Specter of Taxman threatens to snatch away American dream

Lucinda Wingard

guest columnist

For weeks I’ve tried to write a column about our beautiful parks, but each time I sat down at my desk, the specter of taxes grabbed my imagination. Forgive me, I’m still held in its bony clutches.

One inspiration for a parks column was Ken Burns’ magnificent documentary on the national parks. I hope you saw the entire series. Aside from enjoying the gorgeous scenery and correspondingly idealistic prose, I learned a lot about American history. Much of it concerned the dramatic dispute over taxes spent to purchase and maintain our parks system.

Without taxes, of course, there would be no parks, but in these hard times, how do parks rank in the list of spending priorities? In our community, we must congratulate “Preserve Our Parks” for a successful campaign to make Kopachuck and Joemma Beach state parks priorities for this fiscal year. A stopgap solution was found to keep them open, but I doubt this is the end of the debate.

I asked myself why every benevolent impulse our collective mind has — for parks, for universal health care, for education — gets engulfed in a fight over taxes. (Strangely, when we debate whether to make war, it’s unpatriotic to have a cost-benefit discussion, but that’s another column altogether.)

When the family discusses its budget, we ask what our spending priorities should be and how we are going to get the money. We solve budget shortfalls by:

Delaying expenditures

Borrowing for things that can’t be delayed

Increasing our income

That’s exactly what our government does, and, you guessed it, the third option means revising the tax system and collecting more money — from us.

Whoops, there’s the boogeyman. There’s the government putting my budget out of whack. It’s time to do some research.

A 2002 study by the Washington State Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy placed our state’s tax system as the most regressive in the nation. A second non-partisan study by the League of Women Voters in 2004 agreed.

“Our state has the unhappy distinction of being one of the 10 worst states in the union in the area of tax fairness because our system is so regressive. The lowest 20 percent of taxpayers contribute nearly 18 percent of family income to state taxes, while the top 1 percent contribute less than 4 percent of family income, and the next 4 percent contribute less than 6 percent of family income to state taxes.”

The LWV study concluded that, “tax revenues are considerably more volatile than the economy, that is, tax revenues grow faster than the economy in good economic times and contract more than the economy in poor economic times.”

Well, aren’t we just living through that scenario.

Two weeks ago, Gov. Christine Gregoire announced she expects to face another $1 billion budget shortfall in January. The studies warned us:

“Washington’s demographics are changing. The lower income sector of the population is growing faster than other sectors, leading to higher costs for education, health and human services, and public safety. Our population also is aging, leading to higher health care costs and costs for infrastructure support, such as public transportation and handicapped access. These added demands on government put pressure on state and local budgets” (LWV, 2004).

That means the Preserve Our Parks movement, for example, is doomed — unless a new source of revenue is found.

New circumstances require new strategies, so the family makes new priorities and decides where there can be no further cuts. Someone takes a second job or works longer hours.

People can look for more work; the government must levy higher taxes. General hue and cry is predictable.

Some political conservatives (who intend to starve the ravenous government into submission) imply that all taxes are evil and tell a classic Halloween story of how government is some kind of Headless Entity — run by ghouls, not us citizens — intent on ripping our hidden nest eggs right out from under our mattresses. The Tim Eyman-backed Initiative 1033 is a prime example of pandering to our baser, selfish instincts and hiding the unacceptable long-term consequences.

It’s no surprise that voters argue vehemently over government spending, but let’s arm ourselves with facts in this debate rather than scary Halloween stories. I recommend reading the Washington State League of Women Voters studies on taxes, including a fascinating history of why we depend so heavily on property taxes, and the Washington State Tax Structure Study of November 2002, both easily accessible online.

I hope we can cool the rhetoric, banish the banshees and demonstrate that we value our neighbors’ well-being as much as our own.

Let’s support efforts to find more equitable tax revenues.

Lucinda Wingard is a guest columnist for The Peninsula Gateway. She can be reached by e-mail at wingardjl@comcast.net.