Does that also mean we have to pay "our fair share" for the tunnel overruns or are some folks going to pay a more "fair share" than others?

Kill the tunnel before it kills our pocketbooks and economy.

I wish we could just grow up and impose an income tax, but people - especially the ones who grew up here - are so irrationally afraid of it. I work with a single mother who could certainly benefit from better schools and services, and who could easily absorb the "extra cost" of the tax (which would be minimal, given her salary) but she is adamant. Even if we were to just tax the rich - which she would otherwise like to see - that's a "foot in the door" in her book.

Back in Iowa, we had a modest state income tax, a 6% sales tax (with exemptions for food and used goods, which makes for wonderful thrift shops) and rather steep property taxes (my mother paid the about the same amount of property tax for her house as I do for mine in Seattle). It's really not that big a deal, especially since you can deduct your state income tax from your federal tax.

Yes, Cato, that means you pay for the tunnel. Get over it!

Thank you, Governor Inslee, for demonstrating real leadership on this crucial issue.

Are we really sure this is actually from the Governor? No.

They faked Rob McKenna, and hence we must be suspicious forevermore.

Sadly, the Republicans will do everything that they can to destroy all hope for a more fair tax system and a better future for most people.

A rich person, a (formerly) middle-class person, and a poor person are seated at a table with a dozen cookies. The rich person takes eleven of the cookies, then tells the (formerly) middle-class person that the poor person is trying to take their cookie.

A perfect metaphor for US politics and economics--past, present, and future.

I don't care whether this is the real Jay Inslee or not. It's still a good idea, whoever espouses it.

Washington state (and Seattle) have needed an income tax for a long, long time. And it's not just Seattle or Washington. We need to be a country where everyone pays their fair share, especially corporations (considered people) who are paying ZERO in taxes, while the working poor pay more and more in regressive taxes as the top echelon try to keep every penny of their obscene wealth.

@ 2, "a foot in the door" mentality is precisely the myth anti-tax activists and the wealthy who pay them have been working on Americans for 35 years. The suspicion that all legislators want is to take as much of your money as they can. It's not to fix or buildinfrastructure, educate children, or anything you might want government to do, it's to waste it. They've repeated it a million times and it has sunk in completely.

The bitter irony, of course, is the giveaways (federal military contracts, state tunnel projects) that amount to many more billions of wasted money than any proveable amount of welfare fraud they could cite. These things don't trouble them at all. (Maybe Seattleblahs will come along and demonstrate that for us.)

Geez. No wonder the state needs money. The governor is a moron with no understanding of numbers for gods sake.

Listen, Jay. If someone making 22k a year spends 16% of that in taxes, even using the study liars own laughably impossible numbers, they'd have to be spending on taxable items what they made. Before rent or car payments or food. Now, go back to something you do well, rabble rousing or tiddleywinks or that epic task of learning to tie your shoes, and stop trying to think. It isn't your forte.

All talk. Prove me wrong, Inslee.

@ 10, prophecy fulfilled.

The lowest income bracket does not pay property taxes.

The lowest income bracket does not pay business taxes.

These numbers are skewed by the LLC structure, in which an individual's income goes to the business and the individual pays the bills.

The lowest income bracket is not paying more than the sales tax.

@ 13, unless you're going to suggest that property and business owners pay those taxes from their own salaries, and not as part of the overhead of owning property and businesses which derive their income from renters and consumers, and/or that property managers and business owners do not take projected taxes into account when setting rents and prices, you can GTFO with that nonsense.

You're going to argue trickle down is fabricated and injected into our tax numbers.

Well played.

Overheard last night -

"They" keep us from making money by making us spend our time at laundromats.

There's a limit to how far you can take this.

Of course those expenses are passed on, but they sure as hell aren't in the numbers.

It's fake.

@13, 15, 16 welcome to slog! You'll find it's a place fairly intolerant of vague bullshit comments like yours.

Quantify the numbers then.

Quantify what percentage of property tax is passed on to the renter.

You can't. It's on a person-to-person basis.

If you can't quantify the numbers(unless you ran a survey of every property owner in the state), then how can those numbers be valid?

How do state income taxes work with Federal income taxes? Do you subtract your state income tax directly from what you owe to the Feds?

In a similar vein, how would the state level capital gains tax work with the Federal capital gains tax? 15% to the Feds and 7% to WA?

@ 15, pointing out the flaw in your logic doesn't mean that I'm making a counter argument. I'm stating a plain fact - taxes are part of the overhead of business and rental property, and as such the funds to pay them come from renters and consumers. Therefore, when their rents and prices are set with the expense of taxes, among all overhead and sought profits, those taxes are indirectly paid by renters and consumers and represent a burden shouldered by them. They are a business expense, not a burden shouldered by these owners like their own personal property and sales taxes are.

@20

Property taxes a tenant might 'pay' are local, not state. And the notion that someone might spend 16% of 22k on all non food, non rent items combined is conceivable. That of that 16% all of it goes to taxes. Pure bullshit.

@20

Also, mile high, even were the lying numbers true it wouldn't make any difference.
Fact is, even if your put upon 22k per year hero were paying around $3800 a year in state taxes (which they are not) they're getting most or all of that back in social services. They're a taxpayer in the same way that a shoplifter is a consumer.

