More on Governor's Budget and Taxes

Don Brunell's column today addresses the stark choices required to balance the state budget.

Gov. Gregoire rightly points out that each statistic in the state budget represents a real person. Similarly, each tax and fee hike also takes money out of the pockets of a real person — the taxpayer — who is struggling to get by.

The decisions will be gut-wrenching, but these are hard times.

At the Washington Policy blog, Jason Mercier notes the deficit beyond this deficit, a $2.8 billion problem in 2011-13.

Senate majority leader Lisa Brown applauds the call for new revenues. 

It’s clear that more revenue is needed to avoid putting our values, our future, and real people at risk. We cannot afford to slash funding for rural school districts, financial aid, early childhood education, children’s health care and care for those with developmental disabilities – to name only a few examples. The Governor has said that this is the first book in a series of two. Like many others, I eagerly await the sequel.

Bad news in Rasmussen Reports polling for those hoping the states will get more federal stimulus money. 

...a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 22% of Americans favor providing federal bailout funds to states with serious financial problems. Fifty-eight percent (58%) oppose giving bailout money to financially troubled states.

Finally, check out this graph showing the rising number of Americans with zero tax liability.

There were an additional 15 million people in 2007 who did not earn enough income to file a tax return, bringing the total number of Americans who paid no federal income taxes to more than 61 million, or 39 percent of the tax-eligible population (158 million including filers plus non-filers).

Tax Foundation economist Scott Hodge reports that “the percentage of tax returns with no liability was fairly low in the 1960s (only 16 percent in 1969) and again in the early 1980s (17.9 percent in 1984). A record had been set every year since 2002, as tax cuts throughout the Bush years, especially the refundable child tax credit, pushed low-to-middle income people off the tax rolls.”

Much is often made of the regressive nature of Washington's tax structure.The highly progressive federal tax system largely offsets the generally regressive state-local tax structures. States that rely overmuch on taxing the rich tend to lose the rich, as Maryland found recently.

Something to keep in mind as we, to borrow Brown's phrase, await the sequel.