SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Dori: Got an oil furnace? Durkan will tax you for that
Aug 9, 2019, 12:35 PM
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan. (File photo, Karen Ducey/Getty Images)
(File photo, Karen Ducey/Getty Images)
When I was a kid, we had an oil furnace. I remember how the oil tanker trunk would come every few months. I remember the metal cap in the yard where it would be refilled.
We would often run out of oil and not have a working furnace for weeks at a time because my mom didn’t have the money to get more heating oil.
A lot of the people who have an oil furnace live in an older house and cannot afford to make the conversion to gas — I’m talking about older people on a fixed income or the working poor. There are 18,000 homes in Seattle with those old oil furnaces, those Craftsman-style homes that were built in the 1920s through 1950s.
Well now Jenny Durkan wants to impose an oil tax on those homes of 24 cents per gallon, as she announced in a press release this week. The reason? She wants to essentially punish people for having oil furnaces. She wants to get people to switch to renewable sources of heat.
Jay Inslee exploits low-income residents for his own selfish aspirations
This is a tax that is mainly going to be on older people and on those who cannot afford the conversion.
Here’s where it gets especially hypocritical — she says they’re going to use the tax revenue to fund programs that will help the poor switch to electric heat. An older person on a fixed income may not qualify for these government-funded programs, but that person does qualify to provide that money.
It’s just another example of how government is micro-managing our lives. It’s social engineering in the name of the climate scam.
Seattle loves to tax the poorest people, minorities, and the elderly. Think of the soda tax. Think of the congestion pricing they’re pushing. Now we have this oil tax. The politicians do all this talking about the groups that they care about, and then those very groups are the ones that get slammed with every new tax that they impose.
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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