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Terrorists and taxpayers the problem?

By Bob Williams, Evergreen Freedom Foundation

Can you say income tax? I know it’s hard to spit out, but the ingredients for an income tax are just what Senator Lisa Brown and her colleagues have assembled for taxpayers. By overspending for the past decade, and by refusing to reconsider making timely changes in current expenditures, they have left us with a huge budget hole to fill next year. Their solution: new, improved and more intrusive taxes.

Legislators began the session with a state budget deficit. They didn’t address the billions of dollars in mismanaged or wasteful spending found by audits. They did not make significant and timely spending cuts.

Instead they killed I-601, the initiative taxpayers passed a decade ago to cap spending by state lawmakers to the percentage increase in inflation and population growth. They employed multiple budget gimmicks and linguistic gymnastics, like "tobacco securitization," a bad deal that will cost our state hundreds of millions in lost revenue.

Senator Brown and Governor Locke are quick to blame terrorists and taxpayers for their budget woes, but this is just not the truth. Consider a few facts. Of the $2.3 billion in deficits the legislature needed to make up, less than half can be attributed to the awful aftermath of September 11. Of the $492 million in taxpayer-approved initiatives, only $25 million can be laid at the feet of Tim Eyman, one of the Senator’s favorite scapegoats. In fact, if the Senator is looking for an initiative boogeyman, she need look no further than the WEA, whose initiatives for increased education spending accounted for $458 million of the budget deficit.

Furthermore, the Boeing layoffs had little to do with September 11. In plain English, Boeing executives confronted lawmakers this year with our state’s anti-business climate, noting that it cannot operate at a profit in this state. That is the reason Boeing is moving elsewhere.

Even if the blame could be laid at the feet of terrorists, in the five months since September 11, in spite of dire revenue forecasts showing the burgeoning deficit problem, state agencies continued to hire new employees. While Washington businesses shrank and citizens lost jobs, government grew and public employees got pay raises.

These problems hardly crept up on Senator Brown and her fellow lawmakers. Internal audits indicated that state lawmakers overspent income by $1.1 billion in the last year of the 1999-01 biennium. Then, last summer, the governor knowingly signed a budget that exceeded state revenue by $642 million for this biennium.

Meanwhile, investigative reports from our State Auditor and the Joint Legislative Audit Review Committee (JLARC) pointed out billions of dollars in waste, fraud and mismanagement in state spending – problems legislators declined, for the most part, to solve.

Senator Brown continues her theme of requiring revenue to keep pace with spending. This means taxpayers will have to come up with more money. And just who are those taxpayers? Some are individuals who just received a pink slip informing them they needn’t come back to work. Others are homeowners wondering how they’re going to pay the tax bill for huge increases in their property appraisal. Most are hard-working families deciding what they can do without and prioritizing their budgets to get through lean times.

Senator Brown, Governor Locke and the leaders of the majority party refuse to re-prioritize the state budget to put spending in line with revenue. Their big talk about everyone being forced to make sacrifices is just that – big talk with little substance.

It’s time for Brown and crew to stop blaming terrorists and taxpayers for their bad spending habits. It’s time for them to stop trying to push us into an income tax corner. It’s time for them to start treating taxpayers as something more than their favorite cash cow.

Bob Williams is President of the Olympia-based Evergreen Freedom Foundation. He can be reached at (360) 956-3482 or effwa@effwa.org.

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org