Lt. governor write-in candidate: Opponents’ only answer on budget shortfall is taxes

Lieutenant governor write-in candidate Joshua Freed believes fiscal conservatism is crucial at the moment, and that his opponents in the race have no answers for the looming budget shortfall other than taxes.

“This has been anything but a normal year, and we have a real opportunity here with Denny Heck who in the primary was at 25%, with Marko Liias at 18%,” Freed told the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. “Clearly no majority there. I pull more votes from Denny. We can win this election when people write my name in … with as little as 34%.”

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“I am getting independent voters right now who are saying that Denny Heck and Marko Liias are just too progressive, meaning too far left-leaning for them to vote for,” Freed said. “They’re looking for a fiscal conservative to help restart our economy. Sadly, we’ve seen 3,064 different businesses go out of business permanently in the last six months. So we need to not further burden our businesses and the economy with tax increases to overcome the budget shortfall, but truly have a fiscal conservative to be the president of the Senate, in that position of lieutenant governor to keep those bad bills like an income tax bill going to the Senate floor.”

Freed says he had thousands of signatures sent in requesting that he be included in the recent debate, but was not allowed in.

“So sadly, the perspective that the voters in Washington state got to hear was … when the question for these two gentlemen was what are you going to do with the budget shortfall? Literally the answer was taxes. When pressed further on where are you going find efficiencies in state government, they couldn’t answer the question,” Freed said. “We need to trim state government back by 20%. And it’s really not as far away as people think when you consider that the budget was just increased just a year and a half ago by 17%.”

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Freed believes the COVID-19 crisis has further created a need for fiscal conservatism to manage the budget shortfall, which he says won’t come with the other candidates.

“We’re going to see a $4-7 billion budget shortfall of the $54 billion budget. So let’s go making sure that we shrink the size of government today that’s continued to grow under one party control. We need fiscal conservative policies because we know as fiscal conservatives that in a time of crisis we can more quickly respond to address the needs of our family, rather than wait for funds from the government,” he said.

“We’ve seen during this period of time a billion dollars go to a Nigerian fraud ring,” he added. “And yet, the Democrat fundraiser who’s the head of the ESD has not yet been fired by this governor. They are enriching their politicos rather than looking out for the citizens of Washington state who are in a desperate situation today.”

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here.