Reflections on Yesterday’s Legislator Town Halls
Our 16th district legislators spent three hours yesterday making the case for my campaign, which is that if we want to change anything about how Olympia operates we need to send someone else there to represent us.
Being in the opposition is nice, because it means you can take credit for bills you happened to sponsor that passed unanimously in both chambers, while blaming the other side for everything your constituents didn’t like.
That doesn’t even require consistency. During the session in Walla Walla yesterday, there was a lengthy discussion about how bad it was that the legislature moved funding out of the state’s pension buckets to paper over a hole in the budget. That is bad!
But it was also bad when the Republican Senate budget writers proposed a similar maneuver last year (page 350, lines 29-31).
A number of attendees raised concerns about the new “millionaire’s tax.” I understand why. Washington state is an expensive place to live. But the issue in Washington isn’t that we overtax high-income residents. It’s that we tax businesses and working people too much.
Finally, it’s very easy to criticize. It’s much harder to create. The legislators began the session bragging about new spending for retirees and in-district capital projects. They talked up new investments in areas like finishing Highway 12 and funding K-12 education. Absent a reference by Rep. Rude to the pay increases for state employees, there were no specific proposals to actually cut anything. It was just hand-waving about things like “zero-based budgeting.”
So let me tell you what I’d look at immediately:
- Tort reform to defuse the state’s liability problem, which required the legislature to come up with another $1 billion this year, with no relief for other levels of government.
- Real cuts to agency leadership funding, paired with increases in the frontline staff needed to actually serve Washingtonians and reduce the incidents of negligence and harm.
- Aggressive anti-monopoly and anti-consolidation legislation in the healthcare industry to stop middlemen from sucking ever more funding out of the state’s health insurance system for state and school employees – and the pockets of private-sector businesses and workers.
- A total revamp of Climate Commitment Act funding to prioritize real, on-the-ground infrastructure projects that will increase clean energy generation and drive down costs across the board.
If that’s not enough, we keep going. And every one of these proposals would benefit not just the state’s bottom line, but also its residents and local governments.
Let’s do better.