When our state’s rural Republicans toss around pejoratives like “socialism,” “redistribution of wealth,” and “welfare state,” they’re usually hurling them at the People’s Republic of Seattle and the Democratic legislators we send to Olympia. As a commenter on the Spokane Spokesman-Review‘s website recently carped: “Eastern Washington… has always been shorted/slighted where state expenditures are concerned! Nearly to the point that we don’t exist!”
That’s not an uncommon complaint. Republican lawmakers make a similar accusation, albeit more veiled, that the state is serving as an engine of wealth redistribution. However, the money is not exactly moving in the direction most Eastern Washingtonians suspect.
Indeed, if Washington is a welfare state, it is residents in these mostly rural, mostly Eastern, mostly Republican counties who are the biggest beneficiaries, while taxpayers here in the blue parts of the state are left footing the bill. And while your typical liberal Seattleite might be neither surprised nor disturbed at this revelation, the degree of the gap between who benefits from state government and who pays for it may come as a bit of a shock.
How big is this disparity? According to 2008 budget figures compiled by the state’s Office of Financial Management at the request of Representatives Reuven Carlyle (D-Seattle) and Glenn Anderson (R-Fall City), King County, with roughly 29 percent of the state population, produced 42 percent of state tax revenues, yet it received back less than 26 percent of state benefits. That’s a return of only 62 cents on the dollar for our state’s Democratic stronghold.
Compare that to the generous $3.16 return on each dollar enjoyed by taxpayers in hard Republican Ferry County in deep northeastern Washington. All in all, only six counties qualified as “net donors” to the rest of the state—San Juan, King, Skagit, Kittitas, Whatcom, and Snohomish—while the remaining 33 counties enjoyed an average return on investment of over $1.40 on every tax dollar sent to Olympia.
The Seattle Times dismissed the issue in late January as “neither new nor news.” But with $4.6 billion of budget cuts in the offing, now is exactly the time to debate these numbers. “We need to challenge the political bureaucracy to get outside of its comfort zone,” Carlyle stresses, “and engage directly in difficult questions of how taxes and spending really flow.” One could argue that as lawmakers struggle to divvy up ever-scarcer resources, the question of who’s funding whom matters more than ever.
This expenditure/revenue disparity extends across every major spending category of the state’s general fund. For example, according to 2008 data compiled by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, the state spent $6,322 per student in King County to cover K–12 “basic education” costs, ranking us near the bottom statewide, while the usual red-county suspects jockeyed for a position at the top. The winner: Lincoln County, scoring an impressive $10,356 per student.
Break the numbers down by school district, and the chasm yawns wider, as the high cost of subsidizing the many small districts that dot Washington’s rural countryside add up to produce per-student expenditures that border on the absurd. The tiny Evergreen School District in Stevens County received $36,566 in state funds for each of its seven enrolled students, while Adams County’s Benge School District (a whopping enrollment of nine) topped the charts at $43,924 per student. By comparison, the Seattle School District, much maligned for its administrative overhead and other inefficiencies, managed to get by on only $6,740 in state funding per student, just below the state average, while Skamania County’s Stevenson-Carson School District cost state taxpayers a paltry $5,371 per enrollee.
But perhaps the most glaring example of our rural welfare state comes in the category of “welfare” itself, where 2008 data from the state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) clearly illustrates just how dependent on Western Washington tax dollars many Eastern Washingtonians have become. King County, home to our state’s largest concentration of urban poor, drew only $538 of DSHS expenditures per capita, ranking it 30th out of 39 counties. Meanwhile, such bastions of self-proclaimed self-sufficiency as rural Adams, Ferry, Pend Oreille, and Okanogan Counties consumed per capita DSHS benefits of over $900, while Yakima County—Washington’s “fruit basket”—topped the charts at $1,129 per person.
To put this level of dependency in perspective, 83 cents out of every dollar Yakima County sends to Olympia is paid back in DSHS benefits alone. Tiny Ferry County actually receives more in just DSHS benefits—$1.14 on the dollar—than the total tax revenues it pays to the state! Schools, corrections, higher education, everything else… that’s all gravy.
The irony here is not that those who benefit most from state spending are paying the least; that’s kinda the way these things are supposed to work. No, the irony is that those rural communities that are most dependent on the state—whose roads and schools and other essential public services couldn’t possibly be maintained without generous state subsidies—are also those least likely to vote for the tax dollars necessary to sustain these services. Just look at the map on the previous page: Those counties that receive the most money back on the dollar are also those that are most likely to vote Republican. But it’s a disconnect that just can’t continue forever.
