Tag Archives: Initiative 1107

Washington State Anti-Tax Initiatives and the Shrinking of Public Services

Posted on October 28th, 2010 | Comments Off on Washington State Anti-Tax Initiatives and the Shrinking of Public Services

Conservative anti-tax proponents pushing initiatives like I-1053 and I-1107 on this year’s Washington State ballot are pushing lies about our ever-expanding state government.  The fact is that the percentage of our state’s resources (as measured by collective personal income) devoted to public services like education and health care for seniors and children continues to decline.

The following is taken from a post by the Washington State Budget and Policy Center and deserves wide distribution to help educate the public:

Despite the claims being made by Initiative 1107 and Initiative 1053’s proponents, Washington actually devotes a smaller share of its resources to public services like education and health care than a decade ago. And given the magnitude of the recession, the state will likely continue to devote a smaller share of its economy to public services than before.

Typically, economists measure changes in government spending over time by analyzing how much of a state’s total personal income – or the sum of its collective resources – goes for public services. But as the graph below shows:

•The share of our resources that are spent on education, health care, public safety, and other important services has actually dropped since the late-1990s;

•As of June 2010, state spending in the current 2009-11 biennium is projected to fall to about 5.4 percent of total personal income in Washington – lower than the 6 percent share that went for public priorities the late-1990s.

This percentage will decline even further due to the recently-announced, 6.3 percent across-the-board budget cuts.

In other words, a smaller share of our collective resources is going to public priorities like educating our kids or providing health care than before.

And it is declining.

The post adds a link to get more detailed information. See the full report by Andy Nichols entitled Budget Claims Lack Context, Belie Deep and Painful Cuts. 

I urge Washington Voters to vote No on Tim Eyman and Oil Industry giant BP’s Initiative 1053 – which would give 17 out of 147 Washington State Legislators veto power over our state budget. Vote No on I-1107 which would repeal a short term tax on bottled water and soda. The American Beverage Industry is bankrolling this effort.
For more information on the initiatives on the November ballot go to http://www.protectwashington.org/ and http://www.stopgreed.org/.

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AARP Opposes Initiatives 1053 and 1107.

Posted on October 13th, 2010 | Comments Off on AARP Opposes Initiatives 1053 and 1107.

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is opposing Tim Eyman and British Petroleum’s Initiative 1053 and the American Beverage Industry’s Initiative 1107. Both measures are based on greed, namely that large corporations are unwilling to help Washington citizens fund basic public services but are instead intent on increasing corporate profit. And they hope that the public is gullible enough to believe it is about reducing taxes for the average taxpayer. It’s not.

As AARP notes:

Out-of-state special interests are at it again. This November, Washington voters will be asked to vote on two initiatives that if passed, would lead to deep cuts to important services like health and long-term care for low income seniors and a quality education for our children and grandchildren.

Initiative 1107, funded by the American Beverage Association, and Initiative 1053, funded largely by out-of-state businesses like BP and big Wall Street banks, will threaten our state budget, cripple state government, and make it harder than ever to recover from the recession.

Times are tough enough already. In response to one of the worst economies in decades, we’ve already cut more than $4.4 billion from the state budget. As a result, 2,600 education jobs were eliminated, 44,000 people lost Basic Health Plan coverage, class sizes are soaring and college tuition has skyrocketed by nearly 30 percent.

Initiatives 1107 and 1053 would only make things worse. Further cuts will seriously harm the things that we value – more cuts in health care means more expensive emergency room use, and more cuts in education hurts our kids for generations to come.

Initiative 1053 is an attempt by large corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. They want to bank their profits and have the rest of us taxpayers pay for their cost of doing business in our state.

The Big Oil Companies like BP and Tesoro and Conoco Phillips paid for getting signatures to put I-1053 on the ballot. They did not do so to lower costs to average middle class taxpayers. They did so to try to make it impossible to allow Legislators to require them to help pay for cleaning up stormwater runoff polluted with the oil products they sell. They want you to believe I-1053 will lower your taxes, really all it will do is shift the tax burden and environmental health costs onto the citizens of Washington while Big Oil laughs all the way to the bank.

Vote NO on 1053 and make the Big Oil Companies pay the cost of cleaning up their waste before they bank their corporate profits taken out of our pocketbooks. Vote No on 1107.

Both measures are on the Nov 2, 2010 General Election Ballot in Washington State.

for additional information see:

http://www.stopgreed.org/

http://www.protectwashington.org/

http://www.voteno1053.com/

http://www.voteno1107.com/

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