State Sen. Phil Rockefeller (D-23) makes the case for ending some of the 567 special tax preferences on the books in Washington:
Faced with a deep state deficit and deep cuts to vital services we should look first at ending unjustified tax breaks.
Many breaks on the books subsidize a privileged few at the expense of ordinary citizens. The notion of tax fairness, that everyone pays his or her fair share for core services that benefit everyone, has been trampled under the feet of special interest lobbyists.
These tax breaks are conveniently embedded in obscure tax law and routinely ignored, yet they divert billions of dollars into wealthy pockets. As a result, essential public services like education and health care are starved for funding.
Rockefeller admits that passage of I-1053 make the task more difficult. Given the widespread opinion that the 2/3 majority requirement of I-1053 would not pass Constitutional muster, if only we could get into the courts, why not use the budget crisis to force a showdown?
Here’s how it works. Declare that the projected revenue shortfall, following a biennium where spending has already been cut to the bone, makes it impossible for the legislature to pass a budget that lives up to the spirit of Article IX, Section 1 of the State Constitution:
It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.
The constitutional requirement of “ample provision for education…” simply isn’t happening.
Article IX, Section 3 gives lawmakers broad authority to do what is needed to fund education. If we cannot provide “ample” funding for education via existing taxes, lawmakers should provide short-term revenue for education through the repeal of tax preferences, using a simple majority to pass the legislation.
The mandate and the authority to accomplish it as spelled out in the Constitution trumps a law enacted through the initiative process. If Republicans believe the law trumps…they can sue.
But would they sue? The reality is that I-1053 is most potent when it stays out of the courts. The threat to I-1053 is serious enough that, perhaps, a bill to repeal tax preferences might just get that 2/3 majority as a way to avoid Judicial scrutiny.
As a certain Mayor-elect puts it:
“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”
That law needs to go to court.
AND…those tax breaks need to be repealed. What a terrific place to start.
Needs to happen sooner rather t6han later…and the legislature needs to quit cowering in the corner, DO THEIR JOB and enact laws to create revenue.
A bold idea that will never happen.
Elected Democrats don’t have the balls… they’re too worried about getting re-elected.
They’ll bring up a few of the most egregious tax-exemptions, the Republicans will accuse them of trying to raise taxes and not honoring “the will of the people,” the measure will fail, and the Democrats will say “we tried, but… oh, well, I-1053…” and then leave it at that without pushing it to the courts.
I think it’s a great idea, but I’m expecting those that benefit from those special tax deals to start floating stories in the media about how they will be “forced” to close down and move out of the state if their special deals end. Boeing will be first in line, saying that Washington will be off the list for the new 737 assembly line (called the 797 by some in the industry) if the bill gets passed, and threaten to move all the 787 work to Charleston once that plant gets up and running.
Of course, some of these industries could do quite well without their tax loopholes, and probably are sufficiently rooted here for any number of reasons that they wouldn’t move. But that wouldn’t prevent them from saying they would move.
With a threat of loss of jobs due to an “anti-business agenda”, I predict the politicians will cave.
Democrats all pay their fair share
In a conference call with reporters, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill just disclosed that she failed to pay $287,000 in property taxes related to her co-ownership of a private aircraft. This scandal comes quickly on the heels of recent revelations that McCaskill improperly billed taxpayers for use of the same private aircraft, for which McCaskill reimbursed the Treasury $88,000:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/.....54904.html
Oh maybe not! maybe she’ll have a hussy fit!
Gee isnt it yet again against the constitution for a president to attack another country without getting congressional approval unless we are attacked or in immediate jeopardy of such an attack.
PER OBAMA in 2007 in the law class he was teaching..
The entire purpose of the anti-democratic 2/3 majority requirement is to preserve the loopholes granted to rich special interests by bought legislators. That’s why Mr. Dunmire’s poodle slaved to get it passed: no loopholes, no biscuit, Timmey!