In the short term, without the sort of new tax revenues red-county voters bitterly oppose, draconian budget cuts will be unavoidable. And since these counties currently enjoy a disproportionate share of state spending, it’s hard to see how they can avoid a disproportionate share of the cuts.
In the long term, the red counties have by far the most to lose from the devolution of state services. Had King County’s school districts been funded proportionate to what King County taxpayers put into state coffers, our schools would have received an additional one billion dollars from the state in 2008; now that’s the kind of data point, if properly understood, that could erode local, blue-county support for statewide solutions.
Which perhaps explains why so few lawmakers seem to want these data points properly understood. 
Facts bounce off of retardlicans like rubber bullets. That’s how an ignoramus like Palin can pass herself off as Reagan to them.
I think we should balance the budget by limiting payouts in any given county to a percentage of local tax revenues calculated to produce a balanced budget. Make the teabaggers eat their words.
Is it fair to generalize that “Democratic counties contribute more money to the rest of the state than they get back” when a majority of blue counties (5 of the 9) are actually in the same welfare boat as the red counties (albeit maybe not as deep)? The main takeaway should be: “Four blue counties and one mixed county carry the rest of state.”
Well done.
Here’s a similar infographic from 2004 showing the ratio of federal spending to federal tax receipts by state. The irony plays out on a national level.
If anybody can link to a newer map, it would be much appreciated.
Bonus map: population by county. Aside from Yakima, most of the big spenders have populations smaller than Capitol Hill’s.
Goldy’s willful ignorance of the difference between fixed costs and variable costs is getting tiring. Rural, low-density counties are always going to have higher per-capita spending than urban counties simply because there are fewer people across which to spread the fixed costs of government (roads, buildings, land management, etc). To claim that spending should be equal across counties with vastly differing population densities is just silly.
I’m well aware that Republicans happily argue for tax cuts without supporting corresponding spending cuts, but this piece mostly comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding how government spending works. You guys can (and should) complain about variable costs of government being higher in places that claim to oppose them, but the analysis doesn’t mean much when variable and fixed costs are lumped together.
Look at those poor idiots. Hahaha…they are so poor and stupid that they don’t even know they are voting against the system that will make them rich and smart like us!
This is a compelling visual, but it begs another question that I don’t see in the article… What is the impact-per-dollar-spent by county?
It may be true that we spend more of it and collect less of it in the Eastern counties. But if the resulting programs are less impactful, if they are designed in such a way that they work in King County and not in Yakima, if we are ‘wasteful’ in the sense of running programs that do not produce valuable outcomes, then this graphic actually supports the conservative argument. Is there any data on impact?
@hi-land, it doesn’t matter what the impact per dollar spent number is. The bottom line is that, on a per-capita basis, the residents of King County are getting ripped off.
The fact that we have to listen to so-called GOP fiscal conservatives lie to our faces while robbing us is just salt in the wound.
@Sean P, Do you even know the difference between fixed and variable costs? What variable costs, exactly, does a county government have? Your argument, if one can call it that, is a complete red herring.
The point of the piece is that the counties in the Red, so to speak, need to decide if they want to have schools, police, welfare, and hospitals, etc. Those services have known fixed costs: salaries, pensions, welfare payments and the costs of maintaining the buildings, e.g., fixed costs. If they want them, they can vote to tax themselves for them.
A variable cost is when someone is hired to build something, e.g., construct a new road.
Maybe the reason Republicans and Libertarians don’t ever follow through on balancing budgets and cutting spending is that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of how accounting works.
Damn but I love that map.
Time to give them what they want and have us stop subsidizing those Red County welfare queens and their farmer tax-subsidized lifestyles they can’t afford.
Sean P says that the analysis was unfair because it was done on a per-capita basis. I suppose he would prefer seeing the analysis on a per acre basis?
Either way, it’s going to come out the same: rural citizens, in general, contribute less to state revenues and, in general, receive more in state spending.
Want to divide it up between fixed costs and variable costs? Great, but also divide the revenues into fixed and variable. There are fixed (or nearly so) revenues in the form of property taxes and variable revenues in the form of B & O and sales taxes. I’m sure that the story is going to come out the same: the state spends more on rural citizens than it collects from them and collects more from urban and suburban citizens that it spends on them.
Don’t make excuses: the people living in rural areas chose to live there. They are exercising a choice. They should pay the cost instead of expecting others to pay for their expensive choices.
