My pitch for all Washington state politicians who want tax increases

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.

Hold on to your wallets. In 2014, we could see some of the most massive tax increases ever if we don’t fight back here in Washington.

Gov. Inslee, came on our show a couple of days ago and told us they’re going to need $10 billion to $12 billion for transportation tax increases.

Then we find out, King County Executive Dow Constantine is proposing tax increases, both the sales tax and car tab increases to pay for more bus service.

Here’s the bottom line. Ever since I was a little kid growing up pretty poor on the mean streets of Ballard, I’ve thought, man it would be the best to have a swimming pool someday.

Now, I’m an adult. I’ve had three kids. Someday I’ll have grandkids. How cool would it be to have a swimming pool? We’ve got the room for it in our backyard. We could put in a pool. But my wife and I, we have to always make evaluations.

How much time out of the year would you actually use a swimming pool? It’s expensive to heat. The bills go through the roof. We wouldn’t use it that much of the year. And if we were going to spend $30,000 to $40,000 to put in a pool, that’s $30,000 or $40,000 that we don’t have for our girls’ college education, or if we wanted to take a vacation. It would be quite a tradeoff. Everything in life is a tradeoff.

I wish just for a moment that we had public officials who thought that way. They believe that we are an unlimited source of money. And you see that is not the way it is for your family or mine. If I’m going to spend a bunch of money on one thing, that means I have to cut a bunch of money somewhere else.

If I’m going to put in a swimming pool, I have to tell my daughter, ‘We can’t pay for your junior year of college.’ That’s the tradeoff. And we’ve decided that our priority is helping our girls get through college, so no swimming pool for daddy. Why don’t they think that way in government?

Instead, they say, oh no we’ll just get a lot more money from the taxpayers, they’ll just give us more.

So that’s the word we got from Gov. Jay Inslee who said we’ve got to spend more on education.

“We need to put several billion dollars more into funding our Kindergarten through twelfth-grade education system,” said Inslee.

He said we need more money for transportation.

“If education is the heart of our economy, then transportation has to be considered the backbone. That’s why we need a transportation investment package this year,” Inslee said.

Oh and by the way, let’s take money from business owners and give it to their workers with a higher minimum wage.

“Too many Washingtonians struggle. There are thousands of working moms and dads with full time jobs,” Inslee said.

And there’s thousands of struggling business owners who can’t afford to pay more than a minimum wage. But with politicians it’s always, let’s give away other people’s money. We’ll just get it from the taxpayers. We’ll get it from the business owners. And we will make promises to everybody so they’ll keep voting for us.

Dow Constantine, he wants more money. He wants a sales tax increase. He wants a car tab increase.

“For five years now, we’ve lived under the threat of drastic cuts, bus cuts, at a time when we needed more service not less, while the backlog of maintenance on our local roads just continues to grow,” said Constantine.

Well it’s for buses. Of course, we have to vote for tax increases if it’s for buses. We don’t want to make the bus riders pay the true cost of riding the bus. Why? Because taxpayers are an unlimited source of revenue.

So here is my pitch to all of the politicians: why don’t you live your political life the way your constituents have to live their family lives?

If you need to give money to buses, if you need to give money to school teachers, and if you need to give money to minimum wage workers, why don’t you find the savings from the massive amount of money we’re already giving you? You have plenty of money, you’re just not spending it well.

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.

Related:
State of State: Inslee says minimum wage too low
King County proposes sales tax, vehicle fee to prevent deep cuts to Metro Transit

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