Jason Mercier of the Washington Policy Center shares his thoughts on the budget decisions made by Democrat lawmakers
Jason Mercier
Washington Policy Center
The long-awaited budget details were finally made public yesterday with just over 24 hours to go in session. Realizing that state after state across the country has been enacting what has been called “historic” tax cuts, let’s see what Washington’s legislative majority decided to do. Wait, that must be a typo. A supplemental budget, with billions in revenue increases and families being hit with record inflation and the 2022 supplemental budget provides only $13 million in tax relief and that’s just for small businesses. Are you serious?
In fact, not only is this an absurdly small amount of tax relief within the context of the massive revenue forecast increase, but the final budget didn’t even include what some Democratic lawmakers were claiming as “middle-class tax relief” – free access to state parks and fairs.
You may be asking, where is our broad-based sales tax cut, or any broad-based tax relief?
Well, the capacity for meaningful tax relief was spent instead in the massive supplemental budget increase, including for the first-time sending billions of operating dollars to the transportation budget. This is a very disappointing precedent. Now that the firewall between the operating and transportation budget has been breached, expect to see future increases in the revenue forecast (and the opportunity for tax relief) to get siphoned instead over to the transportation budget.
If Washington ever was going to provide substantial broad-based tax relief this was the year. Shockingly, the Senate majority leadership couldn’t even find the time (or will) to hold a public hearing on the bipartisan sales tax cut bill (SB 5932) prime sponsored by Senate Democratic Majority Caucus Vice Chair Mona Das.
Sen. Das said about SB 5932 in a press release:
“Thanks to our federal, state and local leaders’ careful stewardship during this pandemic – and the public resilience throughout our communities – we are in a strong place financially. We should seize this opportunity to live up to our values of a full, equitable recovery and reduce the sales-and-use tax that burdens lower- and middle-income families . . . We need to take a serious look at tax relief for all working Washingtonians. And this is the year to do it.”
The senator was right. This was the year for broad-based sales tax relief but her bill couldn’t even get a public hearing. Sadly, we now have our answer if the current legislative makeup is capable of prioritizing meaningful tax relief. No, no, no, and no.
Jason Mercier is the director of the Center for Government Reform at the Washington Policy Center.
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