Last night SB 5231, a bill that would have required ongoing assessments of endocrine disrupters and other toxins in children's products, died on the State Senate floor, an event I had hoped to use as an opportunity to launch into a tirade against faux-moderate Eastside Republicans like Senators Steve Litzow (R-41) and Andy Hill (R-45), who would obviously rather protect the interests of Mattel and Hasbro than the health of our state's children.

And it was shaping up to be a helluva a tirade too... until my thesis was totally undermined by Eastside Democratic Sen. Rodney Tom, who turned out to be the deciding vote against the bill.

So I emailed Sen. Tom to ask him what was up with all this, and got the following response:

All money in Olympia is fungible. The $500,000 costs for a good program, means I have to make a $500,000 cut in some great education program. The money for this program comes from the Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA) account. We have swept over $250 million from the MTCA account to the general fund for programs like K-12 education over the past several years. If I spend $500,000 for children’s safe products, in the end a little more will need to be cut from other programs, including education. People don’t like to admit it, but it does get down to a zero sum game where every dollar spent elsewhere, is a dollar I can’t spend on core programs like K-12 education and for our colleges and universities. I’m assuming you don’t want the cuts to education to get even more painful, and that is why I’m willing to take the heat and say NO to what is a good, but not critically important program.

Uh-huh. So if I understand Sen. Tom correctly, he's saying that he and his colleagues have been stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTCA account for years, to paper over budget shortfalls elsewhere, but if they actually spent a mere $500,000 of that MTCA money on the type of toxics control programs it was originally intended to be spent on, that would be the moral equivalent of stealing $500,000 from K-12 education, because they'd have $500,000 less to steal from MTCA than they otherwise would've. Do I have that straight?

Um... I've got no reason to question your sincerity, Rodney, but could you get any more convoluted?

But what really stands out about Sen. Tom's response is how clearly it illustrates how much of the budgeting strategy in Olympia has been reduced to rearranging deck chairs, and how totally dishonest and unsustainable this will prove to be over the long term. Accounts like MTCA have been raided across the board, yet the Legislature still can't avoid further cuts to basic education and other high profile programs. So what happens a couple more bienniums from now when the state budget has been substantially hollowed out, but the chronic shortfalls persist?

Sen. Tom attempts to frame his decision as one of simple budget priorities—assessing toxins in children's products versus K-12 education—but in doing so he only puts off the debate over how our state can continue to fund even its most basic obligations in the face of what has long been understood to be a long term structural revenue deficit. And in that regard, whatever his intentions, Sen. Tom's "zero sum game" approach only serves to advance the drown-state-government-in-the-bathtub agenda of his former colleagues in the Republican caucus.