The clock hasn’t turned yet on 2015, but already mega-rich liberals and the special interests that love their support of Democrats are plotting ways to try and attract voters to the polls for Jay Inslee next fall. The latest effort rearing its head is “a statewide minimum wage and paid leave ballot initiative”, featuring Seattle’s favorite wealthy liberal progressive, Nick Hanauer.
As announced in Seattle blog Publicola, “the Washington State Labor Council, the Service Employees International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers’ union, and Nick Hanaeur (sic)” are behind the effort they hope will attract left-leaning voters to the polls, and “are hiring for the signature gathering phase of a likely 2016 ballot initiative to raise Washington’s minimum wage and expand sick and safe leave.”
This effort is on top of the carbon tax initiative to the legislature, Initiative 732, which has raised over $700,000 and will allegedly turn in enough signatures Wednesday to put its idea before legislators in January, and then before voters next November.
And that effort is competing with still another SEIU-led initiative – which includes bankrolling from California billionaire Tom Steyer – to tax businesses for carbon emissions and use that money to grow the size of state government even larger. The extreme environmentalists like Steyer behind that effort tried to muscle the I-732 initiative out of the way, because they are angry that initiative does not raise enough tax dollars for the state.
On top of these efforts, Seattle liberals are also talking up the prospects of an income tax on the ballot next year, and have been advertisin for help in explaining to voters why they need to have a state income tax.
That will certainly take a lot of explaining, given voters have rejected the income tax several times over the years and are facing all the other expensive initiatives on the ballot statewide. And, for voters in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties, the ballot will likely also include Sound Transit’s $48 billion dollar money grab.
But for liberals, you evidently can’t raise taxes high enough.
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