SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Dori: $30 tabs push-back has us asking, ‘What is the point in voting?’

Nov 18, 2019, 1:46 PM

Reykdal, $30 tabs, 976 suit, Sound Transit, escrow, car tab...

Car tabs continue to cause controversy in the Puget Sound region. (KIRO Radio photo)

(KIRO Radio photo)

My daughters asked me at our family dinner over the weekend when $30 tabs tabs would take effect. They are paying hundreds of dollars for cars that, frankly, aren’t worth that much.

I replied that I thought it would take effect Dec. 5, but after a recent story in the Seattle Times, I’m not so sure about that. A spokeswoman for the Department of Licensing told the Times that there is no date set in stone yet, that it could be months before we see $30 tabs, or that they might possibly never happen at all — even though the measure that 1 million people voted on called for its provisions to take effect on Dec. 5.

Because of legal maneuverings, government knows what the will of the people is, but it is doing everything it can to circumvent our will. The politicians know the will of the people, and they simply do not care.

A lot of people have contacted me saying, “Why even vote? If you are not an extreme Leftist, what is the point in even voting?” After all, they say, after 976 passed, politicians like Dow Constantine and Jenny Durkan immediately jumped in to fight it with a lawsuit. Now the Department of Licensing is not even sure when $30 tabs will go into effect. The people have spoken, but their voices have apparently not been heard. So, why even bother voting?

Why a Sound Transit Board member voted for $30 tabs

I’ve got to be honest — I do not have a great answer for you. I do not know why a person who differs from the far-left group-think should even bother voting in this region anymore.

You have politicians who do not care about the will of the people. You have Dow Constantine, who spends hundreds of thousands of tax dollars being driven around by his Executive Protection Unit, and then abuses the privilege by having them drive him to bars. We let him get away with acting like he is royalty.

You have Jenny Durkan, who lives like royalty in a $7.5 million home in one of Seattle’s ritziest neighborhoods. And yet these are the people who say, “We’re going to go to court so that the person making $40,000 a year and getting a $400 car tab bill still has to pay $400 instead of $30.”

What is the morality of these people? Who is looking out for the working class, the middle class, the blue-collar families? Nobody in the Democrat Party is, that’s for sure.

The Democrats’ strategy is to keep the financial handcuffs on. Keep people economically trapped so that, by design, there is no middle class. People who escape from making $30,000, $40,000, or $50,000 a year start to realize that sending so much money to the government is not a good thing. But if you’re making $30,000 and government says, “We’ll give you free health care, we’ll pay back your college loan, we’ll give you $15 an hour,” that’s pretty alluring. It sounds like a gift to people who are in the most challenging economic situations.

So I do want you to think about that. Look at the elite lifestyles enjoyed by Dow Constantine and Jenny Durkan. And they are the ones telling working-class people that they cannot have their $30 tabs.

How did we get here? How did the people of this region get so horribly duped by people who could not care less about the voters?

What is the point in voting?

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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Dori: $30 tabs push-back has us asking, ‘What is the point in voting?’