Two Major Newspapers to Governor: No Sale On Tax Hikes

The News Tribune and Seattle Times editorial boards both write on the governor's budget today. Read both editorials in full. Both papers remain unconvinced that new taxes should be the answer to the current shortfall.

Here's the Tacoma paper's take on it.

Gov. Chris Gregoire – and other Democratic leaders, no doubt – are hoping her neo-Dickensian spending plan for the remainder of the biennium will make the case for a tax increase of perhaps $700 million.

They’ve still got a lot of selling to do.

They note that the governor's proposal hits the poor hard, while protecting public employee compensation. Acknowledging that collective bargaining agreements pose a problem, the edit board nonetheless argues for reform.

What are they looking for?

Carefully targeted increases might prove necessary in the end, but lawmakers should first look hard – very hard – for a plan that bleeds the public sector a little more and the people on the margins a lot less.

The Times considers the governor's current revenue budget a good starting point. Though they find some of her cuts unacceptable, they suggest others. As with The News Tribune, the Times sees imbalance in the treatment of state employee compensation.

The cuts the governor has not made, but should, are in raises and health-care benefits for state employees. They have already lost cost-of-living increases, which weren't much anyway, but about one-third of employees still get "step" increases. These should be frozen. When the state is cutting money for schools, hospitals, kindergarten and everything else, it cannot afford any raises.

Nor can it afford to keep to the formula that employees pay only 12 percent of medical premiums. That percentage needs to rise to 20 percent, a figure still well below that of the private sector.

Here's the crux, from the Times editorial:

State government as constituted today is more than the people can afford.

I suspect the people agree.