I hope the Dems take it to the court over this, but I don’t have much hope for them on this, or any other point, requiring a profile in courage.
And 64% of the people of this state approved it..you know, the ones the Olympia elites are suppose to represent!
Tell that to President Cheney and his talking dummy G.W.
# 5: Off topic again, I see. Why is it you keep trying to change the subject?
And you obviously didn’t take the course, either. A big exception to the rule is when the U.S. is acting in concert with other nations under a U.N. resolution and the enforcement powers under the U.N. Charter, of which the U.S. and Libya are signatories.
Remember Korea? How about the first Gulf War?
Of course, George W. Bush said he didn’t need no stinking U.N. resolution, or Congressional approval, either. He did get a vote in Congress to use force if negotiations didn’t work, after which he promptly scuttled the negotiations.
It’s long past time to throw the entire B&O and Sales Tax system into the trash bin where it belongs, and enact an income tax instead, with no state deductions (we would just take the Adjusted Gross Income on our federal tax form, and multiply by the state rate). We could do it on a postcard, and it would take all of ten minutes to complete, most of which would be spent trying to find our federal tax form.
Heh. Did that include kids and invalids or non-voters for that matter?
I wasn’t aware that any level of voter approval of an Initiative could substitute for an actual amendment to our state’s Constitution, but since I’m not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Michael Dunmire, what do I know about our laws?
Well,
Kinda hard to
When crap like this reported….
http://www.king5.com/news/inve.....21934.html
Cut to the bone? Not even close… There is a LONGGGGGGG way to go…
Special interest tax brakes? Ask the Gov why she gave away all the tax revenue to the tribal casinos?
Don’t think business will leave? Boeing was thought to be far to entrenched and invested in the PNW to ever leave….Yet they continue to expand their capability outside the region..
Thank you Democrats for this mess….
Little Iddy,
Constitutions often impose limitations on the will of majorities. Even you understand that, don’t you?
re 3: I thought that one of Boeing’s main selling points in acquiring their last major contracts was the stability and experience of their WA production facilities.
Do you suppose that Boeing reps. just lie when it’s convenient? Shocking!
re 13: “Boeing was thought to be far to entrenched and invested in the PNW to ever leave….Yet they continue to expand their capability outside the region..”
Name one tax break that has been rescinded for Boeing. You can’t. Boeing is doing this to break the union and get cheap labor at whatever cost to themselves and their customers. It’s a control issue.
Boeing’s supply chain has only become chaotic because of their outsourcing. They send the Chinese crap to WA to be fixed.
doesn’t surprise me washington dummocrats will do anything possible to increase taxes. that’s what this is. a tax increase. a guy with a name like rockefeller ought to be the first guy to get a tax increase. how about eliminating all the union exemptions first?
so…like…..you worry about “tax preferences”…yet mysteriously you wont bring up how the state, with Safeco Field nearly paid off, wants to renig on eliminating the taxes to pay for the stadium and apply them somewhere else.
shouldnt this shit be illegal?
and you silly progressive fucks wonder why the rest of us dont trust our states politicians(IE the income tax “only for the rich” bullshit).
once a tax starts, its damn near impossible to get rid of it – NO MATTER WHAT THE LYING FUCKS SAY.
assholes.
The Democrats should have a vote in the legislature, though, if only to make the Republicans have to defend some of these tax preferences. Even if the repeal doesn’t get over the 2/3 threshhold, the fight is worth it.
19
No doubt about it. Bring it to the corporate lapdogs.
@19: Exactly right. Make them vote, get them on the record.
I’m skeptical that the Ds will take this golden political opportunity. It’s significant that Phil’s gone on record, so we’ll see.
8: Congress gave approval for both of GW’s wars..get your facts straight.
11: No but it did include the voters that will vote Gregoire gone in 2012 if she screws with the voters intent.
Oh and Boeing is building a brand new building in Oklahoma, while they just sold off half the Kent space center, and are selling off they computer buildings in Bellevue.
