Unwilling to take no for an answer after the last nine times statewide voters have overwhelmingly rejected an income tax , income tax warriors have changed strategies and are now trying to get a city to adopt an income tax to create a legal test case to overturn the state’s 84 year old ban. Their first local income tax effort was in Olympia last year but that also was rejected by voters . Now it sounds like the local income tax focus is moving back to Seattle. According to Route Fifty :
“Although there have been periodic efforts to authorize a state income tax over the years, voters have rejected them at the ballot box.
But some progressive activists haven’t been deterred and have been trying to lay the groundwork for a long-term effort to change that starting at the local level.
‘This is a great moment to seize,’ John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute, told a Wednesday night gathering organized by The Urbanist, a Seattle-based website about urbanism, policy and civic affairs.
The goal: Knowing that voters statewide won’t approve an income tax, get sympathetic local leaders to support a local income tax ordinance which would be triggered by incomes above a certain threshold. That local ordinance would be inevitably challenged in court by opponents of an income tax, triggering a legal battle. Then, the Washington State Supreme Court, which has more members sympathetic to social justice issues, would, in theory, reverse decisions from 1933 and 1935 that declared a voter-authorized income tax unconstitutional.
Income-tax advocates in Washington state tried this approach in the city of Olympia last year, but in November, Measure 1 failed with 52 percent of local voters rejecting it.
