Taxation isn’t the best way to get revenue

It’s one thing to “rail against taxes” (“Vashon supports education; Olympia needs to, as well,” Feb. 16); it’s a completely different thing to express legitimate concern over large tax increases imposed over a short period of time — something the Tim Eyman-orchestrated initiative, I-960, was designed to control.

It’s one thing to “rail against taxes” (“Vashon supports education; Olympia needs to, as well,” Feb. 16); it’s a completely different thing to express legitimate concern over large tax increases imposed over a short period of time — something the Tim Eyman-orchestrated initiative, I-960, was designed to control.

Most of us understand the cost of doing business and the price of living in a civilized society. Some of us understand it better than others because we have paid that price with more than just our taxes.

Property owners on Vashon recently received their 2010 tax bills in which the property tax levy rate increased from approximately $8.50 to $10.50, a nearly 19 percent increase in one year.

Most property owners, however, didn’t experience the full increase in their property tax because the majority, if not all, assessed property values declined. You would like to think that when your property value goes down, so would your property tax, but that was not the case on Vashon this year. In fact, some property owners saw their taxes increase by more than 12 percent. I’m sure most of us wish that our income would increase at that rate.

A review of a typical Vashon property tax bill revealed the following percentage increases to the levy rates from 2009 to 2010: State +4.44 percent; local school +29.51 percent; county +7.56 percent; roads +11.18 percent; port +1.30 percent; fire +1.16 percent; flood +6.11 percent; library +6.93 percent; and EMS +1.16 percent.

We all have to manage and balance our personal budgets by controlling spending, and we seem to do a much better job at it than our state representatives do at managing the state’s budget. What’s hard to understand is how our state representatives can increase expenditures by almost $16 billion a year, from 2005 until now, and then complain that there’s now a $2.6 billion shortfall in the state’s current budget.

For some of them, their immediate outcry is that taxes must be increased, or essential services will have to be cut. But what’s really causing the shortfall? If you believe their rhetoric, it’s the increased cost of essential services. But is it really? What new programs have been added and funded since 2005?

Think about it. When you have a shortage of income to support your personal budget, do you start by cutting out essential items such as food, housing or clothing? Of course not. If forced to, you start by cutting non-essential expenditures, such as eating out, vacations and recreational trips.

Then why is it that our state representatives, in order to support their increases in spending, start by threatening cuts to essential services, such as schools, law enforcement and emergency services? It’s a rhetorical question — because if they threatened to cut items in the state budget that were added since 2005, it probably wouldn’t instill the fear in us that they need to support their increased spending.   

I believe that all taxpayers support increasing revenue, but there are better ways to do it than imposing large increases in our taxes over a short period in time. It makes you wonder what they’re planning for future tax increases now that they’ve set aside I-960. The thought scares me.

— John Cushing is a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel and a Boeing employee who works on computer-based pilot training.