Search Results for: i-1053

My ballot was mailed earlier this week, but unlike Goldy, I was torn over I-1100. I’d really like to see the state’s monopoly over liquor sales go away. The state store system is archaic, and one can easily look at state-by-state statistics to see that states with privatized liquor sales don’t have more problems with drunk driving (one of the bogus scare tactics that proponents have been using to get people to vote against it). There’s an argument to be made that underage people could potentially access liquor easier, but I think that’s a problem that can be solved with better enforcement and larger fines.

On the other hand, I wasn’t convinced that I-1100 adequately addressed the drop in revenue that would occur from dismantling the system. And in a year where our revenue problems aren’t showing any signs of improving, this outweighed my desire to move to a regulatory system that was more customer- and retailer-friendly. I ended up voting against it.

I’m currently reading Last Call by Daniel Okrent, a book detailing the history of alcohol prohibition. What’s interesting is that when the late 19th century movement to ban alcohol was gathering steam, the movement ran into a similar problem:

By 1910 the federal government was drawing more than $200 million a year from the bottle and the keg – 71 percent of all internal revenue, and more than 30 percent of federal revenue overall. Only external revenue – the tariff – provided a larger share of the federal budget, and by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the tariff’s continuation was the most intensely debated issue in American public life. It would be hard enough to fund the cost of government without the tariff and impossible without a liquor tax. Given that you wouldn’t collect much revenue from a liquor tax in a nation where there was no liquor, this might have seemed an insurmountable problem for the Prohibition movement. Unless, that is, you could weld the drive for Prohibition to the campaign for another reform, the creation of a tax on incomes.

It may make us feel uncomfortable to have our budgets rely on revenue generated by the sale of alcohol, but that was the reality then and it’s the reality now. In fact, Okrent points out that taxes on liquor helped fund each of the wars of the 19th century, from the War of 1812 to the Spanish-American War. Right now, our state relies on the revenue it generates from controlling the sale of liquor. I’d be perfectly happy with breaking that dependency, but it doesn’t happen from wishful thinking alone. It requires figuring out how to restructure our tax system to allow for us to replace that lost revenue. With the outcome of I-1053 and I-1098 about to be decided as well – each having a large impact on how our tax system is structured, it’s anyone’s guess whether or not we’ll be able to do this in the near future – and that was too much uncertainty for me this time around.

The other day the Seattle Times endorsed Tim Eyman’s I-1053, arguing that it would help restrain state government, as if our current budget crisis is the result of out-of-control government spending. Of course, it’s not.

The chart above plots Washington state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income from 1977 through 2008, and compares it to the national average of the 49 other states. As you can see, WA taxes as a percentage of the total economy is near a thirty-year low at the moment, after plummeting dramatically from the mid 1990’s. You can also see that WA state and local tax “burden” is also well below the national average, and has been for more than a decade.

And in case you’re wondering where I cherry-picked my numbers, it’s from the conservative Tax Foundation, the same source Eyman often uses to support his preposterous claims.

I know the Times would like you to think that all our budget woes are due to profligate Democrats lavishing our tax dollars on organized labor, but that is simply not the case. In fact, our budgets are unsustainable, but not because spending is out of control. Rather, we have an antiquated tax structure that simply cannot keep pace with the economy and the associated growth in demand for public services.

That’s the real economic reality both the Times and our legislators refuse to address.

The Association of Washington Businesses claims its board unanimously endorsed Tim Eyman’s anti-democratic I-1053 at its May 13 board meeting, but after a bit of digging, the folks over at the Washington State Labor Council can’t find a single AWB board member who admits to attending the meeting and endorsing the initiative.

Can this be true? Amid severe recession-related budget cuts to higher education, transportation and other state funding priorities strongly supported by many of our largest private employers, the AWB board voted UNANIMOUSLY for this starve-the-beast strategy to avoid taxes?

Not Boeing.  Company spokeswoman Susan Bradley says the company has no position on I-1053 and had no representative at AWB’s May 13 board meeting in Spokane.

And not Microsoft.  Government Affairs Director Delee Shoemaker, an AWB board member, reports that the company will not take a position on I-1053 at least until it qualifies for the ballot. She adds that she wasn’t at the May 13 meeting either.

And the list goes on: Weyerhaeuser, Avista Corp., Ben Bridge Jewelers, US Bank… nobody would admit to even attending the meeting. In fact, of the AWB board members who responded to WSLC’s inquiries, only one, Safeway Director of Public Affairs Cherie Myers, expressed support for the initiative. But… “I was not there to vote,” Myers told the WSLC.

Huh. Reminds me of a lyric from Les Miserables:

Phantom faces at the window.
Phantom shadows on the floor.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more.

The bulk of the board members WSLC contacted wouldn’t respond to inquiries, but there’s a reason why local businesses might be reluctant to embrace I-1053 despite the business community’s natural knee-jerk support for anything that makes it harder to raise their taxes: as WSLC explains, the Californiafication of Washington government simply isn’t good for our state’s business climate:

Our biggest private-sector employers report that one of their greatest challenges is the insufficient number of skilled workers available. Microsoft regularly argues that more H-1B visas are needed to meet its demand for engineers. Boeing’s aging workforce — of both machinists and engineers — is considered a looming crisis.

This problem has been exacerbated by the recession. Plummeting state revenue has resulted in college and university budgets being slashed; University of Washington reports that its state funding was cut by one-third in the past 15 months. College instructors are being laid off, departments eliminated, class sizes sharply increased, and double-digit tuition hikes imposed. And all this is happening as Boeing laments its demand for engineers consistently exceeds the state’s production by a two-to-one ratio, a supply gap that is widening as its aging work force retires in droves.

WSLC includes a list of companies that have refused to respond, and it wouldn’t hurt if they heard from their customers that we don’t particularly enjoy doing business with companies that spend their profits ensuring that a one-third minority of the Legislature has veto power over our state budgets. At the very least, they need to know that they can’t continue to hide behind their empty chairs.