One Gazette reader who wrote in response to my last column “Voter Count Counts” stopped short of saying, “What’s wrong with you people in Sequim!” Instead she denounced the “tyranny of the minority” and suggested that some in the community adopt the motto, “If I don’t do it, it ain’t worth doin’.”
Wow, that’s a gut puncher; makes those who didn’t vote or voted against SARC and the school bond sound like self-interested individuals who really don’t care if children have safe schools or adults and children have a community pool.
She went on to explain that she and her husband were planning a move to Sequim and were actively looking for a home. That Sequim had a lap pool was among the reasons they selected Sequim.
Now SARC has closed and, if this couple happened to need the two by four to the side of the head approach, the owner of one of the homes they are looking into was selling because the community no longer has a pool.
Commenting that they might be another loss to the community, she answered her own question with undisguised disillusionment, “OK, no big loss, right?!”
Wow, there it was again, reference to the great uncaring minority who rule.
The unhappy writer ended with an offer of help and wanted to know who to contact. I sent her contact information and said I hoped they would come; that we could no doubt use her.
Minority rule and Butterfly Effect
I also heard from a Gazette reader who answered my column mind wonderings into minority rule by calling it the “Butterfly Effect” of Washington’s regressive tax system and sent along the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy ITEP website to make the point (www.itep.org/whopays/).
The website ranks Washington the most, as in No. 1, unfair in maintaining income equality, which I read to mean that the gap between low and high incomes grows even larger due to the regressive nature of tax policy. Is that an honor?
A table of family income, excluding the elderly, shows that families with an annual income of less than $21,000-$65,000 — that would be 60 percent of families counted in the table —pay between 10.1 and 16.8 percent of their income in taxes. Those families with an annual income of $197,000-$507,000 — that would be 7 percent of families included in the table — pay 2.4 to 4.6 percent of their income in taxes.
Washington seems to practice the tax rule that tax revenue should come from the majority of income earners and spenders. In some ways that makes sense, but does that have to mean that the more money you make, the less you should pay?
Apparently it means just that in Washington primarily due to its dependence on state sales tax instead of state income tax. We know that some people come to our state because we don’t generally have droughts, never hurricanes and no income tax.
Tim Eyman, initiative entrepreneur, seeks to raise our most unfair ranking in nearly every election. He serves and profits from those who assume no responsibility beyond their gates and claim to be exploited by those that might benefit from services such as education and health care. And Eyman wins every time. That’s most unfair!
Since this website has put me in a mood to embarrass the state, I will post two little known reasons our state ranks high in having the most regressive tax system.
Washington enacted a refundable Earned Income Tax Credit, but lawmakers have failed to provide funding for the credit and fail to provide a property tax “circuit breaker” credit for low-income non-elderly taxpayers.
Final reader words (for now) on pools and schools
Yet another reader reminded me not to forget the City of Sequim’s “vigorous campaign against the SARC Metropolitan Park District (MPD) vote in August and that the city said it would “save the day with their own MPD.” The reader went on to point out that the city shelved its MPD plans “shortly after they helped kill SARC,” the reader’s not so subtle gut punch to the city in explaining the pool’s closure.
The failure of the school bond triggered another reader to dip into Dickens for a remedy. The reader points out that the community simply doesn’t respond to the notion that Sequim schools ought to be at least as safe and technologically set up as McDonald’s.
Instead he proposes that “schools run with the ‘Please sir, I want some more?’ as illustrated in Oliver Twist, approach to school funding” and sent along a drawing of what could be students on treadmills producing power for class computers.
I started this column about the reader who may not move to our community due to the pool closure and will end it with telling you about a family who is disrupting their lives so their child will receive the education they think the child needs in order to succeed. Maybe they will join the physician that moved from the community several years ago for the same reason. It seems these families didn’t think the school or the community can get itself together.
Thank you readers.
Paris Redux 9-1-1 Part 2 Postscript: “Nous pleurons avec vous, nos amis Paris.”
Bertha D. Cooper is retired from a 40-plus year career as a health care administrator focusing on the delivery system as a whole. She still does occasional consulting. She is a featured columnist at the Sequim Gazette. Reach her at columnists@sequimgazette.com.
