To start off his PR offensive prior to the release of his next budget, Democrat Governor Jay Inslee began unveiling big plans to spend Washington State taxpayer money over the next two years. Unsurprisingly, Inslee is focusing on spreading your tax dollars far and wide, including on illegal aliens.
It’s equity for all, unless you are a taxpaying, law-abiding Washington voter, in which case your taxes are going up and your public safety is going down.
Among Inslee’s top priorities during the biggest pandemic in modern history? Declaring Juneteenth a new legal holiday, at a cost of $7.3 million per year to cover increased overtime costs.
Inslee’s budget wish list includes several items voters have rejected over the last few years, including preventing the police from doing their jobs, raising gas prices for little environmental benefit, and bringing back affirmative action quotas.
It seems it took only a year for Inslee to forget that a Democrat-sponsored bill to overturn Washington’s two-decade ban on affirmative action was rejected at the ballot box by state voters in 2019. Now Inslee is back with a newly created $2.5 million Equity Office, to force his will on the voters.
Insurance rates are about to skyrocket as Inslee and career politician Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler want to ban consumer credit ratings from being considered for setting insurance rates. Sounds great right? Now you can recklessly spend the money you would have used to pay your bills. Everyone else gets to pay more, because eventually you can’t afford your car insurance, and end up defaulting on your car payment. Don’t worry though, under Inslee you don’t need to pay your rent either, since he just extended his eviction moratorium. Party on.
Among the more controversial elements in his proposal, Inslee grabs another $10 million in taxpayer dollars to give cash away to people who broke federal law and are in the country illegally. They are ineligible for direct federal payments, so Inslee wants to create a workaround to get them cash.
If you play sports outdoors apparently that’s not equitable enough, so new laws are coming to expand “outdoor recreation equity”, whatever that might mean.
Unfortunately, few among the priorities on the Inslee Christmas budget wish list have anything to do with helping provide relief to suffering Washington residents living under his lockdown mandates. It might be insulting to them that among the only people getting a lending hand and a Christmas bonus from Inslee are ones here illegally.
The question is how will Inslee pay for the expansion of government and his new programs?
Yes, you guessed it, a state income tax. Inslee will call it something else – most likely an excise tax – but the IRS knows that when you tax someone’s income, you are playing their game. Thus, while you are being told to stay home because of the pandemic, Inslee and his campaign-donating friends (many who have been collecting a salary funded by taxpayer dollars all year long), are mulling a new tax for everyone else. Taking a page out of Socialist Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s playbook, State Democrats are quietly meeting behind closed doors to figure out how much more they want you to pay to keep them in the lap of luxury they have become accustomed to.
The specifics of the new taxes are coming in the next few days, but you can bet they will be unfair and quite unequitable, unless you are Democrat donor or union friend of Inslee.
The irony of all the whining the Democrats do about never having enough money is that the state is bringing in more money than it ever has. The budget is balanced, despite the Democrats’ overspending and recklessly shutting down the economy.
But that won’t stop them from trying to do more damage.
