When the state of Washington’s most recent revenue forecast came in well below the wishful thinking levels of the last legislative session, Governor Christine Gregoire declared that, “nothing is off the table,” when it comes to closing the gap. That sounded familiar, so I did a quick internet search and discovered that Washington’s governor has deployed that phrase quite regularly during her tenure as governor, particularly in the last two years as tax revenues have fallen sharply below expectations.
Now when a Democrat uses words such as “nothing is off the table,” it means nothing of the sort. It simply means that just about any proposal to raise taxes will be entertained, and not that fundamental changes will be made in the way that Olympia spends money. There are, in fact, quite a few things off the table.
October 1, was D-Day in Washington. That was when the latest wild guess at tax revenue was expected and it was the day that Christine Gregoire had set for ordering across the board spending cuts. The latest dart throw estimated that half a billion dollars would need to be trimmed. While a three decades old law permits the governor to order across the board cuts, this process has been corrupted from its original purpose into it current application, which is to insulate legislators from having to make difficult decisions in an election year. The former legislator who wrote the law giving the governor that power says that it was never meant to be used this way. It was meant as a bargaining chip for the governor to use when dealing with a recalcitrant legislature. If they don’t get the job done, then the consequences would be catastrophic, across the board cuts, which no reasonable, dedicated public servant would ever want to see come to pass.
Former Representative Bob Williams certainly overestimated the moral fiber of future legislators.
The truth is that a great deal is off the board. And protecting the Ruling Class from having to make those decisions is what political expediency is all about.
Let’s look at two options available to the legislature that are almost certainly off the board.
First, let’s eliminate the Liquor Control Board. Selling liquor is not an appropriate government function and doing so costs the state at least $140 million dollars annually. If the state closed its liquor stores and privatized liquor sales, it could still collect revenue from liquor sales through taxes, but would save about a quarter of the projected deficit by offloading operating expenses.
And that’s only the legal, above board improvement that we could expect. In addition, Washington would be freed from the corruption and inefficiency of the Liquor Control Board. In 2002, the Liquor Control Board was found to have misplaced $421 million. To my knowledge, the money has not yet been accounted for. In 2001, the Liquor Control Board spent $31 million constructing a useless distribution warehouse. Audits have also discovered overpayments and outright fraudulent payments to wholesale distributors.
So why do we still have a Liquor Control Board? The employees of the LCB are state employees and public employee unions exist to protect the jobs of their members by paying off politicians. The roughly 1300 LCB employees only have to pay a fraction of their dues to keep the LCB in the state’s budget.
Another item that’s off the table is repeal of a law that requires that all state construction go to unionized contractors. This depletes state coffers in two ways. First, the state is guaranteed to overpay for building construction. Contracts do not go to the lowest bidder. They go to those companies that will funnel a portion of their take back into Democratic campaign war chests through union dues. In addition, to keep the public trough full for these contractors, the legislature and governor have a vested interest in overbuilding. This costs tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions.
Governor Gregoire has operated a gangster government that has as its first priority the perpetuation of her party’s grip on power. Perhaps the most flagrant example of her corruption was the deal she struck with Indian casinos that exempted them from having to pay $140 million dollars annually to the state. In exchange the Washington Democratic Party received $650,000 from the tribes.
Serving the public good and giving taxpayers a good deal is definitely off the table.
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