I keep hearing the same response when voters raise this obvious concern about Washington’s new income tax: What happens when a future Legislature decides they need more money and lowers the income threshold?
Don’t worry, tax supporters utter, voters will have a say if it does. The unfortunate reality is that lawmakers had the chance to guarantee exactly that, and they voted it down.
Rep. Chris Dufault offered an amendment on the House floor that would have done what income tax supporters are saying now, by requiring a referendum if lawmakers ever lowered the deduction. The House voted it down, 45-51.
And yet income tax supporters are now talking as if voters already have that protection.
Sen. Marcus Riccelli used that argument last week. “At the end of the day, voters will always have a say,” he said. “So even if future legislators decided to try and expand it, voters would have their say.”
I heard essentially the same thing during the Seattle Times editorial board debate. Sen. June Robinson said, “any future choices relating to taxation will be in front of the voters in the same way.” Later in the discussion, voters were told they would “ultimately have the final say” if lawmakers ever lowered the threshold.
That same assurance also appears in the opposition’s argument in the state voters’ pamphlet on I-645: “Any attempt to expand it to those of us making under a million would be decided on the ballot — voters always have the final say.” It's worth noting that the Secretary of State's office does not verify pamphlet statements for accuracy. Campaigns write their own arguments, and the office prints them exactly as submitted.
These statements are intended to sound reassuring to voters and would be if they were true. They are not.
If a future Legislature decides the $1 million threshold is too high, voters do not get a vote. Lawmakers can lower the threshold whenever they want to. The “say” voters are being promised comes afterward, when somebody has to raise the money, collect hundreds of thousands of signatures, and run a statewide initiative campaign to try to undo what the Legislature already did. That is an astonishing thing to gloss over when you are assuring voters that they will “always have the final say.”
So, when I hear that voters will “always have a say,” I think income-tax supporters are being purposefully obtuse with their language. If lawmakers lower the threshold, that change does not go on the ballot. It becomes law unless somebody goes through the enormous expense and effort of qualifying an initiative to reverse it.
There was an opportunity to make the promise real by saying that if the tax ever moved below $1 million, voters would get the final word before it happened. The Legislature decided not to do that.