@5, “To claim that spending should be equal across counties with vastly differing population densities is just silly.”
Goldy doesn’t make that claim (red-herring argument). What he is saying, I believe, is that socialism is alive and well in Washington State. Those benefiting from this socialism are the very ones who oppose it; or think it is a new plot foisted upon them by Obama; or who think that it’ll be the end of FREEDOM and Liberty. Socialism has been the status quo for decades.
Without this socialism, their current way of life would be nearly impossible. If they dislike socialism, let them try rugged-individualism for a few years. I suspect many would change their mind, except for those hardcore hermits.
@10: Most rural counties in the US have had negligible or negative population growth for decades. People moving to Republic and promptly demanding government subsidies aren’t the problem here.
@11: Goldy’s claim is that people who argue the loudest against government spending actually benefit the most from it, and that this is relevant to the state’s fiscal woes. The point remains, however, that Goldy’s chosen metric doesn’t necessarily distinguish between “welfare” and “things that cost more per person to provide to places with lower populations or population densities”. For that matter, the county tax/spend metric also fails to distinguish between benefits to individuals and statewide benefits. Would you really want I-90 to become a dirt road as soon as it leaves King County?
@5,
I’d add to the others’ statements that in Goldy’s piece, he clearly states that this is roughly how the State should be dividing it’s spending. Rural counties SHOULD receive more than urban ones in taxes to maintain SOME services they can’t pay for themselves – with the understanding that they are willing to pay their fair (subsidized) share.
When they force us to raise taxes with 2/3 majorities and then vote in Republican legislators who always refuse to raise taxes, then it is only right to cut their subsidy.
@12
You continue to miss the point. It is obvious and excepted that a rural road with a few hundred users is going to cost more per capita than a urban one with 10s of thousands of users.
The point is that those who are being subsidized (in some cases rightly, in some cases, excessively) are unwilling to ever increase taxes and they vote in people who block the rest of the State from raising taxes – they are even opposed to increased taxes if it doesn’t affect them (see: Tim Eyman all the time but mostly in relation to the Ferry System).
i-90 should not be a dirt road anywhere, but many Eastern Washington roads should be, but aren’t because they are subsidized while Seattle roads are destroyed with potholes. Could we fix this with raising the gas tax, yep but we can’t because of the welfare queens.
Way to take an issue that is nuanced and make it into a simplistic infograph that only viewers of Fox News and readers of USA Today could truly appreciate.
Progressive business taxation, higher per acre taxation and yes, higher fixed costs can explain away much of the differences. The fact that the map is skewed in such a way is because most liberals would intend it to be so skewed.
It does not preclude the possibility that a less skewed map might produce fine results. But higher fixed costs for roads and schools in large, population scarce counties are always going to be a reality.
@12
You continue to miss the point. It is obvious and excepted that a rural road with a few hundred users is going to cost more per capita than a urban one with 10s of thousands of users.
The point is that those who are being subsidized (in some cases rightly, in some cases, excessively) are unwilling to ever increase taxes and they vote in people who block the rest of the State from raising taxes – they are even opposed to increased taxes if it doesn’t affect them (see: Tim Eyman all the time but mostly in relation to the Ferry System).
i-90 should not be a dirt road anywhere, but many Eastern Washington roads should be, but aren’t because they are subsidized while Seattle roads are destroyed with potholes. Could we fix this with raising the gas tax, yep but we can’t because of the welfare queens.
As a former Tri-City resident, I can assure you there was no need to rebuild highway 240 (the road connecting richland to kennewick) 4 fucking times in the last 25 years. If you drive that road now, it is up to 5 lanes in some places, so hanford workers don’t have to sit in traffic for an extra 3 minutes on the way home. Nothing pisses me off more than that kind of pork, especially when I can drive on roads here that have not benn repaved, much less rebuilt, since the 1970’s. This is the “welfare” that I want to go after, millions of dollars awarded to private companies for no good goddamn reason.
I don’t like your tone… maybe some of the Eastern Washington counties get more tax money. They farm most of the food we eat and manufacture more than in Seattle. Any farms in Seattle. NO. Eastern Washington sustains the rest of the state! If you actually did articles on some of the industry around the state or visited differnt places in the state you would know and I wouldn’t have to be typing this… good day.
Stop coplaining so much Stranger.
The lesson we should take from the DSHS and education graphs is that counties shouldn’t have poor, disenfranchised minorities, right?
Let’s stick it to Indians and Hispanics (who already don’t vote) because they aren’t discouraged enough voters already and their white slavemasters are cocks.
