DORI MONSON

Dori: Jay Inslee rips off small businesses, shows hypocrisy in budget

Dec 13, 2018, 5:02 PM

Inslee...

Washington Governor Jay Inslee presents his proposed 2019-2021 budget in front of the press on Dec. 12, 2018. (TVW)

(TVW)

Jay Inslee’s proposed new budget is one of the most ridiculous spending and taxation proposals I have ever heard, and I have been watching this stuff for 25 years now.

I’m going to go through the entire budget speech with you, and tell you why it contains some of the most hypocritical statements I have ever heard our governor make.

He spent a lot of time at the beginning talking about whales, and why we need to spend $1.1 billion dollars to save them. I like whales, I think they’re beautiful creatures, but a billion dollars? Apparently, according to Inslee, we have a lot in common with the orcas, like our “body temperature,” “heart rate,” and hatred of Trump’s environmental policies.

Then, Jay Inslee talked about McCleary, and how we have to spend more on schools, even though we just had a gigantic property tax increase for education. He wants to give more free money to college students. People who have struggled and saved to put their own kids through college now will get a massive tax increase to pay for everybody else’s kids to go through college.

My wife and I opened a GET account for each of our daughters when they were born. This is a government account that has worked out pretty well — if you start putting a little bit aside for your kids’ college educations each month starting when they’re born, it becomes doable.

But, you have to plan, save, look to the future, and take care of your own kids, not someone else’s. Now we have to pay for other people’s kids?

RELATED: Inslee wants $1.1 billion to aid the orca whales

You know this is a sore spot for me, because, as I’ve said, kids who go to community college for two years can cover it if they start working 15 hours a week in high school. What about the people in Seattle, who have a new property tax to pay for other people’s kids to go to college? Will they be taxed twice now?

The lack of any personal responsibility in this state is mind-boggling. It seems as though it has no sense of personal accountability. We’ve got to tax people to pay for other people’s families.

There are some things that I agree with the governor on. He pointed out that not every student has the desire to get a four-year degree. That is very true. First off, the mania that every single kid needs a four-year degree to be a success has driven the cost of college through the roof.

Plenty of kids would do wonderfully going to a trade school and getting a blue-collar job that pays well. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a belief that every kid needs to go to a four-year college. And it seems like Jay Inslee wants to make all of us pay for those kids.

Then, of course, there is more money for homelessness in the proposed budget, which Inslee said we are “tackling with a broad array of ideas.”

But are we?

We’re one of the few states in the country where homelessness is getting dramatically worse. And now we’re supposed to give more money to fight a problem that has been largely the creation of local politicians who attract drug addicts from around the country.

Thinking that government is how we improve people’s lives is such folly. Once we get free from government, that’s when we have a chance to really thrive. Inslee pitches everything as though people have no shot in life unless the government takes care of them. My reality is 180 degrees different from what he’s pitching.

Inslee also wants free internet throughout the state. How many six-figure jobs will that Central Broadband Office require? And, by the way, we do have free internet throughout the state — it’s called the public library. I pay a couple hundred bucks in property taxes a year for the libraries, where anybody can go and use the internet. People can even watch porn at the library if they want.

Paying for it all

So, how are we going to pay for all of this stuff? The number-one idea from Jay Inslee is a nine-percent capital gains tax. If you’re a mom n’ pop business, and you have struggled, putting blood, sweat and tears into a family business for 40 years, and now it’s time to sell it — you’re going to have to pay 9 percent to the state of Washington so that you can “pitch in.”

Because you haven’t done enough. You probably haven’t paid any B&O taxes, or created any jobs, or helped out the local economy in any way, but now you can finally “pitch in” with a capital gains tax if you’re a business owner and you have to sell.

Think about that; you’ve built a business from the ground up, and it’s now worth about $1 million. Maybe you’ve been pulling out just barely enough to get by, and selling the business is your retirement plan. Well, under Inslee’s plan, you’re going to have to give $90,000 of that to the state.

