Dori: Call your Washington senator and stop this illegal capital gains tax

As you know if you’re a regular listener, it is more important than ever right now for you to be vigilant about your state government. What Olympia wants is billions in new taxes, including an unconstitutional income tax in the form of a 10-percent capital gains tax. That is the new move by Democrats in the House, rolled out in their budget proposal this week.

Call it a capital gains tax, an excise tax, or whatever you want, but it is an income tax, and that is not allowed by our state constitution. And I guarantee you that it would not withstand a court challenge. We already have written evidence that the IRS considers a capital gains tax to be an income tax. What further proof do you require?

Not only do Democratic lawmakers want an income tax, they want to raise the B&O tax on businesses. Democratic lawmakers say they have “looked under every nook and cranny” for more money.

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How about this radical idea — how about you cut spending? How about if you can’t make a budget, instead of essentially telling us that we need to all take pay cuts (which is what new taxes are), you slow down your spending? That’s what all of our families have to do when we make our family budgets. When I was a little kid, there were a lot of things that I wanted. We couldn’t afford many of them. That’s called life. You can’t always afford to have or do all the things you want.

But Democrats in Olympia are like 4-year-olds at a toy store saying, “I want this, and I want that, and I want it now.” And their solution is to steal more of your money. And yes, I say steal because their proposal is flat-out illegal, according to our constitution.

Let’s say that you had a couple who started a small business 30 years ago. They just barely scraped by for the first few years. They held off having kids for that time. They couldn’t draw much salary, and they ran on credit cards just trying to get their business off the ground. Then they finally got to the point where they could make a little bit of money at the business. Not a king’s ransom, but enough to put their kids through college and take a family vacation every now and then. They’ve built a business to support them so that they can retire; the sale of their business is essentially their retirement plan. And now these dogs in Olympia want to take 10 percent off the top from the business this couple has been sweating over for decades.

That’s the kind of naked greed we see when Democrats are in charge of both chambers in Olympia. We’ve put a bunch of greedy 4-year-olds in charge of the state. And they are beholden to the teachers union and the developers and the contractors who are all wanting more money.

State Rep. Laurie Jinkins (D-Tacoma) came on the show to talk about the House’s budget proposal. Believe me, I always appreciate it when Democrats come on the show to debate with me. But the thing is, I know I am 100-percent right on this issue.

I asked her how the state can justify a 44-percent increase in spending over the last decade. Jinkins said that a large reason the state needed all of this revenue was to fulfill the McCleary obligation.

“The way that we initially paid for much of our McCleary decision was what the Republicans asked us to do, a property tax increase … we’ve had some good revenue growth to pay for the rest of the McCleary fix, and we weren’t paying our teachers what they deserved to be paid,” she said.

Wait, we haven’t been paying teachers enough for an 80-percent job? This isn’t about McCleary. This is about paying off raises that were clearly unsustainable when the teachers union secured them. A couple of years ago with massive property tax raises, we were told we satisfied McCleary; now it comes up again.

Like other Democrats on the show have done, Jinkins argued that the capital gains tax is not an income tax, calling constitutionally-based arguments against the tax pure “rhetoric.”

“In Washington state, we don’t have an income tax. We won’t have one after this bill passes,” she said. “What we have is a sales tax. This is a sales tax on incredibly high-valued assets … You have the privilege of selling an asset, you’re not taxed on owning the asset.”

When I asked her if we own our profits from capital gains, she agreed.

Our constitution does not allow you to tax only the wealthy; you have to have the exact same tax at the exact same percentage on every citizen in the state. The Democrats are playing games in pitching this as something that is somehow constitutional.

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Now, more than ever, I need you to be vigilant. I need you to call the Washington State Legislative Hotline. The number is 800-562-6000. If you don’t know who your legislators are, they will inform you when you call the hotline so that you can direct your comments toward the correct people.

Let’s prove that we’ve got strength in numbers. You must tell your senator how unconstitutional this capital gains tax is and how you cannot afford these tax hikes. There are still some Democrats in the Senate who recognize that this is an impossibility.

If you’ve listened to the show over the years, I don’t engage in this direct, make-a-phone call kind of plea that often. But this is important. We need to put a stop to this while there is still time.

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