If you haven\u2019t started your holiday shopping, you might want to hold on to your wallet. Gov. Chris Gregoire wants the state to dig deeper into your pocket to help bail-out the state budget.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Gregoire\u2019s plan is two-fold:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
1. Boost the sales tax by a half-cent, and<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
2. Have it \u201csunset\u201d in three years.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
We have two concerns with that:<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n 1. It\u2019s another half-cent tax on what already is nearly (.095) a 10 percent tax on just about every dollar you spend, and<\/p>\n<\/p>\n 2. Does anyone really expect that a tax, once in place, will ever go away?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Gregoire says her new tax would bring in close to $500 million annually and be largely used to help fund education.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Before you applaud, recall that this is the same person who just recently proposed cutting your kid\u2019s school year by four days.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Apparently schools \u2013 and our kids\u2019 education \u2013 is only important if we pay more for it. Gregoire, of course, knows the fallacy in this.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The state constitution says clearly that education is the paramount duty of the state. It doesn\u2019t say anything about having to raise taxes to do this.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The state may or may not need an extra $500 million, but schools aren\u2019t the place you cut when money is tight.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n That\u2019s the same problem with her earlier plan to cut the school year by four days.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Doing so would save the state $99 million in the 2012-13 school year by not having to pay teachers for those four days.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n But that also means that our kids get cheated out of four days of instruction.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Does anyone really think our kids can get buy with LESS education?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n We understand that the state faces some tough financial questions.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Legislators are due back in Olympia on Monday to deal with a $2 billion hole in the state\u2019s budget.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t mean that higher taxes are \u2013 or ought to be \u2013 the first choice for a solution. After all, it\u2019s not as if taxpayers\u2019s money is burning a hole in their pockets. Quite the opposite.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Consumer prices in the Seattle area have risen 3.8 percent over the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n At the same time, take-home pay for people around here has gone up 1.7 percent.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Do the math and you\u2019ll see we\u2019re falling behind.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Drive to work?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n You\u2019re even worse off. The price of gasoline in the Seattle area is up 26 percent since last year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. And that means energy prices are up 16.5 percent.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n There are more \u2013 lots more \u2013 things that cost more today than they did since October 2010.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n We\u2019re not saying the task facing the Legislature is an easy one.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Far from it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n But higher taxes should only be considered as a last resort.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The state isn\u2019t there yet.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Craig Groshart is the regional editor of the Bellevue Reporter.<\/em><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you haven\u2019t started your holiday shopping, you might want to hold on to your wallet. Gov. Chris Gregoire wants the state to dig deeper into your pocket to help bail-out the state budget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":285,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-20300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20300"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/285"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20300"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=20300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}