Democrats have been desperately searching for some semblance of victory on the new state budget. Apparently, they’re having a tough time finding anything positive that they did, so they’ve resorted to revising history.
Since Democrats based their legislative agenda on the need for a huge (billion dollar-plus) tax increase , so they’ve decided that they—without anyone else knowing—succeeded in doing just that. Democrats—including Jay Inslee—are claiming that the Legislature raised taxes by $480 million. As GOP state Sen. Jan Angel put it, the claim is the most “outstanding bit of revisionism since the Russians invented the airplane.” Angel writes,
“This claim is based on the fiscal note for Senate Bill 6134. The bill raises $185 million in the next biennium. Over the next four years it raises $480 million. The problem is that our entire budgeting system is based on a two-year cycle. Just about every number we use in the Legislature is a biennial (two-year) figure. When somebody uses a four-year figure, without explaining why, the nicest thing we can call it is an exaggeration. If we wanted to play the same game, we could say the Democrats proposed a $4 billion tax increase (the four-year figure) rather than $1.5 billion (the two-year figure)…
“The rest of the story: Of that $185 million, only about half comes from ending tax exemptions and preferential rates. The remainder is a little hard to call a tax hike. That money comes from increased penalties for late payments and efforts to step up collection of existing taxes from out of state firms. When you consider the tuition cut we passed this year, really a tax cut for the middle class, and the roughly $35 million in tax preferences we enacted and extended, the final budget deal actually reduced the total burden on the state.”
Angel goes on to state, “Why, exactly, anyone would want to celebrate the passage of a wildly overstated tax increase is hard to figure.” The “why” of it may be unknown, but it certainly reveals just how out-of-touch Democrats have become when it comes to the day-to-day struggles of working families.
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