What Gov. Inslee is proposing is absolutely against our state constitution. As I stressed when I talked to the state superintendent a couple months ago, a capital gains tax is an income tax. You cannot enact a graduated income tax under our state constitution.

Jason Mercier, director of the Washington Policy Center’s Center for Government Reform, has a letter from the IRS to Congressman Dan Newhouse (R-WA), clearly stating that a capital gains tax is an income tax.

The letter reads, “Capital gains are treated as income under the tax code and taxed as such.” I’ve been telling you that for years, every time someone proposes something violating our state constitution with a capital gains tax. A state income tax is the holy grail that the Democrats seem to so desperately want.

RELATED: Inslee wants billions from us to build national ‘green’ image

Inslee’s second idea for paying for free internet and college and whales is an increased B&O tax. This is on gross receipts, so if a small business is breaking even or even losing money, the business owner will still need to give a larger percentage of gross receipts to the state of Washington. Because you business owners, by paying taxes and creating jobs and generating sales tax revenue and benefiting the economy, are not doing your fair share.

With this pie-in-the-sky budget, Jay Inslee once again shows us that he is a liar. Let me remind you what he said on my show when he was running for governor.

“My plan is very specific — it does not propose or support tax increases.” That’s what he said because he had to say it to be elected governor. He had no intention of ever honoring the pledge he made to you or to me to not raise taxes. The tax increases that he is proposing now are staggering.

His third idea is to have the state real estate excise tax go from a flat rate to a progressive rate. Everybody here in the Puget Sound who has seen a dramatic increase in their home’s value will have to give a big chunk to the state when they sell their home. Maybe you made a good decision to buy a home within your budget 10 or 20 years ago and it has gone up in value.

Now, because you’ve crossed the evil threshold of the rich, you’re going to have to give a huge amount of money to the state when you sell.

Then Inslee said something really bizarre. He said that one of his “principles” is that we must have a balanced budget. That’s not a principle, that’s a constitutional requirement. Our state constitution mandates a balanced budget. Don’t stand there and tell us it’s some noble principle of yours, and use that as justification for jacking everybody’s taxes through the roof.

But you haven’t even heard the worst of it yet. When explaining the reasoning for his tax increases, Jay Inslee made the most hypocritical statement that I have ever heard from him.

Our state has the most unfair tax system in the United States … This tax system that is so unfair to working people on the lower end of the economic scale is really a blot on our record. Lower-income people in our state pay five times more as a percentage of their income than the top tier in our state. Think about that — some of the hardest working people who are working in our retirement communities and taking care of our safety.

Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t recognize how hypocritical that statement is. But when I heard it, I blew a gasket. It’s as infuriating a statement as I’ve ever heard from him. The reason is, Jay Inslee couldn’t possibly care less about lower-income, hardworking people in our retirement communities.

Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court ruled that home health care workers — many of whom make maybe $30,000 a year and take care of their own elderly parents — could be exempt from union dues.

Jay Inslee’s office worked with the SEIU — the Service Employees International Union — to craft a plan get around the Supreme Court ruling. So now those people making $30,000 a year taking care of their parents have to cough up about $1,500 to the union, thanks to Jay Inslee’s collusion.

Money, and paying off the massive campaign donations he got from the labor unions, was all Inslee cared about. And then he had the audacity to stand up there and talk about how he cares about the low-income home health care workers.

His office colluded with a labor union to steal money from those people. Listening to him pretend to care about workers with that fake earnestness so that he can have a talking point when he runs for president was nauseating. It was maybe the most infuriating press conference ever.

The people of this state are taxed plenty. We send more money to Olympia per capita, adjusted for inflation, by far, than we ever have in our state’s history. And he says we are not giving enough. Because Jay Inslee has to manage everyone’s life so that when he goes out on the campaign trail in a year, he can tell the rest of the nation how much he cares.

Now you know the rest of the story.

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