Leveling spending in those areas (in particular) won’t really hurt the people who get to make decisions because they aren’t the one who actually benefit from those services.
There’s certainly more than a little bit of “I got mine” when the people whom these particular transfers are helping aren’t really part of the political debate.
Roads, though, yeah, that’s legit.
@18 Yeah, they get farm subsidies too- Just add that to the growing list of government handouts.
HO-LY SHIT but that is a frightening lot of red!! YIKES!!!!
Okay. Red counties want big state budget cuts. Should they fend financially for themselves?
I have to agree with what others have said, Sean. The point being made ISN’T that we should stop playing Robin Hood with taxes–that’s a practice that helps a lot of people in the greatest need. The issue is the uneducated and willful ignorance of those who believe that they are being unfairly taxed to benefit King County when the truth is 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
What Goldy is calling for is not an end to the flow of money. Goldy is pointing out yet another case where people have been fed a line, a way of looking at the world, which they believe–heart and soul–is the truth and so they vote accordingly. But it’s all a lie.
This is a call to look at the reality, to publicize the reality, and then let people vote based on THAT. The simple reality is that King County foots the bill for Adams County, and when Adams County insists on cutting taxes, because they don’t want to pay as much, they are the ones who would be impacted the most.
The reason, undoubtably, that all that work was done on 240 is because someone in the State Legislature need to take jobs back to his district–sorely needed jobs, I’m certain–but each time the road is fixed or expanded, that means we ALL, including the citizens in the effected counties, have to pay for it through taxes.
Thus, if you want us to lower your taxes, one of the things we are probably going to start eyeing are those job-creating projects. So your taxes will be lower, but you won’t be able to get work to pay those lower taxes. In the end, it’s short-sightedness. And in the end, that’s the biggest problem with many Republican ideas and principles: if you take them to their natural conclusions, we all suffer…except for the politicians who actively create these misconceptions: their coffers tend to grow while our savings and budgets shrink.
I have to agree with what others have said, Sean. The point being made ISN’T that we should stop playing Robin Hood with taxes–that’s a practice that helps a lot of people in the greatest need. The issue is the uneducated and willful ignorance of those who believe that they are being unfairly taxed to benefit King County when the truth is 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
What Goldy is calling for is not an end to the flow of money. Goldy is pointing out yet another case where people have been fed a line, a way of looking at the world, which they believe–heart and soul–is the truth and so they vote accordingly. But it’s all a lie.
This is a call to look at the reality, to publicize the reality, and then let people vote based on THAT. The simple reality is that King County foots the bill for Adams County, and when Adams County insists on cutting taxes, because they don’t want to pay as much, they are the ones who would be impacted the most.
The reason, undoubtably, that all that work was done on 240 is because someone in the State Legislature need to take jobs back to his district–sorely needed jobs, I’m certain–but each time the road is fixed or expanded, that means we ALL, including the citizens in the effected counties, have to pay for it through taxes.
Thus, if you want us to lower your taxes, one of the things we are probably going to start eyeing are those job-creating projects. So your taxes will be lower, but you won’t be able to get work to pay those lower taxes. In the end, it’s short-sightedness. And in the end, that’s the biggest problem with many Republican ideas and principles: if you take them to their natural conclusions, we all suffer…except for the politicians who actively create these misconceptions: their coffers tend to grow while our savings and budgets shrink.
I don’t like your tone… maybe some of the Eastern Washington counties get more tax money. They farm most of the food we eat and manufacture more than in Seattle. Any farms in Seattle. NO. Eastern Washington sustains the rest of the state! If you actually did articles on some of the industry around the state or visited differnt places in the state you would know and I wouldn’t have to be typing this… good day.
Stop coplaining so much Stranger.
Perhaps we need to take a page from Oregon’s play book and combine small school districts.
@16, 22: Washington Republicans aren’t itching to increase taxes to support their Ferry County brethren because the most Republicans aren’t actually DSHS-funded welfare queens (hence my posting of the map of county populations). To the Republicans of Spokane or Vancouver, it would be much better just to gut the DSHS or Basic Health programs that they don’t use than it would be to raise their own taxes. Most disproportionate spending enjoyed by suburban and exurban Republicans isn’t of the welfare variety, it’s of the roads and schools variety that even Republicans support.
@24
Oh, BS. We farm in Western WA, and almost half of WA state agriculture commodities are exported. You can only eat so many apples, which is the largest cash crop.
