Comments

1
Time to stop subsidizing Eastern Washington and other counties.

Without King and Snohomish, they can't even keep the roads paved in the rest of the state.

Stare them down.
2

Washington as a whole subsidies the large landowners and long time population of "natives" versus the productive, wage earning new comers.

Neither side addresses the 1% property tax covenant that unfairly distributes the tax burden on the newcomers and lets the natives relax in splendor on their 100 acre estates, while the productive people fight over tiny apodments.
3
If they want to play hardball, play hardball:

Get a law that says just this:

All taxes collected in Washington state in a given county may only be spent on projects in that given county. The exemption process to this is that another county or the State may ask permission of the legislative body of another county for use of their funds. The requestee county then must pass legislation as a law, approved by their executive or administration, authorizing the transfer of funds. All such transfers must be single events, and may not be on-going, for fixed amounts.


If the Red Counties want to play hardball with us, let's play hardball right back. If they want our precious King Count money, let them come grovel.
4

#3

Fine, maybe then Seattle and King County residents will start to pay property taxes based on actual value and use that money for budget busting infrastructure like trains and tunnels. No Federal monies should be used for these things.

5
Maybe it's time to turn the "Government should function like a business" mantra on its head and ask some local businesses how they'd survive if they had to operate under the guidelines being pushed by Senate Republicans.

'Hey Starbucks - it doesn't matter if the cost of coffee beans goes through the roof next year, you can only increase your bean-buying budget by some arbitrarily predetermined factor that has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual cost of making coffee.'

'Yo Boeing - we know the global demand for your airplanes is projected to increase by double digits, but our state population is only increasing by single digits and inflation is pretty low, so you'll have to tell the airlines to go screw themselves and buy from Airbus.'
6
#5

What part of population growth plus inflation do you not understand?
7
How the Republicans got the reputation as the party that understands finance better is beyond me. Aside from the productivity and off shoring problem that Goldy points out, we all know that health care and construction materials costs have outpaces core inflation for decades now, and our 2 biggest state departments are WSDOT and DSHS. So they will immediately be in the red next year. Stupid, bumper sticker solutions to complex problems. It's the modern Republican way.
8
@6 - I understand that the 'plus inflation' in this legislation pertains to overall inflation, not inflation of specific cost-drivers that impact individual programs.

Overall inflation is relatively low, but the inflation rate for things government does (healthcare of high-acuity and needy populations, law enforcement and incarceration, etc) is almost always much higher.

The private sector also faces similar factors (sometime the cost of a commodity like coffee beans rises far faster than the overall CPI), but they have the flexibility to adjust their budgets accordingly. And so should government.
9
decipimur specie recti.
10
@4 you go on ahead and do whatever it is you want when you have critical mass in the form of a population that shares your views, enough to the point you can enact legislation that reflects those views. Let us know when Hell freezes over as well, since that's when King County will reflect these views at the current rate of adoption.
11

#10

In other words, I'm right, but until I bully you into submission with a large enough mob to counter your mob, then you will continue to mouth an unfair and unworkable scheme.

Challenge accepted.
12
TABOR here in Colorado hasn't necessarily wrecked things, but it DOES make things more bureaucratic and complicated because now politicians and lobbyists have to convince the public to agree to raise revenue on things that should be obvious. Yeah, on face it "feels" like the common citizens have more say and more control, but not really. It just makes things more difficult. Like, instead of going to the store yourself to buy bread, milk, and eggs, you have to send your request through a committee and then hire outsiders to go shopping for you, who might return empty handed, telling you the cost of those goods isn't worth it.

TABOR doesn't shrink the size of government at all, it increases it. But republicans don't really want to shrink government. Nor are they fiscally conservative. Republicans spend most of their time trying to convince their dim-witted followers of things that are simply untrue.
13
#8

The inflation part, as I read TABOR, applies to the total growth in spending, not to changes in costs.

For example, if computers and energy become cheaper due to technological innovation, but BLS inflation creeps upward, you would still have that taxable amount to spend. If however, something individually skyrockets you'd simply have to reduce the proportion of that in your budget. That's life, we all have to live with it.
14
@3 for the Win
15
#13

That is not how the rest of us deal with it. When possible, we substitute lower cost items. However, what we usually do is to eliminate the expense.

If the economy isn't doing as well as you would like, it is because most of us are not buying things the way we formerly could afford. We can't even make capital-type expenses as we used to make them.

Here is an example. Young twenty-somethings are not buying automobiles and not driving the way the same demographic did 50 years ago because it is too expensive to own a car. How does that help car manufacturers in the long run?

I have a nephew that can't afford to complete a four-year degree. He is working to support himself (a good thing, of course). However, how much will he and US society suffer in the future without an educated workforce because, as a society, we are too cheap to make the investment the same way an investment was made in me.

Sometimes you have to spend money to make money.
16
They also have a couple of policy bills that they want to pass but take to a referendum. Huh? Either do your job or let it go to initiative but don't pass the buck (AND the election costs) to taxpayers.
17
@15 nah cars are just stupid especially when you can wait a year and get one that gets 60 mpg at the same price as one that gets 30 mpg today
18
@2 - I don't think you really understand how property taxes in general, and the 101% aggregate limit in particular, works.
19
@18 Or, he doesn't care.

In any case, thanks to I-747's arbitrary one percent limit on revenue growth, all districts with regular levy capacity are well below their statutory millage limit.
20
One overlooked fact here is that about half of the state's spending is off budget. There are some 640 tax expenditures that reduce state revenue. Looking at the 2012 tax exemption report by the State Department of Revenue, on B&O taxes on business - the state gave out 176 tax breaks totaling some $7.5 billion while collecting only $6.5 billion in revenue.

The exemptions were 54% of the potential tax base. When you add in sales and use tax to the B&O tax total the state collected some $21 billion in revenue but gave out tax expenditures worth $2 billion. See http://dor.wa.gov/docs/reports/2012/Exem… for the study.

Senator Rodney Tom and Senator Andy Hill and the Senate Republicans don't want to even look at most of these tax exemptions for cutting and saving the state money to use for education and other state needs.

It's time to put the tax expenditures aka tax exemptions into the state budget and treat them the same as other state expenditures. They should be ranked as high, medium or low priority in meeting the state priorities of government. And they should be subject to being cut the same as other expenditures are during the budget process.

Visit www.taxsanity.org to get information on the proposed citizen's initiative to put tax expenditures into the state budget and end the hypocrisy and sham of off budget tax expenditures.

21
"Population plus inflation is a formula for shrinking state government over time, both as a percentage of the state economy, and in terms the level of services and investments it is able to provide." THAT SOUNDS FANTASTIC! A RETURN TO PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY! READING THE FOUNDER'S ORIGINAL WORDS, THIS IS WHAT WAS INTENDED. BRAVO!
22
"... population plus inflation is a formula for shrinking state government over time, both as a percentage of the state economy, and in terms the level of services and investments it is able to provide." ???

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." --Thomas Jefferson

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one." -- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Sounds like an attempt to put us back on the right track, as originally intended. Do not confuse the will of the majority with the will of representatives elected from across the state. It is the design of a representative republic TO EMPOWER THE MINORITY, as opposed to mob rule democracy. The fate of mob rule democracies was debated long ago, and that is how we inherited our superior form of government. I love America. I love our exceptional place in the world, and I wish to restore that which made us a great nation.

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