SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Dori: Inslee wants $7.3K from each of you in 2019 budget

Dec 20, 2018, 6:08 PM

whale tracking, orcas, orca...

Southern resident orcas. (AP)

(AP)

I’m sick and tired of how the media has characterized the Jay Inslee capital gains tax. Every news outlet covering Jay Inslee’s press conference said that Jay Inslee has proposed a capital gains tax to pay for the $3.4 billion in new taxes.

I’ve explained that it is an income tax. The IRS itself calls a capital gains tax an income tax. I think that everybody in the media is doing their readers, viewers, and listeners an incredible disservice when they don’t call this ‘capital gains tax’ what it really is.

Why no one else in the media seems to be acknowledging truth, and why they want to carry the water for Jay Inslee so he can disguise this income tax, is beyond me.

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

The state budget that Inslee has proposed is $54 billion, including $3.4 billion in new taxes. We have 7.4 million people in Washington, including children. If you do the math, Jay Inslee wants $7,297 per person. For every man, woman, and child. If you have a family of four, he wants nearly $30,000 from your family. And he wants to establish an unconstitutional income tax to achieve that goal. Is that acceptable to you?

A billion of that will go to the whales. Because, as Jay Inslee said, “We share so much with the orcas. We share about the same body temperature. We share about the same heartbeat rate.” What a stupid reason to set aside a billion dollars. He could’ve said, “We love the whales, the whales are dying,” and that would have made sense, but to argue that we need to spend a $1.1 billion because we share the same body temperature?

A listener named Bill sent us an email making the point that if we start giving all this money to the whales, we’re going to start attracting whales from all around the world. Donald Trump will have to put a net in the Strait of Juan de Fuca to keep them out.

It’s an excellent point, Bill. The more we spend on homelessness around here, the more we attract the vagrants from all around the country. The same thing is going to happen with the orcas. We’re going to see a bunch of freeloading whales coming from Iceland and Japan to the Puget Sound because we’re the land of plenty.

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Dori: Inslee wants $7.3K from each of you in 2019 budget