 Dear friends and neighbors,
I want to start by thanking everyone who came to our 27th district town hall on Saturday! It was great to connect with so many of you and hear from you about your priorities as we head into the last few weeks of this session. There were a number of questions we didn’t get to, but I’m hoping to cover some of those later in this e-newsletter and more in coming weeks. We’ve got 14 days left in this year’s legislative session and lots of important work to get through, including passing our budgets and making progress on our regressive, out-of-date tax code. |
|
|
This week we rolled out our House Supplemental Operating Budget proposal. What does that mean? Last year we wrote our budget for the biennium (two-year cycle), this year we’re making changes to that budget to reflect current revenue and needs for our state. These supplemental budgets are usually small changes to the budget from last year and don’t include significant new investments.
That’s even more true this year – we’re still facing rising costs as a state because of the Trump Administration’s tariffs and inflation, and on top of that we’re going to have to pay more in administrative costs to get less money from the federal government thanks to H.R. 1 passed by Republicans in Congress last year. And we’re doing all of this with a 90-year-old tax code that simply cannot meet the needs of our state. With that in mind we prioritized food, shelter, and health in this year’s budget.
 During the pandemic we were able to expand access to food assistance for families that need it most, and one of the most important things we did in the budget this year is protect that funding. That includes covering the cost for the 30,000 people that H.R. 1 kicked off of federal food assistance who are now covered by the state instead. One of the questions we couldn’t get to at the town hall was about restoring funding for reproductive health (asked by Laura) and we were able to restore that funding, too. Kerri asked about preserving tenant right to counsel funding and I’m proud to say that we maintained that funding at current levels, too.
That said, we did have to make cuts. That’s made harder by the fact that we combed the budget for any possible reductions last year, so the options we had left this year were all painful. We’ve had to cancel planned expansions of the Working Connections Child Care program and establish a new attendance program to right-size funding to childcare providers based on how often a child receives care. While we were able to add 2,000 more ECEAP slots thanks to a grant from the Ballmer Group, these cuts are still incredibly hard to stomach, and I’m hopeful that in better budget years we’ll be able to restore these programs. I mentioned that we’ll have to pay more to get less from the federal government thanks to H.R. 1. That price tag is more than $500 million over four years. This allows us to maintain services in some areas (food assistance), but in others it will only cover a portion of the people previously served by the federal government. We’re doing as much as we can to protect Washingtonians from the devastating impact of H.R. 1, but we simply don’t have the resources to backfill the services abandoned by Republicans in Congress. |
|
|
I mentioned that our 90-year-old tax code simply cannot meet the needs of our state. Our current tax code asks low-income Washingtonians to pay nearly 4x more in taxes than the wealthiest among us, relative to income. We need to do better.
That’s why I’m supporting a millionaires tax – a 9.9% income tax on households making more than a million dollars a year. The tax only applies to anything after one million dollars and doesn’t include assets like houses, investments, or personal property. Only about 209 households in the 27th Legislative district would pay the tax.
This funding would go towards K-12 education, healthcare, and higher education. And the proposal also significantly reshapes our tax code by expanding the Working Families Tax Credit – both increasing the credit and expanding who qualifies, by expanding tax credits for small businesses (by enough that many small businesses would no longer pay the Business and Occupation Tax), and removing the sales tax for grooming and hygiene products (such a soap and shampoo). This proposal is still working its way through the legislature and I expect that we’ll see additional changes to our regressive tax code by the time it passes off the House floor.