TODD HERMAN

Jay Inslee and the Democrats want to hurt you financially

Feb 16, 2018, 11:51 AM | Updated: 11:52 am

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Washington State Governor Jay Inslee. (AP)

(AP)

It would seem something is wrong with this sentence: facing a massive increase in tax revenues Jay Inslee and Washington Democrats seek record-level tax increases. Something is wrong, but it’s not a mistake.

Jay Inslee and the Democrats in Olympia want to hurt you. The point of putting you through this financial pain is to blackmail you into supporting the absolutely Holy Grail of leftist, machine politics: the income tax.

Sen. Ericksen says Washington carbon tax is really about an income tax

The income tax is the leftist dream because it is the ultimate power tool. Arrange the system so 49 percent pay taxes, and 51 percent get a free ride. Then you have the basis for a permanent ruling majority. Democrats will have the ultimate business model. It would be a machine where they can use the word games of lawyers to provide tricky exemptions from the income tax for certain groups, while sucking the lifeblood out of others.

Observing Jay Inslee and Democrats

Senator Doug Ericksen joined our show to talk about the $3 billion windfall in revenues that Olympia is on track to receive. Instead of giving citizens some tax relief, they want even more money. To my surprise, the senator agreed with my assessment that Jay Inslee and the Democrats are purposefully hurting people.

This hardly just a theory. Consider this:

Jay Inslee’s energy tax will increase the costs to taxpayers by 20 percent for driving to work and heating their homes. Who will not pay that tax? Corporations. Private jet owners get a specific waiver, so do chemical plants, food manufacturing facilities, airplane makers, factories that make airplane parts. All the “evil” corporations (as Democrats put it) get a waiver. And you get financially hurt. We don’t need the money and this bill, if made law, might one day reduce global temperatures by .001 degree. In other words, it will do nothing but cause pain.

WSDOT wants to hurt you. The expressed mission of the illegal toll lanes for rich people on I-405 and the new, illegal toll lanes on 167 are designed to hurt you. The purpose of your pain — in the mind of Roger Millar, the coward who runs WSDOT — is two-fold: blackmail you out of your cars onto choo-choo trains and buses; and add to your overall financial pain, so you will back an income tax sought by Millar’s bosses.

The Teacher’s Union wants to hurt you. All around our region, people are being taxed out of an ability to afford their homes. This is supposedly in pursuit of funding schools.

Yet, schools are hardly underfunded. Consider the Seattle School District’s overhead of roughly 45 percent that goes, not to teachers, but the central office. Make note of the school superintendent who enjoys a total compensation of $430,00 per year overseeing a demonstrably failed district. That same bureaucrat will retire with a massive pension. The unions, who forcibly take money from teachers, pay themselves massive salaries and benefits, and make huge donations to Democrats and the Seattle Supreme Court (formerly the State Supreme Court). Those union leaders are all in to help their partners in extortion in pursuit of the income tax.

Is a Jay Inslee-style income tax even constitutional in Washington State?

No. Our state constitution is quite clear: property can only be taxed if done so on a uniform basis. The State Supreme Court has twice held that this bars the income tax that Jay Inslee and the Democrats want, which is a selective one. But, those rulings happened before Seattle elites purchased the court.

If Jay Inslee and the Democrats cause enough pain to blackmail people into supporting an income tax, when that income tax gets to the Seattle Supreme Court, I predict they will pretend it’s legal. The rational, I contend, they will use is this: because the tax is levied against the business — the money taken before the employee gets it — the income was never actually the property of the workers. Of course that is ridiculous — the money is in exchange for using your ultimate property of your body for labor — but that won’t matter to a Supreme Court who lied about how Charter Schools were funded in order to pay off the teacher’s union.

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Jay Inslee and the Democrats want to hurt you financially