It may not come as a surprise, but Democrat Governor “Read my lips” Jay Inslee just can’t help himself when it comes to raising taxes.
Our always “green” Governor Inslee is a bit of a chameleon with his “promises” of not raising taxes. On the campaign trail, when Inslee knows it would be unpopular to tell voters he wants more of their money for backroom union deals and his campaign donors, Inslee denies he’ll raise taxes. Then, right after he wins election, suddenly the state is in dire straits, and all he can do is raise taxes to fix it.
Here at Shift, we thought we would review the times Inslee has broken his tax promises, since the mainstream media is experiencing short term memory loss.
Back in 2012, Inslee was in a highly contested race against Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna for the governorship, and stated, “I don’t believe that tax increases are the right route forward for our state.” Inslee doubled down after a debate by saying he would veto anything that heads in the wrong direction, and “new taxes are the wrong direction” for the state. All the electorate had to do was elect him, and their pocketbooks would be ok.
Yet, less than a week after taking office in 2013 (and three months from his debate promise), Inslee suddenly changed his tune and started using weasel language claiming that he only said he would be opposed to NEW taxes, but increasing old ones was fine. The final increase to his first $32 billion state budget was $2 billion in new taxes, taking the spend-happy legislature to $34 billion.
Inslee, however, wasn’t satisfied with a measly $2 billion more.
After his anti-tax campaign amnesia fully set in, for the following biennial budget in 2015, Inslee proposed a $39 billion budget, but had to settle for $38.1 billion, “only” adding another $4.1 billion on the backs of state taxpayers. Inslee also forgot his original campaign promise where he was opposed to “new taxes” and started in earnest on his carbon tax jihad.
Fast forward to 2018 and Inslee was back demanding another $5 billion, bringing the bloated budget to $43.7 billion.
Now, in 2021, Inslee finally got his state income tax, and the budget has ballooned to $59 billion – plus another $10 billion-plus in federal pork.
If you add up all of the tax advisory votes since 2012, when the voters of Washington have had the chance to vote on the tax insanity, Inslee and his legislative allies have proposed almost $52.1 billion in additional taxes.
It took 123 years of Washington State governors to create a $32 billion budget (including recent big spending Democrats Christine Gregoire and Gary Locke), and Inslee has managed to double that budget (with the federal bailout) in less than 10 years. Do you feel the state’s taxpayers in 2021 are receiving twice the services than they were when Inslee took over in 2012?
Probably not, since most of the money is going to lucrative government payments, to unions and other favored friends.
It’s true, that buried in the state’s numbers, are the McCleary court case funding mandates and state economic growth, but the majority of the budget increases are due to Inslee’s cronyism, overspending, increased government bloat, and big payouts to his union buddies.
Of course, the recently passed 2021 budget taxes – the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, Cap and Trade and the state income tax on capital gains – are all new taxes that Inslee and his legislative cronies managed to punish the voters of Washington with this year.
Inslee is a basically over-stimulated tax-and-spend liberal who has no respect for hard-working Washington residents now paying almost 100% more in taxes than they were 10 years ago.
The latest claim is that Inslee doesn’t want to expand his new state income tax to non-rich wage earners – until he switches and does just that.
We hope we don’t have to say, “we told you so”, but with Inslee’s record, we probably will.
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