Bye Bye Boeing
Roger Rabbit Returns to HA
As regular readers of this blog know, my youngest brother committed suicide a couple weeks ago. I’ve been out of town — in Wisconsin, actually — to attend memorial services. I’ll resume posting on HA tomorrow. Meantime, I can report from Ground Zero that Gov. Walker is TOAST. He totally sandbagged the independent voters who elected him, and he and the Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature who rammed through the union-busting bill are as good as GONE. There’s more to this than union-busting, of course. There’s taking $900 million away from schools and local governments, there’s stripping away state funding for local recycling programs, there’s selling off publicly-owned assets for pennies on the dollar to fatcat Republican donors, there’s a whole bunch of stuff. My relatives who live in Wisconsin told me Walker’s motivation is he’s following orders from the RNC and expects to be rewarded with the Veep spot on the 2012 GOP ticket.
Revisionist @22: Congress authorized military action against Iraq as a last resort, not as a first resort, and did so on the basis of false information presented to it by the Bush administration. Under these circumstances, Bush’s invasion of Iraq can hardly be considered legitimate, even though it arguably might be found legal on a technicality.
New Hampshire Republicans are trying to strip college students of their voting rights. A Republican legislative leader in that state went on record as saying college-aged people lack the maturity and judgment to vote, or words to that effect.
A generation ago, Republicans said the same thing about Southern black voters.
A Republican is someone who sends other people’s children to die in their wars while striving ceaselessly at home to deny the right to vote to as many American citizens as possible.
@18 “renig”
Spelled like a true redneck! The CORRECT spelling is “renege.” Learn to use a fucking dictionary, nitwit.
Are there any literate people left in this country?
I can do better than those idiots even when I’m drunk.
re 18: Since 2001, have you spent more on taxes or price gouging from the health insurance and Big Oil companies.
If you do the math instead of refer to your knee-jerk ideology, you may realize where your money is really going.
Mark Twain wrote an article about the Missisippi riverboat captains and pilots strike illustrating the point so that even you could understand the falsity of your knee jerk anti tax stance.
@18 (continued)
“assholes.”
I like our assholes better than your assholes.
“Rockefeller admits that passage of I-1053 make the task more difficult.”
So pass it with a majority vote and then challenge I-1053 in our liberal-dominated (8-1) state supreme court.
While I was in Wisconsin this week, I learned something very interesting about that state’s supreme court. This is relevant because Gov. Walker’s union-busting bill is sure to be challenged in Wisconsin state courts, because the only way the GOPers could pass it was by violating that state’s open meetings law. Currently, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has 4 Republicans and 3 Democrats, but one of the GOP seats is up for election on April 5, and the front-page story in yesterday’s edition of Wisconsin’s main newspaper involves e-mails by the Republican candidate calling the chief justice a “bitch” and making some other intemperate comments. It seems there’s a regular old civil war raging between that court’s conservative and mainstream members, which is now spilling over into the public domain on the front page of the newspapers. This should be interesting.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, a Wisconsin judge has issued an INJUNCTION against the Republican union-busting bill.
@31
thats funny – with the progressives running around, are you reading the new “sanitized” and PC version of Twain, or the real thing? And if its the real thing, you better not tell any of your friends – you may reported to the thought-police….just a friendly warning….wouldnt want you to use the “wrong language” or anything.
now, as to your other question….yep, Im pissed when my money is stolen or thrown away. So because big oil and health care are stealing it from me, I shouldnt be concerned when the govt lies and steals it from me too? Is that your rationale?
sorry, that dog doesnt hunt for me. Since its progressives that are lying and running this state into the ground, you feel fit to give them a pass – I dont.
First Roger, let me say I am sorry about your brother. That is not easy no matter what camp one comes from and strikes far to often in way many famlies.