@ 22, local or state might be germane to the issue of what will Washington do to raise badly needed funds, but not so much to the issue of whether or not the poor are bearing an unfair part of the overall tax burden. So that distinction means little to me because I'm no longer a Washington resident. Whatever you do or don't do, it's no skin off my nose.

But the larger notion that income tax is bad, bad, bad, or that the poor do not, in fact, bear more than their fair share of the tax burden, interests me. You may disagree with me, but given your perfect record of never supporting your opinions with good data, it doesn't move me one way or the other.

@22: Hmm, on one hand we have the non-partisan, non-profit Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy with a report where they showed their work and analyzed the data, and on the other, a bloviating windbag who lies all the time, has been wrong about everything, and when asked for evidence for his assertions, runs away and hides?

However will anyone choose who to trust? Show us your work Seattleblues, and we can judge it by its merits. Where is your research, where is your data?

@24

Property tax is not state tax, nor in state control. So Inslee isn't nor are the study liars talking about it as part of the lying 16% figure. Whether you're interested in the facts or not (being a lefty, not) isn't te issue.

Fair share? The bottom 50% pay no taxes. Most of these receive substantial federal and state giveaways or even a damn check for their citizenship. Fair, like most words for leftists, appears to be used independently of its definition by you. And Jay Inslee.

@25

While I'm at it, should I prove that magic doesn't exist? Santa Claus, real or not, up to me as well?

If a liar says something that simply could not be true as I show at 22, I'm wasting no time analysing their lies. Why do they lie doesn't interest me. I'm just going to assume nothing they say has any merit.

@27: How do you know they are lying if you have not done any of your own research?

Also, don't you think this is a little ironic considering how much you lie?

@ 26, as I said, a perfect record of never supporting your opinions and notions. Good boy.

Part of the solution of both income inequality and the state's budget shortfalls is by imposing an indirect tax on corporations... in the form of raising the minimum wage. It's a more direct redistribution than welfare benefits. Want to more effectively tax the wealthy? Make them pay their employees more.

Theodore, Matt, Subhumanblues does not need research, evidence or facts because truthiness always trumps research, evidence, reason and facts.

@27: You are the one that believes in magic, not us.

Oh, sorry, "God".

@12: *grovels in amazement*

@23: Gee then, a customer isn't a consumer either! When I go to the grocery store and give them my money, I get the same value back in comestibles. So everything I pay them, I get right back in the form of cheese, apples, and pasta. I must not be a consumer!!! GOSH.
@26: "Property tax is not state tax, nor in state control. So Inslee isn't nor are the study liars talking about it as part of the lying 16% figure."
When you read the study's figures (assuming you actually read it), you must have missed the big letters at the top saying "State & Local Taxes in 2015" (source, bolding mine). Are you fucking illiterate as well as factually-challenged?

@27: You're saying, to paraphrase:
"It couldn't possibly be true. If you look at it, it just can't be true that someone pays that high a portion of their income in taxes! Therefore it's not true."
Argument from intuition doesn't hold water in the hallowed halls of scientific inquiry, boy. But hey, you wanna play that?
"There's no way that a human woman could spontaneously conceive without being exposed to human spermatozoa. Any idiot knows that much! There's no way it could have happened. Therefore Christianity is built on a lie."
Hmm, this game of "I claim things without evidence and tell everyone they're true facts" is fun!

There are fewer people in the (formerly) middle class because it's rapidly shrinking as more people fall into poverty--not because more people are moving up the ladder. Yet another well-researched, tragic fact.

@35: what about the evidence that that part of the story wasn't told until much after his death and all the other people alive at the time's death? That he definitely wasn't born in Bethlehem because no such census took place, nor would it have taken place in such a manner, and he was known as Jesus of Nazareth because he was FROM NAZARETH?
And then of course the fact that King of the Jews was not a thing only he was accused of, but a title many like him tried to claim, ending in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem 40 years after his death?

More Info: Governor Inslee is correct, we can no longer sit back and watch our children go hungry.

With 30,000 homeless children in 2013,the legislators should be ashamed that you have not taxed the 118,000 millionaires and 7 billionaires that don’t pay taxes and legislators having given over $7.6 billion annually in tax breaks to 650 corporations, more than the annual WA Budget that serves all of us. Your budget and revenue policies are resulting in killing Washingtonians and should be considered unconstitutional for not serving the Welfare of All of Us!

Legislators have a legal reason to take away the $8.7 billion they gave to Boeing and fund education instead. Europe challenges 777X subsidies $8.7 billion to Boeing in WTO trade case The European case asserts that a package of tax breaks offered by Washington state to induce Boeing to build its planned 777X jet there would violate WTO rules and give the U.S. plane-maker an unfair advantage over its European archrival, Airbus. http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstec…

Links:

Where are Washington's K-12 dollars? Just ask Microsoft shareholders. http://crosscut.com/2014/08/22/education…

State Level Tax cuts Don’t Boost Job Growth. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/03…

2012 Tax Exempt Study – where our tax revenue went! http://dor.wa.gov/Content/AboutUs/Statis…