Media is Quietly Helping Democrats Pass an Unconstitutional Income Tax

As predicted, the Democrats in the Washington State Senate used a rare Saturday session to pass their unnecessary and unconstitutional state income tax on capital gains legislation, and the Seattle Times buried the story on page A8, while the News Tribune did not cover it at all in their Sunday print edition.  

Despite the state being flush with cash after a record-breaking 20% revenue increase the past two years, and at least 7% more projected during the next two years, and another $4.2 billion more on its way from the federal bailouts, the greedy Democrats in Olympia voted to take control of even more of your money to fund their strong desire to increase the size, power, and reach of state government.  One of the reasons for the quick actions by the Senate on a state income tax bill (which hadn’t been brought up for a vote in decades) is because the upcoming March 17^th state revenue forecast is expected to show the state will be projected to receive even more tax revenue than previously estimated.

A state income tax revenue stream (which future Democrats will certainly expand to include more and more taxpayers) will primarily benefit the Democrats’ major source of campaign funds — government employee unions (which in turn will benefit Democrat politicians, since the union bosses will have more dues money to send their way).

It was interesting that the media has chosen to use the Democrat’s factually incorrect political spin about the new tax, and call it an “excise tax” instead of an “income tax,” which is how the IRS and 49 other states label a capital gains tax.  Since an income tax is unconstitutional in Washington State, Democrat legislators are the only public officials in America to not use the term “income tax” to accurately describe their legislation.  The region’s media not only fails to call them on out on this deception, they happily follow along with the “excise tax” scheme.

We should also note that while Democrats have disingenuously argued that this new unconstitutional state income tax is necessary to make Washington taxes “more equitable,” they have not proposed to reduce taxes elsewhere.  In fact, many of their other Democrat proposed new taxes are very regressive, like an 18-cent-a-gallon gas tax and a tax on sugary drinks, and would impact lower-income households the most.