The unions have got to get involved with the solutions in these debt ridden states, or they will be gone. With an unemployment rate of 10.3 and an underemployment rate of 18, wages are falling like a rock in the private sector. Each contract I get offered is for 10k less per year. I could say no, but then I would be unemployed. Wut government wages are not falling. That cannot continue in this 14,250 triilion dollar debt or we will be in a real mess.
# 18: “”…yet mysteriously you wont bring up how the state, with Safeco Field nearly paid off, wants to renig on eliminating the taxes to pay for the stadium and apply them somewhere else.”
As usual, you confuse anything you don’t like with the “state”. The “state” isn’t doing anything, at least not now. There is one proposal by one legislature to do this, as far as I know the status. I also am pretty convinced it’s not going to pass, because it’s an idiotic idea, as Ron Judd pointed out in his column in the Sunday Seattle Times.
There are lots of places in this state where we are suffering from rather ruinous cuts, and this proposal doesn’t hit any of those priorities. If a tax is going to be passed, it needs to solve the other problems first.
Correction, “legislature” should read “legislater” (a single person, rather than the group).
And if anybody else is backing this proposal, they should be kicked around for a while, for political stupidity, if nothing else.
By the way, Paul Krugman has a nice column on the GOP’s attempt to attack Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The GOP’s cynical attack on Elizabeth Warren
37 – awwww.. Poor ld(iot) is pizzed that the “free market” gives him less because the moneybags would rather pay less in China and wants a teacher making 30k to make 20k now…
What a sad sack of crap.
Lisa Brown would never ever let Rockefeller’s proposal see the light of day. She should. She won’t do it though. And then Chopp will totally prevent any sort of House action on the topic. These guys are stuck in “groupthink” mode and feel that as long as they say the right things, doing the right thing is irrelevant.
The righties point out various examples of state government waste as evidence that we haven’t cut to the bone, but what they fail to realize is that our legislature has no stomach or intellectual capacity to go through anything with a fine tooth comb. Better to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I just saw a story that the transportation bill isn’t going to cut as much from the ferry service as the governor proposed. Okay….because that is a fine example of our tax dollars well spent. But they turn a blind eye to the issue of education.
# 22: Boeing IS consolidating it’s space here. It has given up leases in the “twin towers” across from the airport and relocated to Boeing-owned property near the Renton plant. It’s also selling off the Bellevue properties not that it has out-sourced the computer functions.
Yet it appears that management has FINALLY had to come to grips with the fact that their out-sourcing strategy was a huge mistake – not that many knowledgable people didn’t warn them of that fact before – multiple times. I think the 787 program in Everett is rather secure for the time being, although I wouldn’t have made that prediction a year ago.
The replacement for the 737 program is another matter altogether. Boeing now says it is going to be building the 737 and it’s replacement at the same time, until the existing 737 orders are fulfilled. This is a rather novel strategy, as 737 orders would normally be converted to the new airplane after consultation with the customers. After all, who wants to keep buying the old airplane while it’s replacement is comming off the assembly line? But regardless, it’s probably the Renton facilities’ days are numbered. The land is extraordinarily valuable as potential retail/high rise residential development with lake views, it’s hard to justify it’s continued use for industrial purposes, strictly from a land-use perspective. But Boeing will have lots of environmental clean-up costs there, which will cost tens of millions of dollars in the future, and may take as much as a decade before the land is buildable. The problems go back to WWII days, when waste would be dumped on the ground without much thought of environmental consequences.
As for sites in Kansas and Oklahoma, those sites are being developed as Boeing pulls out of Long Beach entirely. That is partially an anti-union issue, but also it’s because the property at Long Beach is valuable for the same reasons the Renton site is valuable for other development.
But what’s fueling the collection of previously dispersed work areas is the need to dramatically cut overhead. Boeing has lost a ton of money on the 787, and it may take a decade before it breaks even on the project (one knowledgable person last week predicted 1,500 plane break-even point, which is about twice the current orders for the 787-7). And Boeing needs to pay for a new 737 replacement, and look at making changes to the 777. It’s all going to cost an awful lot of money.