As a passionate believer in the state income tax, I agree that is would definitely be the best way to balance the state budget and provide a sustainable, more stable way of funding basic state services like education, public safety and health.

But, please, don't try to promote the income tax as a realistic way to balance the state budget in the current political environment. The Elway poll indicating that 71% laughably believe that the budget mess can be solved with efficiencies and closing tax loopholes shows that the voters are too ridiculously out-of-touch with the realities of funding our commonwealth to consider an income tax. Nothing is going to happen to restore funding for state services until the loss of those services is felt on Mercer Island, and the shores of Lake Sammamish.

Redirecting your reporting to illuminating this fundamental voter misunderstanding will do more to solve it than suggesting solutions to a problem the voters don't believe they have. It's equally ridiculously out-of-touch to believe that there is any way you could convince any Republicans to join a super majority required to pass an income tax in the legislature after such a ringing defeat in the polls just a couple of months ago. You're wasting your time promoting one right now. Do it when it can do some good.

Although I have said Property Tax in numerous blogs including this one, the Insiders continue to ignore the most obvious and fair way and instead promote retrogressive income taxes.

The reason is obvious...all you "poor" Sloggers are helped along by your parents expensive real estate and stock options holding. So poor little rich girls and boys of Seattle don't want their inheritances touched. This allows them to live in expensive condoes and smoke pot and whine about "The System" well into their late 30s...at which point they will cash out their parents estate, thus avoiding ever getting a job. To fund their light rails, health care and community college courses, they will insist upon taxing those who actually go to work everyday healing people, creating technology and managing their parents estates...

The truly beautiful thing to do would be to eliminate every subsidy and exemption to the B&O tax for one year - it would prevent the people of this state from losing revenue that could balance the budget, and get around the awkward debate in Olympia about why one subsidy is better/worse than another.

Steve Breaux
WashPIRG

After a year, they could start from scratch and have a thoughtful discussion about new subsidies or exemptions that would work as intended, with built-in sun-set provisions.

Yes, someone will complain that eliminating a given subsidy or exemption for even one year will destroy their business, but think about it: any business that can't survive for even one year without their exemption or subsidy is a business that doesn't have any business being in business.

Seattle Times: Supporters of I-1098 blamed the resounding defeat on a decades-long distaste for a state income tax. "I think that there are people who have a fundamental negative feeling about new taxes, and that's where the majority (of the opposition) came from," said William H. Gates Sr., a prominent backer of the measure who became its public face in television commercials.

I agree. And I'm convinced that a lot of people who might have voted yes, voted against the initiative because they believed that the income tax would eventually be extended to people who don't have high incomes. Now, even if those people had been convinced the income tax would only remain on people with high-incomes, I'm not sure their support would have been enough for I-1098 to pass, but I think it would have been much closer than it was.