Wash. Dems ignore calls for reform

This week, the Washington state Legislature is burning the midnight oil to reconcile House and Senate versions of the budget for 2011-2013. Though differing in details that may need to be resolved in a special session, each version arrives at the same answer for a $2.8 billion deficit: raising taxes by at least $600 million. With the deep recession lingering in our state, that’s the wrong answer.

A last-minute budgetary crisis wasn’t our only alternative. From the late 1980s to the present, successive Republican reformers — Bob Williams, Linda Smith, Joe Zarelli, and Dino Rossi, to name some of the most prominent — have argued passionately for a thorough restructuring of our state’s spending. This approach has repeatedly, and rightfully, been praised by recent Columbian editorials, including the Feb. 27 “Cheers & Jeers.” But during a decade of one-party, liberal control of the state’s budget, reform has been set aside in favor of an easier way out: more spending.

In a Feb. 27 interview, Rep. Jaime Herrera (R-Camas), stressed the long-term roots of our state’s budget problems. “The question isn’t ‘what would you cut?’ It’s, ‘what do we change through reform and government restructuring?’”

Herrera points to repeated ballot measures through which Washington state voters have demanded that their legislators control and reform spending. Voters passed Initiative 62 in 1979, I- 601 in 1993, and I-960 in 2007. Yet, she says, Democratic lawmakers don’t get the message. Herrera was a key player in the recent Republican effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to stave off Democrat-led suspension of key features of I-960 to allow for a large tax increase.

Extracting $600 million or more from the private sector and putting it into government coffers will do nothing to moderate the upward trajectory of state spending or to shrink government. “More taxes will only put more people out of work,” says Herrera.

GOP ideas

Gov. Chris Gregoire shares the blame, Herrera believes, for the lack of leadership to control spending. Last December, Gregoire’s priority was attendance at the Copenhagen international conference on climate change, where she argued for expensive and unproven solutions to global warming. On Feb. 24, Gregoire hastened to sign the I-960 suspension measure into law over Republican objections.

Herrera credits Sen. Joe Zarelli (R-Ridgefield) as a “constant voice for reforming spending.” GOP Ways and Means Committee leader Zarelli, in a Feb. 24 joint statement with Senate Minority leader Mike Hewitt, stated that “now that people are seeing the magnitude of the majority’s proposed tax increases and realizing how they would … slow our economic recovery, they’re upset, and rightfully so, because it didn’t have to be this way.”

In their statement, Zarelli and Hewitt catalog dozens of GOP proposals, including “Ten Ideas for Structural Reform” dated April 10, 2009, for efficiencies that would reduce spending permanently. The reforms outlined in detail include higher-education access, basic health plan reform, general assistance-unemployable reform, B&O tax-exemption for new businesses, “put extraordinary revenue growth into rainy day fund”, and others. In February, 2009, the GOP championed “Twenty Ideas That Will Save $810 million,” to no avail.

It didn’t have to be this way, with House and Senate bickering over the magnitude of huge tax increases. Some of those in control appear to want government expansion at any cost. The proof came on March 4, when thanks to quick media contacts by Sen. Don Benton (R-Vancouver), drive-time radio listeners to KPAM’s Victoria Taft Show heard Democratic leaders in Olympia plotting a state income tax. In their view, the financial crisis is an “opportunity too good to pass up.”

Voters must reject such cynicism in favor of leaders with passionate commitment to spending reform.

Ann Donnelly, a Vancouver businesswoman, is a former chair of the Clark County Republican Party. E-mail: adonnelly7@comcast.net.