Here is why it's hard to disagree with Danny Westneat's proposal to end King County's export of capital to counties in Washington that do not generate enough tax revenue to settle their own accounts. The fact of the matter is that we live in the world that is, and the world that is is dominated by a sector of the economy that produces, distributes and insures automobiles. Big US cities face nothing but the greatest resistance when it comes to supporting and building other, more efficient modes of transportation. The Koch clan recently poured lots of money into an effort to kill the expansion of Phoenix's light rail. The clan did not succeed there, but it did succeed in Nashville; they helped toss that city's grand transit plans into the trash bin.
In short, the political tools available for greening a big urban area are limited and easily undone (as Tim Eyman made very clear with his Initiative 976). A big city not only has to battle a trillion-dollar sector of the US economy (energy for cars, finance for cars, car insurance, car parking businesses), and also, sadly, the ignorance of voters. What a successful King County tax revolt would (by the looks of it) hand Seattle and Bellevue is much-needed resources to counter the enormous political influence of the car industry. That said, Westneat's solution, as appealing as it sounds, only addresses the surface of the problem, not its substance. As a consequence, the harm it might do, from a historical perspective, could surpass the good it achieves.
Westneat determined from a government report "State Expenditures and Revenues by County: Fiscal Year 2016" that...
...King County taxpayers exported a record $2.95 billion to prop up the state’s other counties in 2016, the most recent year studied, according to OFM. About 37 cents of every dollar of state taxes paid by King County taxpayers was spent elsewhere.
True, King County actually needs that exported capital to pay for improvements to forms of transportation that are more compatible with the realities of a dense urban area. This would require, to use Westneat's words, "giving red-county voters what they keep insisting they want... less government" and "cutting Pierce County out of the light rail project."
Fair enough. But consideration of this proposal immediately reveals two of what has to be its many other problems. One is found in the fact that the top beneficiaries of King County's capital aren't exactly out in the sticks—Pierce County ("the No. 1 recipient, getting $508 million"), Yakima County ("$395 million"), Clark County ("$375 million"), and Spokane County ("$350 million"). Now, the smallest county on this list, Yakima, has a city, Yakima City, with a population that surpasses that in Bellingham and Federal Way. (It's the largest city in central Washington.) These counties are considerable nodes in the state's economic network. Yes, we can imagine King County cutting its links, once and for all, to Lincoln County, where ever that is; but with Pierce County? A major urban machine with a population that's nearing a million? Also, Hillary Clinton won that county by a solid 8 percent. When combined, the souls in left-leaning King County and Pierce County (over 3 million, which is not that far from half of the population of the state—7.5 million) determine who runs Olympia.
As a snobbish Seattleite, I'm happy to box the ears of Trumpy counties like Adams, where ever that is. But I will never be so quick to enter the ring with Pierce, and, for that matter, Clark, which has a population that's nearing half a million; and is part of a suburb of the third-largest city in the Pacific Northwest, Portland; and also voted for Hillary Clinton. Does Seattle want enemies like these?
Yes, Seattle is happy to tax itself, but Seattle is also much richer than Pierce County, the place where a lot of wage earners have moved to make ends meet. And this brings up my second issue with Westneat's proposal: A lot of the people who are poor or working class in Pierce County, and Yakima County, are people of color. Indeed, Yakima will soon become (if it hasn't already) the first white-minority county in the state (it's presently 48.4 percent Hispanic/Latino); and Pierce County will certainly be minority-majority long before King County, whose largest city, Seattle, is becoming whiter. Now, if these and other counties experience a sharp decline in public revenue because of a successful, left-driven tax revolt in King County, expect the members of their poor and working classes, many of whom are people of color, to bear the brunt of this victory. King County's voters may solve its transit problems (and even this is not a given) by declaring independence, but it will not end the 400-year history of race-based and class-driven exploitation. A break with other major Washington state counties will find white progressives reproducing, in a brutal way, America's brutal history.
