It’s not surprising, but the overwrought nature of this editorial in The Columbian is easily ascertained by reading the first sentence.
The tax-increase snake is not exactly back on the state’s budget table, but it has slithered under the door and is coiling its way up a table leg.
It goes on in that serpentine fashion for quite a while. It’s essentially an argument for making Washington another failed West Coast state, ala California and Oregon.
Digby at Hullabaloo comments on the fun they’re having in California, with protestors trapping some board of regents members in a building after they voted for a huge fee increase. One possible future, heh?
Of course, the editorial doesn’t mention that the newspaper industry just this year received a huge tax break.
The new law gives newspaper printers and publishers a 40 percent cut in the state’s main business tax. The discounted rate mirrors breaks given in years past to the Boeing Co. and the timber industry.
So the Legislature sure is on a roll mollifying Boeing and the wealthy publishers! Nothing like caving in and getting fucked anyway, it’s the Democratic Party Way.
As Digby points out, cutting government spending during a recession just makes things worse, but reflexive right-wing ideology is so ingrained in our culture after three decades of conservative stink tank bullshit that changing things seems like a hell of a mountain to climb.
Neoliberalism may be dead as a viable economic system, but its diseased zombie corpse haunts the offices of newspapers and the minds (such as they are) of those who get paid to attack the government, always and forever. You can almost envision them zombie-walking around the mall, zombie-spittle dripping from their rotted lips, droning “no unions–no taxes.” (Sorry, I tried to work a snake into the last sentence, but zombies will have to do.)
These people are nihilists of the most extreme order, and if they get their way they’ll drag all of us down with them.
Maybe it’s time we stop listening to lectures from people who fail at their businesses? The rest of us don’t want to live in a failed state, and we want basic services like schools, emergency services, parks and libraries. Our kids are going to need fantastic skills to rebuild this country, if we can ever wrest control of it from the greedy morons who nearly brought the whole thing down only a year ago.
We’re not out of the woods yet, either. If Washington adds itself to the ranks of the “Hoover” states, about the only silver lining will be that the last of the newspapers will surely go out of business.