Walsh: WA Supreme Court ‘painted itself into a corner’ as income tax repeal could reverse capital gains decision

While there is currently an initiative to repeal the recently passed income tax in Washington, an article in The Seattle Times pointed out that if the initiative succeeds, it would automatically repeal the state’s capital gains tax.

Rep. Jim Walsh joined “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio to discuss how the state Supreme Court “painted itself into a corner” with a previous ruling and why the latest initiative to repeal the income tax is as “clean” as they come.

“This goes around the so-called Quinn ruling, the challenge of the capital gains tax a few years ago,” Walsh said. “This was the opinion that the state Supreme Court wrote that said no, capital gains is not an income tax, it’s an excise tax. They found this tricky way to say that the capital gains tax was okay under state law and the Constitution. They basically painted themselves into a corner and said if there were ever to be a state income tax, this might make us rethink everything we’re saying in the Quinn decision.

“People who don’t like the initiative and want to keep the state income tax are trying to say that the state income tax repeal initiative does multiple things. That’s not true,” Walsh said. “The initiative only does one thing, and it repeals the state income tax, signed nervously into law as quickly as he could by the current governor.”

Walsh says any fallout from a repeal is the Supreme Court’s problem to sort out

Walsh noted that any decisions made when the capital gains tax was signed are the Supreme Court’s problems to deal with going forward, if there were to be any domino effect from an income tax repeal.

“They just didn’t think there was going to be a state income tax so fast in just a few more years,” Walsh said. “I think they were nervous about the pretzel logic they used to come up with the excise tax, so they put all this sort of filigree around it. Kind of saying, ‘Well, we’re being reasonable to do this, and if you were to do X and Y and Z, it might change A and B. That’s their problem; it has nothing to do with the current initiative that people are signing and likely to vote on this November. The initiative is clean. The mess is in the Quinn decision written by the state Supreme Court.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to John Curley weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Follow @https://twitter.com/jcurleyshow