Washington Initiative 1098 - Vote No

This one is for my Washington state readers. Folks, we have a job and prosperity killer aimed at our heads right now. It's known as Initiative 1098, which would create an income tax in Washington state if passed, coming to your ballot this November.

The "yes" on 1098 folks are inflating the impact of one part of their initiative - the property tax reduction - in an attempt to mislead people into falling for class warfare BS. Your total property tax bill will not decrease by 20%; it will only drop about 4.5% (and Olympia can just raise it again).

What KOMO failed to get into in this piece is that everyone, no matter how large or small their paycheck, will still have money withheld all year long, and you technically won't "pay" the tax ONLY AFTER you file a return and get it all back. That means you still are out the money all year long anyway, and you still have to pay the same "regressive" sales taxes you do now with less take-home pay and fewer job opportunities.

It also cannot be said enough that after two years go by, Olympia can change the law established by any initiative. If they are given the power to tax income, two years from now they can change the law so that "the rich" will mean "anyone earning money in this state."

Finally, bear in mind that a state cannot print money, only the Feds can do that. One day you will get an IOU in the mail instead of a refund check when the idiots in Olympia spend every dime before actual receipts are counted (they budget based on PROJECTIONS - never forget that!). It has happened before to hundreds of thousands of people living in other states that have income taxes, and since our pack of clowns in Olympia have already run this state into the red, it will happen here.

Vote "no" on 1098 in November. Don't let Olympia into your wallet!

To watch the KOMO video, click here.

You Can't See This Post...

..unless you're on my RSS feed, at least.

Paulezimmerman.com is in the midst of a domain registration transfer, which is mostly completed as I type this. I moved the domain from Yahoo! to GoDaddy.com (I took advantage of the Go Daddy $7.49 .com Sale!), which will cut down the overhead of this blog by around 270%. Right now anyone trying to view the blog is getting an error message, but once that clears up, this has been why!

Thanks for reading!

You Can't Pay Stupid Away

A topic of perpetual fascination for me is the frequent self-destruction of people who suddenly and unexpectedly acquire monetary wealth. This can happen a number of ways, but the fastest version is that of lottery winners.

I don't take pleasure in seeing and reading about their fall. Rather, it's the repeated warning that these folks send out to those of us who are listening that I appreciate. If you see Icarus fly high and then plummet as the sun melts his wax wings, over and over again, you'll probably remember not to do the same and never suffer the consequences of that mistake. I know for a fact that were I ever to find myself to be the owner of a winning lottery ticket that I absolutely would not end up like these folks do; my story would be a mirror opposite of theirs.

This particular article, Jackpot Winners Just As Likely To Go Bust contains a suggestion of a related problem, that of redistributive government programs:

The study has policy implications for governments deciding how to help heavily indebted people who are struggling during economic downturns, Hoekstra says. It appears the simplest solution -- giving them cash -- doesn't enhance longer-term financial stability, and only postpones, rather than avoids, bankruptcy. The lottery findings are consistent with a 2007 research paper that showed consumers initially used their 2001 federal rebate checks to reduce debt, but eventually debt returned to its pre-rebate level.

"Our research suggests that perhaps there is something more systematic about the types of people who get themselves into financial trouble -- and the appropriate policy prescription for helping them out is going to be considerably more complex than giving them additional resources," says Hoekstra. [emphasis mine]

This is precisely what governments everywhere generally do: just hand over the money. This is to hand out fish, not teach the recipients how to catch their own, so to speak. We subsidize dependency rather than teach self-reliance. The latter essentially has a fixed cost in that a person trained to be self-reliant eventually requires no additional expenditures to get up to speed, while the upkeep of the dependent is open-ended and grows in cost over time. Eventually more people end up riding in the cart than there are people pulling it, the productive are swallowed up by the non-producers, and then everyone falls.