BTW, you just might want to google “seattle farms” or “seattle manufacturing”.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/statefacts/WA.htm
(link gives lots of info on the state, including where Fed funding goes)
@18, why is it that whenever rural welfare queens are criticized their reply is, invariably, “we grow your food”; as if that’s important. We can import our food from any of a number of semi-literate, 3rd world societies – we don’t need to subsidize one east of the mountains. Try building a jet or designing software some time, hillbilly.
State tax money is not enough, I guess.
Grand jury indicts 4 Eastern Washington growers, processors
LAST UPDATED: FEBRUARY 8TH, 2011 11:16 AM (PST)
Four Eastern Washington farmers and processors have pleaded innocent to federal conspiracy charges that allege they made false reports to defraud the federal crop insurance program of more than $9.5 million.
According to the indictment, the farmers entered into contracts to sell a variety of potatoes not typically suited for processing to the processors. When the potatoes failed to meet processing requirements, the contracts allegedly required the growers to sell the potatoes for a fraction of their value.
A grand jury indicted Jeffrey J. Gordon, a Pasco farmer and owner of Gordon Brothers Cellars winery; Lynn J. Olsen II of Pasco and his company Olsen Ag Inc.; Mark G. Peterson of Richland and his company Poco LLC; and Blake T. Bennett of Pasco and his company Tri-Cities Produce Inc.
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/02/08…
The Republicans can be found every session on the House and Senate floors boohooing over levy equalization. Debolt will, “fight to the death” for that redistribution of wealth.
Rural health clinics, look no further than Gary Alexander.
District 20 is atypical, MrBaker. The rural clinics in that district are pretty explicitly patronage to demonstrate that Alexander isn’t just an Olympian exurbanite (of course, he is!).
Republicans in Ferry County almost certainly couldn’t care less about rural clinics because that’s where Indians go and if they have health problems they just drive to Spokane or get life flighted there. Seriously, they would totally gut DSHS and education funding for levy equalization (if the remaining monies could be spent entirely on roads). Hey, those non-voting Indians get shafted either way, so I guess it’s okay.
The above also holds for the Tri-Cities, Yakima and Wenatchee. The enfranchised are mostly white and older. The heavy users of DSHS and ed dollars are mostly Hispanics.
As for the counties, District 49 (Vancouver proper), District 3 (Spokane proper) and Districts 27 & 29 (Tacoma proper) are more reliably Democratic than just about any district not in Seattle. Unfortunately, they are surrounded by suburban voters who want their specific subsidies (ROADS mostly) and bitch about taxes constantly. Ignoring that they are free riders on the services provided by Vancouver, Spokane and Tacoma just as much as the larger counties are subsidized by the state.
There are a couple of things that could be done that aren’t quite nose-spite-face like levy equalization. First, enfranchise minority voters in the Northeast Washington and Columbia Basin districts. Get them to buy into the programs they already use and protect them by voting for candidates who explicitly endorse them. There are enough Indian voters in the 7th District and Hispanic voters in the I-82 districts to make them unsafe for the current Republicans. Second, end the farm-to-market road spending glut until the state raises gas taxes to the same level that they were when they were paved (adjusted for inflation). These are both long-game solutions, though, and unlikely to be popular among the Capitol Hill readers of this blog.
Perhaps we need to create a state referandum requiring that tax dollars are distributed to counties at an equal proportion to what is collected. Call it something that will really resonate with the rugged individualism psyche of the eastern half of the state, like the “Anti-wealth redistribution act”.
Then we’ll really get to see who the rugged individuals living off their own hard work really are. Enjoy the third world living, Ferry County!
Ok, geniuses, how much of that spending that poor eastern counties have to lay out is actually state or federally mandated? That is what we hear in Kitsap. They would love to cut spending, but most, if not all of it is mandated by some other governmental body. there is little or nothing that is discretionary. so of course, on a per capita basis, it will be skewed. learn a little about federally unfunded mandates….
This is the kind of straight-ahead high quality biased reporting we love from the STRANGER. Go team!
And this doesn’t even count the massive subsidies resource extraction industries garner in the same Welfare Counties.
@24…
I don’t like YOUR tone either mister.
The blue counties -red (but not Red,as in commie,socialist,Anarchist/Syndicalist)-counties paradigm is an oversimplification;there are persons within King County who get waaaaay more than their fair share from the People’s Coffer.Ditto on both the national and international levels!Pfft!
