In what turned out to be a big surprise to Seattle liberals, voters saw through their demand for more “taxes for transit” this spring, and soundly rejected Prop. 1, which would have raised car tab fees and sales taxes to bail out a bloated bureaucracy at Metro. Democrat elected officials around King County joined with their union allies to scream “the sky was falling”, and demand that voters raise taxes not expand needed transit improvements, but just to keep an inefficient system running a few more years.
Now, a half-year removed from the voters rejecting the liberals’ tax grab by a nearly two-to-one margin, the truth continues to come out – evidently Metro could become more efficient if it was forced to, and not have to make the extreme cuts to bus service that Democrats from Dow Constantine to Ed Murray promised.
As the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat writes, those of us (like the team at Shift) that said Constantine and his fellow Democrats were not telling the truth, that there was no crisis, “were also right.” Further, “Metro didn’t turn out to need the huge tax package. An improving economy and a hunt for loose change in the sofa down at the Metropolitan King County Council has now eliminated 75 percent of the bus cuts. A labor contract could buy back another 13 percent.”
Of course, that isn’t stopping the Seattle liberals from pushing another tax package onto next month’s ballot, this time only in within the city limits. It remains to be seen whether Seattle voters will figure out that their favorite Democrats are still lying to them.
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