requiring all budgetary bills and people's initiatives to be revenue neutral or revenue positive. That way we can debate both the positives and negatives of each measure rather than assuming our tax cut will be paid for by cutting someone else's services or our new service will be paid for by raising other people's taxes. In short, we as a society need to have a serious discussion over what we want to pay for and how we want to pay for it.
"People are very concerned about government performance at this point in time. They do not feel they are getting a value for the tax money that they're paying. They continue to feel that there's a lot of waste in government." Once again, Wow! Really! So who's buried in Grant's Tomb again? Maybe instead of spending money on a polling to find out what anyone who bothers to read the comments section of a local news site could tell you. How about spending it on a little investigative reporting to find out where and how bad the waste is?
To sum it up yes the last thing Olympia needs to to is waste everyone's time attempting to throw a bone to trial lawyers, but the idea that we can get out of this mess with out some serious hurt on people's pocketbooks and/or essential services is just plain old snake oil.