A high-earners income tax passed by the Washington Senate Monday would quickly be expanded to the middle class if it makes it through the Legislature this session, says Sen. Leonard Christian, R-Spokane Valley.
Senate Bill 6346, approved 27-22, sets up a case that could overturn 93 years of legal precedents in Washington state giving voters the right to decide whether they want an income tax. The measure would impose a 9.9 percent income tax on Washington state with a deduction for the first $1 million of income.
Christian noted that the bill already applies to everyone in the state.
“They claim it’s a millionaires’ tax, but it’s not,” Christian said during remarks on the Senate floor. “It’s a straight-out income tax. It just happens to have a standard deduction of $1 million.”
All it would take to extend the tax to the middle class is a simple majority vote to change the threshold, Christian said. He said he expects that to happen in short order – because the same thing has happened whenever an income tax has been imposed on the state and federal levels.
“This standard deduction that I read about, it is going to get changed, and we all will be paying that money before too long,” he said.
Christian joined all Republicans and three Democrats in voting against the bill, but they lacked the votes to derail the effort by to impose an income tax without a public vote. This new approach to the income tax is a recognition of the strong opposition from Washington voters. Since 1934, the people of Washington have voted against an income tax 10 times, most recently in 2010. Since that last defeat, legislative Democrats and allied special interest organizations have executed a strategy designed to shift the battle from the ballot to the courts.
Washington voters won the power to say yes or no in 1933, when the state Supreme Court decided that a graduated income tax is unconstitutional. To pass a constitutional amendment a vote of the people is required. But this time advocates of higher taxes aren’t asking. Instead they are making a court challenge inevitable by passing an income tax without a constitutional amendment. When the case reaches the state Supreme Court they hope to persuade it to overturn its 1933 ruling.
In remarks during Senate debate, Christian noted that his 4th Legislative District is adjacent to the Idaho border. As this state increases the tax burden, he said it has created a thriving shopping district at State Line, where gas is cheaper by a dollar or more and Washington laws do not apply. A new income tax would be passed on to consumers in Washington state and would only hasten the flight of retail business to Idaho, he said.
“I guess we’re blessed to live so close to the border, where we are able to fill up our tanks and get our ammo and all the other things we are not blessed to do in the Olympia area,” he said. “But what this is really doing is impacting small businesses in my area because they are losing the customers who go to Idaho.”