In Our View: More Band-Aids

Already the campaign boast is forming on the lips of legislators: “Hey, at least we didn’t increase the state sales tax!” This carries all of the artificiality of the absurd claim heard earlier this year, “Whew! At least we managed to fight back any efforts to create a state income tax!”

Unfortunately for Washingtonians, too many descriptions of this year’s legislative session (and special session) begin with the stale pretension: “At least we didn’t have to (fill in the blank).” But failure avoidance is not why voters send legislators to Olympia. Politicians are expected to do more than just plug fingers into fiscal dikes. This year presented a grand opportunity for the Democratic-controlled Legislature to make state government more efficient through innovative reform. That chance, though, has been squandered. Last week as lawmakers thrashed their way deeper into the budget briar patch, Senate Democrats finally abandoned their desire to increase the state sales tax. Originally they proposed a hike of three-tenths of a cent; that was reduced to two-tenths of a cent last month, then to one-tenth of a cent last Monday. On Wednesday, the idea was dropped altogether.

As of Friday afternoon, legislators were still finalizing an $800 million tax package as the clock ticked more rapidly. Tuesday will be the last day of the 30-day special session, which was called after a 60-day regular session produced no plan for overcoming a $2.8 billion budget shortfall.

The crucial question, of course, is: Why did it take Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown and other Senate Democrats so long to give up on their proposed sales tax increase? The direction legislators were moving later in the week was slightly more positive — actually “less awful” is a better description — only because proposed tax increases were more tightly focused. Ideas include tax increases on beer (excluding microbrews), soda pop, candy, gum, cigarettes and bottled water, all of which would yield almost $262 million, and a business-tax surcharge on service businesses, which would generate about $245 million. Certain exemptions would apply to some businesses and manufacturers.

Most of these increases are temporary and would expire on June 30, 2013. The Washington State Budget & Policy Center points out that 43 percent of the proposed revenue agreement would be temporary, and the center presents this fact as positive news: “Temporarily raising revenue is a reasonable approach given the depths of the recession and the $3.6 billion cut in last year’s budget.” But we disagree. The lingering recession is the worst time to increase any taxes. In fact, the temporary nature of the tax increases disguises a greater problem: the legislators’ desperate attempt — likely driven by the timing of this year’s elections — to slap Band-Aids on budget wounds. Because reform proposals were ignored this year, and because most economic experts say recovering from the Great Recession will take years, more revenue shortfalls will haunt legislators later.

And then, frantic budget writers will justifiably complain that, back in 2010, the governor or the Legislature could’ve declared a fiscal emergency and renegotiated public-employee contracts as allowed by law, but they didn’t. They could’ve privatized state liquor sales and other aspects of state government, but they didn’t.

Instead, they just kicked the deficit can farther down the road. Same old can, same old road, same old problems that will bubble up again in years to come.