Eleanor Baumgartner: Wins in the Legislature may awaken cost-conscious voters from despair

By Eleanor Baumgartner

There has been a growing feeling of despair and pessimism across our state, and it’s not limited to any specific income bracket. You can see it in the faces of people you meet and interact with at the grocery store as they sigh nervously at the bill totals and express frustration at the unaffordability of life. You can hear it with business owners who managed to survive the crippling COVID-19 lockdowns, only to emerge in a new normal of rising and accepted crime and hamstrung police responses. It’s heard in the conversations of parents concerned by a lack of openness from local schools on both curriculum and their children’s records.

So, it is wonderful to see people celebrating the legislative votes in favor of initiatives including a ban on state and local income taxes, a “parents bill of rights,” and loosened restrictions on police pursuits. Watching Facebook and other social media feeds is to see people newly energized. Many Washingtonians feel like at least some things might be in their control after all, and that social decay has had its day – there is a new swing to the pendulum.

But consider this: It took more than 400,000 people signing each of the initiatives to force the Legislature to take action – and the Legislature ignored the other three initiatives with the same approximate number of signatures without so much as holding a hearing. The hearings on the initiatives that passed were limited to only an hour and were held jointly, frustrating thousands of people who wanted to have their voices heard and suggesting an intention to stifle public input.

Ideas like banning income taxes have been around for a long time. In 2017, Senate Joint Resolution 8204 would have created a constitutional amendment to ban income taxes. The main argument against it was that “nobody was talking about an income tax” which was comical enough, but when one senator stood up and said he actually would like to see an income tax, the absurdity of that reasoning was unavoidable. Others were clearly hoping to use the courts to clear the way for income taxes starting with a capital gains income tax. Emails obtained by Washington Policy Center made that clear to everyone except, unfortunately, the Washington Supreme Court, which allowed the redefining of capital gains taxes as transactional taxes instead of income taxes, which is how the IRS and every other state in the union treats them.

That redefining of terms is why this income tax ban is a good first step, but only a first step. As David Boze, Washington Policy Center’s communications director recently put it, “income taxes in Washington are like ’80s slasher villains – they never stay dead and there’s always a sequel” so until there’s a constitutional amendment prohibiting a sequel, we can expect to see this issue rise again.

There was also a notable pattern in the actions of our Legislature with the three initiatives that passed versus those they ignored. All three initiatives that were ignored would have repealed (or made optional) a source of tax revenue from the state, and reduced taxes paid by the people of Washington, including the cap and trade tax that is estimated to have hiked gas prices by 44 cents per gallon.

But the capital gains “excise” tax, the cap and trade tax on energy and the long-term-care payroll tax, remain unscathed. In the midst of yet another year of significant surplus tax revenue and years of spending growth, issues most directly spiking costs for those trying to get by in harder times were left on the legislative floor.

Legislators who think reducing the increase of the new money they have to spend is a “devastating” blow to their priorities, will hear from voters struggling with higher grocery bills, gas bills and payroll taxes. I can’t wait to see what they say.

Eleanor Baumgartner, of Spokane, is the Eastern Washington senior adviser for the Washington Policy Center. Members of the Cowles family, owners of The Spokesman-Review, have previously hosted fundraisers for the Washington Policy Center and sit on the organization’s board.