Gary Locke's social re-engineering

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Gary Locke is again at his liberal best. The "rebate" plan is another example of "liberal re-elect me social engineering" without doing anything really meaningful

-- Mick Remington (remslydog@msn.com), December 17, 1999

Answers

Actually, it's a game attempt to continue a big government agenda. He wants to continue to collect the taxes with the promise of giving some of the money back (after administrative expenses) if we ever really get so prosperous that he can't think of ways to spend it, while attempting to let the air out of the tires of anyone proposing meaningful property tax reform by giving everybody $27 if they will avoid any meaningful changes in the underlying STRUCTURE of property tax reform. It is a classic plan to accept a short term small loss to avoid a long term large loss. I am sure he wishes he had done this with I-695. A fatal flaw, however, is the lack of ANY plan to address the traffic congestion issue. This leaves the field wide open for Eyman's traffic improvement initiative. The only way something as inherently nonsensical as Sound Transit passed, after multiple previous failures going back to the Forward Thrust days, was that the traffic situation was allowed to get terrible, and no other alternative was given. Locke's setting up the same sort of case. Even if people aren't all that sure that the Eyman plan is all that great, it's "any port in a storm) time.

-- Mark Stilson (mark842@hotmail.com), December 17, 1999.

An interesting topic to say the least. . .

I'm wearing my tinfoil hat (FWIW I usually leave it at home in my bunker) and I've have come up with two ideas on this topic (one generally mimics yours):

1) he has it on good opinion that I-695 will be invalidated by the courts (in the interests of disclosure, I have no opinion on what the court will do). He's trying to put something in place that looks good for the next election. All in all, it would be a low-risk public relations maneuver.

FWIW, I don't find this particularly insidious. It's certainly meaningless, but it's not dastardly.

2) He thinks I-695's implementation will be allowed by the courts and he wishes to cut the budget deep enough now to basically force the need for tax increases in the future. At this point, it will be easier to push an income tax on Washington's voters. This is certainly the high-risk strategy.

=================opinion======================

In general, I'd say option #1 (or a variant) is the more likely choice.

-- Brad (knotwell@my-deja.com), December 17, 1999.


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