Seattle Times: "State Senate passes tax package, remains at odds with House on sales tax"
The Times homepage currently has the more optimistic headline "Lawmakers still can't agree on sales tax"
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 20, 2010 02:26 PM | Email ThisThe call started with him trying to take credit for closing a $12.5 billion deficit. I stopped him right there and pointed out that the this was not a cut in spending, but a cut in the proposed increase by Democrats. I told him that I was an engineer and followed numbers. That I had used fiscal.wa.gov to build my own spreadsheets to teach myself what the local media will not report.
I pointed out the state spending has grown at a 7% annual rate for decades, or 14% biennially. I pointed out the tax increases at a time of 9.5% state unemployment, likely much higher when accounting for numbers removed from the labor force, is not the time be raising taxes and will do more harm to the economy that is already in crisis.
He tried to suggest that these were good taxes, as opposed to those really bad taxes. They were closing loopholes, blah, blah, blah. I simply said in response that $800 million in revenue to the state was $800 million in revenue out of the hands of people and businesses that would use that money to create jobs.
He talked about the jobs in certain fields that government was promoting with its spending, such as in construction. I pointed out that private sector jobs, especially those created by government spending, tend to only last as long as the funding. And since the funding comes from people and small business, the theory that government can create better jobs than the private sector is nonsense.
Strangely, he kept agreeing with me. I went on to state that the Democrat expansion of the social safety net in Washington was creating more people who accept a life of dependency on government. And he agreed.
I even expressed my belief that Progressive fiscal policies have brought the nation to the brink of collapse, and if now isn't the time to cut spending, then it is impossible. He even expressed agreement with my analysis of the state of our fiscal crisis here and federally.
Finally I asked him to tell me the net change in the discretionary part of the state budget between the 2007-2009 and the 2009-2011 budget was? He said it was roughly down $2.5 billion. I knew that. Not the $9 billion cut Democrats had been taking credit for. But even that $2.5 billion reduction amounts to about 8% cut in the biennial budget, or 4% per year. I reminded him again of decades of 7% growth and the need to make cuts before considering any further tax increases.
At no point did he express disagreement with anything I had said.
He then said he was being called away for House business and he had to go. We spoke for another couple of minutes, almost like he was in total agreement with me, then I told him we'd said what we were going to say and he left.
It was a very bizarre 15 minutes. Really!
Posted by: Reality on March 20, 2010 04:01 PMAsset Taxes are the only fair taxes and successfully bill people according to use of services.
Income, business and sales taxes should be whittled down to zip.
Asset Taxes should fund Government.