But she doesn’t listen. I knew she wouldn’t and that is why I didn’t vote for her.
What the hell am I talking about? Barely Governor Gregoire’s Washington State budget department has discovered that the state is running a surplus of $1.4 Billion dollars. Of course, being a Democrat, she believes that the money now belongs to the state and not to the taxpayers from whom it was ripped from and proposes to spend $500 Million of it as soon as she can get away with it on extending her powerbase and paying for some pet projects.
On what, exactly?
State contribution to pension funds: $49 million
Increase WorkFirst spending, subsidized child care for people on welfare: $46 million
Complete prisoner tracking computer system: $11 million
Additional K-12 spending to help students who fail all or part of the WASL standardized test: $39 million
Other increases in K-12 spending: $17 million
Create a new Department of Early Learning: $2 million
Higher education increases: $6 million
Puget Sound cleanup initiative: $1 million
Create state-subsidized program to encourage development of biofuels: $18 million
Other economic-development spending increases: $6 million
Expansion of state psychiatric hospitals: $8 million
Miscellaneous increased spending: $22 million
An additional $281 million would cover cost increases such as growth in public school enrollment and health care caseloads.
Oh look, $22 mil for “miscellaneous spending�.
Lose a dollar in Iraq and the left goes nuts, but let a Democrat governor set aside $22 million for party favors and they’re just fine with that.
And we can see why: Biofuel is getting $18 million and then there is the part that totally fixated local leftie media; a whole one million to ‘clean up Puget sound’. I swear, for close to three days after this proposal was announced, that was their major talking point “Oh look, good guvner gregoire is going to make sea otters happy!� I bet that they barely get a single beach cleaned up before they run out of money. But it sells well!
The boondoggle new ‘Dept of Early Learning’ got barely a mention, mostly because no one knows what the hell it is. And I heard not a word on the bogus ‘prisoner tracking system’ that hasn’t even had parameters set for it yet. But that is OK because I can guarantee you that both of their price tags will double before they’re up and running. Hell, the new ‘Dept of Early Learning’ workers will probably demand a special new building dedicated just to them shortly after their ordering process for new furniture starts, causing not just the construction of a new building, but a whole new furniture order because the previous stuff just won’t work in the new building, you know.
But the fun doesn’t stop there; from the remaining $900 million she wants $464 Million to go for even more education and healthcare expenses for 2007 and yet another $127 Million to drop in the state pension craphole next year. I hope to write about the pension system later this week along with the WASL tests that’ll show you why those numbers in this budget will probably triple.
In earthquake prone western Washington, she only wants to set $113 Million aside in an ‘emergency reserve’, which is a pittance compared to what she’s dumping into the other pet projects. Not that it matters, she’ll be cowering under her desk proclaiming Bush to be the cause for our troubles if the big one we’re due for hits.
She’s not going to spend a dime of it on getting the various election departments in this state up to par so that we don’t have another messed up Governor’s Election 2005. She will not fully fund the Washington State Parks System (which hasn’t been fully funded in over a decade) and most definitely, she will not return all or part of the money to the taxpayers.
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Let’s do a statistical breakdown of those taxpayers:
In 2003, the census bureau found that there were just over 6.1 Million people in the state of Washington. I’ll give the state the benefit of the doubt and say that in two years, we’ve increased the population to 6.2 million. If you subtract 25% for the under 18 crowd, you have just about 4.6 million tax paying adults in the state. Divide the 1.4 billion equally between the 4.6 million people and everybody gets just over $300.
Yes, the high income earners who consume more and who pay more taxes would get less than they paid and the unemployed and working poor would get more, but we’re trying to keep the numbers easy to work with here, OK?
In fact, let us figure that this is exactly how the state would give the money back; could you imagine what a person who is struggling to made ends meet could do with an extra $300? Pay bills, buy better food, put gas in the car, hell, fix the car!
While the wife and I are fixed pretty firmly in the middle class, I can tell you that that is exactly what the wife would do with the money; she’s got some weird emissions problem that I can’t figure out. First I changed the usual suspects: the O2 sensor and the EGR. While they helped neither of those totally fixed the problem and she had to pay an extra $150 to have a certified shop look into it and she still failed her emissions test. Maybe we’ll take the car to the shop in February after things settle down to get them to have another go at it again. Luckily, it is only her commuter car that gets 12 miles a day put on it, so we’re not exactly worrying about it.
But a working single mother with the same problem would probably worry about it good deal.
Me, I’d probably buy guns and ammo. But either way, both of our purchases would put nearly 9% of their respective prices right back into the Governor’s coffers in sales taxes, so she could still be happy.
Taking a different look at it, if we just use the figure of the $500 million she is going to dump into the government pit this year and run the previous population numbers on it, there would be just over $100 bucks going back to everyone and Gregiore would still have her precious $900 million to set in the bank for the 2007 budget.
But this is all just ‘crazy talk’ to the Washington State Democrats, who never saw a program or department they couldn’t fund by grabbing my wallet.
I can guaranfukintee you that the idea of giving the people of the state some of their money back never even crossed her mind. It’s the government’s money, after all. The people would only waste it.
AK, remember when “creative accounting” left Gov. Locke in a similar position in the late 90s? He blew the money and the next year we were deep in defecit again? Yep, same deal. These idiots just want to increase spending and bump the state government expenditures up a few notches at every chance. Fuck them.
In Oregon, we have the same brand of liberal moonbats running the state, but we have the “Kicker” law. Oregon has no sales tax, and gets most of it’s operating money from the huge income tax, up to 8.9% on top of Fed tax. Local gov’t snivel but get by on the outrageous property taxes.
The “Kicker” law says that when income projections exceed expenditure projections, the state MUST return the money, and they do. My kicker checks average $250 (every other year, against the $4400 I usually pay in state income tax).
We put the kicker law in by initiative about 20 years ago, and every year the (D)onks wail and gnash their teeth over it and propose getting rid of it, but it if went, so would the Legislators who scrubbed it, so it stays.
One account I read summed it up as 504 million bucks, and FIVE HUNDRED new state employees! The 504 mill. is bad enough, but once that’s gone it’s gone, but the employees keep costing, and costing, and costing…….
…..Mr. C.