Oops!That’s “commie/socialist/Anarchist,and Syndcialist”.I’m a Red,and I take offense when people label those Kluxers and Nazis as being one of us!Pfft! (L)
This is such a well-worn issue. Go back and re-read “What’s The Matter with Kansas.” The surprising thing about this trend (which exists at both the state and national level) is how conservatives are so consistently able to get people in poor rural areas to vote *against* their own economic best interests. When a Microsoft millionaire in Medina votes for tax cuts, I can at least understand it. When a poor single mother with a shaky job near minimum wage in Eastern Washington does, now *that’s* surprising.
I’m sure Eric Cartman will be along shortly to explain this all in his own special way.
@18: “I don’t like your tone… maybe some of the Eastern Washington counties get more tax money. They farm most of the food we eat and manufacture more than in Seattle. Any farms in Seattle. NO. Eastern Washington sustains the rest of the state!”
Justify your Socialism and Marxian labor values over the free market any way that makes you happy, pinko. Neocon? More like NeoCOM.
@24, You’re right, the farmers grow the food. Then everyone buys that food. That’s capitalism. They provide a product and someone else pays them for that product. That is completely irrelevant to this discussion. This discussion is about government services and handouts to those rural folks.
@8, I think it does matter the impact-per-dollar-spent. If the programs themselves only work in Puget Sound and don’t hold water east of the mountains then it doesn’t matter how much money we pour into them.
For example, a health program designed for urban poor doesn’t necessarily work for rural poor but often our state programs operate the same in all geographies.
If an expensive state program doesn’t work in Yakima, then it makes sense for them to rail against it. And if it uses our tax dollars, so should we. That’s a different kind of waste.
I’m not saying it is true that the programs don’t work. I’m just saying the map above doesn’t tell us. Money alone is not an indication of impact. People (and especially governments) have been flushing money down the toilet since we started printing it.
@24: Um…there are a lot of farms here in Western Washington, too. Look around you, Seattle Republican! A lot of what you eat is grown locally! Have you noticed?
Did you even bother to read Goldy’s article? Hypocrites like you make me sick!
Look, if Eastern Washingtonians don’t want government funding for their welfare programs, let them raise their own money. Just don’t get in our faces when all that money isn’t coming YOUR way anymore, either, John GOP Bonehead.
Well this would probably be a bit more logical if you could show us the per capita average income by county and then the average state tax paid per capita. Because the “rich counties” are just that “rich” and because the sales tax and gas tax is super regressive (yes, there are a few taxes eg., the real estate excise for example that at least more neutral, that is tax on $! mill house in Seattle is !)x that on $100K house in Yakima even tho the two houses are physically identical). Point is, the rich counties have (if my assumptions are correct)FAR more per capita disposable income than the poor counties. This explains why the poor counties are less likely (say 40/60 as opposed to 60/40) to vote for more state taxes…their residents are less likely to see $400/year/household tax on water,pop and candy as “affordable”. My theory would also find support in the higher amount of additional local sales and property sales tax the rich counties have voted to impose on themselves for stadiums mass transit etc.
I agree with one of the above comments. Let’s have an initiative resolving that:
1 – A county may received no more than 110% of the state taxes collected in that county and
2 – A county must receive at least 90% of the taxes collected in that county.
King County would see major gains in tax benefits. San Juan County would have a challenge figuring out how to spend the doubling of state revenue they receive – perhaps better Ferry service?
Would love to see the welfare queens of the state pay their own way and hear them howl!
This should be nominated for a Pulitzer. Hey
Eastern Washington Republicans: Fuck you. We can live with the fact that you are mouth-breathing hatemongers — first amendment is a bitch sometimes. Can you live with the fact that you’re money-grubbing hypocrites? — Love, straight taxpaying Cap Hill resident for tax increases to help your dumb asses out. Oh, and in case you missed it: Fuck you.
@32, that’s exactly what happens in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Some goes to the whole state, but the rest gets sent back to wherever it came from. Live in a rich area like Charlottesville or Alexandria? You’re okay. Live in a poor area, like VA Beach or the far western part of the state? Suck it.
I have seen better roads in Zambia than in some parts of Virginia.
Huh…Stevenson Carson Schools have the least funding. That Explains Everything. (Glaring at you, ex-principal Teitzel.)
I have said it a million times. Let the meme ring out loud from the mountain tops: REPUBLICANS ARE MOOCHES. THEY MOOCH OFF THE STATE, AND DON”T WANT TO CONTRIBUTE. MOOCH. MOOCH. MOOCH. How do you like that, mister rugged individualist cowboy? Your daddy was mooch too.