McIntire income tax proposal leads to early treasurer race exit

Jim McIntire, the Democrat State Treasurer first elected in 2008, announced today that he will not seek re-election. It seems that, like outgoing Democrat Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn, he wants to spend a lame-duck year pretending that legislators and voters will care about his views on education spending.

Or, more likely, McIntire realized he had committed political suicide when he very publically proposed a 5% state income tax last April, and decided he didn’t want to go out with a losing campaign.

Most Democrats seem to share McIntire’s infatuation with creating a state income tax to grow the size of government, even though House Speaker Frank Chopp will never let them vote on it. Attacking our state’s economic competitiveness by creating an income tax is the position of the state Democrat Party, which lists a state income tax in its platform as one of its “guiding principles.”

And, Jay Inslee joined the bandwagon last December – after previously saying he voted against the last income tax initiative and pledging to veto tax increases during his last campaign – when he proposed an income tax on capital gains to finance the expansion of state government.

Newspaper editors are now also starting to dip their toe in the income tax water, from the Seattle Times to the Everett Herald. The Herald has been especially outspoken on embracing the need for “a conversation” on McIntire’s income tax plan.

When they ran a reader poll about having that conversation, readers said “shut up”: some 1,239 readers responded, and even when given the information about all the tax cuts they would receive in return for an income tax hike, some 76.76% voted “no” to 5% income tax.

For those who don’t remember McIntire’s plan – and let’s face it, when something is “dead on arrival” it generally doesn’t stay in the news long – he took the Mary Poppins approach and tried to add a “spoonful of sugar” (cuts in other taxes) to “make the medicine go down” (an income tax). It was all the other changes to the tax code that seemed to excite the Herald the most, so much that they wrote another editorial this morning before McIntire announce his retirement.

The Herald wrote, after listing all the tax cuts that sounded good, “OK. Yes, there’s a catch. But before we talk about that, consider the tax reforms above.”

That’s always the way with liberals. Let’s talk about the goodies first, and don’t pay attention to the cost.