Bob Ferguson was a great attorney general. He did not hesitate to challenge Trump’s illegal orders and executive actions, stalling off some of Trump’s worst efforts to deny basic human rights to American citizens and residents. But we see a different Bob Ferguson as governor. He seems to think that our state and our country are facing a typical struggle between corporate lobbyists and advocates for human needs and education, between Republicans and Democrats negotiating “solutions,” between a fiscal shortfall and public services.
We are not in a typical struggle. The health and wellbeing of every single person in our state is imperiled by a federal government intent on taking away our rightful benefits and a state government that forecasts budget deficits with no funding solutions.
We need a Bob Ferguson like we had in 2017. We need a Bob Ferguson who stands up to and confronts Trump. We need a Bob Ferguson who will build the commonwealth of our state, enabling all of us to thrive, setting an example of what is possible as the federal government descends into a kleptocracy.
How do we enable a thriving citizenry? By providing health coverage, parks for recreation and escape into our natural environment, child care, and higher education. By meeting our state’s paramount constitutional duty for the education of all children. By building transit systems that get us out of our cars, by providing lunch and breakfasts to all students in all of our schools, so that all children can learn without hunger dulling their energy, intellect, and interest.
We will not build such a commonwealth of thriving citizens by cutting the budget here and there and finding efficiencies, as Ferguson has proposed. But we can turn Washington State’s social safety net into Swiss cheese with shortsighted cuts. Ferguson’s budget would hit a lot of important social programs hard. For example, it would:
- eliminate the employer child care assistance program (cutting $1 million)
- eliminate the Health Home Program (cutting $55 million)
- eliminate a rate increase for foster families, keeping their reimbursement at 2020 levels (cutting $12 million)
- eliminate funding for a nursery for substance-exposed and medically fragile newborns (cutting $2.5 million)
- eliminate the early childhood care program (ECEAP) for infants and toddlers from families with less than one third of the median income (cutting $9 million)
- increase, for families with less than 60% of the median income, co-pays for Working Connections Child Care to 7% of family income, doubling co-pays for thousands of families, some exceeding $400 a month for one child (shifting $15 million onto poor families), and
- eliminate $50 million from foundation public health (just when the measles epidemic is ramping up).
That’s just a sampling of Ferguson’s proposed cuts – these are not efficiencies, but direct attacks on the people of our state. And to add salt to the wound, the governor eliminated funding for administering the wealth tax, which could bring in $3 billion a year and fill all these funding gaps.
The Washington State Legislature is getting into shifting costs to middle class families as well. One Democratic bill will increase tuition by more than 10% for students in our public higher education system, while decreasing funding and shifting costs of the college grant program onto working class and low income students. In the Senate, the Democrats have run away from universal school lunch funding. The $120 million needed to fund it, out of a budget of $71.5 billion, is just too much.
Meanwhile the Trump/Musk/Vance coup accelerates, with the $1 billion elimination of the local food for schools programs. On top of that, under the Republican proposed budget, almost 1000 schools with half a million students in Washington will lose universal free lunches for their kids – a direct attack on middle class and low-income students. Half a million Washingtonians will lose health coverage through Apple Health as it is defunded in the Republicans’ budget proposal. If the Republicans eliminate the enhanced premium tax credit for health coverage, middle class families can expect to see their health care costs increase by $3,000.
This is no time for Governor Ferguson to cut programs, whether he uses a sledgehammer or a scalpel.
So what should the legislature and the governor do? They could actually tax the affluent.
- A wealth tax on residents who have over $50 million in intangible assets (stocks and bonds) would generate $4 billion a year.
- Closing a tax loophole for Amazon and Microsoft and other global behemoths, a loophole lobbied into law by Amazon that stymies college funding, would raise $250 million a year. HB 1839 would do just that.
- Instituting an excise tax on earned income (we have one on unearned income), while exempting the first $270,000 – taxing fewer than 5% of Washington residents – with a tax rate of 5% (less than the 7% tax on unearned income) would generate $4 billion a year.
- Closing the estate tax loophole for the extreme wealthy would generate $150 million annually.
- Putting an inheritance tax into law, so that when privileged people receive inherited wealth in the tens of millions of dollars, they too can contribute to public services for all of us.
Taken together, these taxes on the affluent, super wealthy, and oligarchs could raise $8.5 billion a year.
We will need every penny. First there is the $3 billion annual shortfall for current services. Then the state needs a minimum of $1 billion a year for child care compensation, to enable child care workers to actually earn their way out of poverty. K-12 is underfunded by $4 billion a year, including a $500 million shortfall for special education and the catch-up needed for inflation. Higher education tuition must be driven down through increased state appropriations. A tuition decrease of $1,000 per student FTE will require $200 million. Universal free lunches in K-12 will cost $60 million a year. Just these budget items add up to $8.3 billion.
This math depends on federal funding for public services in our state being sustained. It won’t. Washington’s 2023-2025 biennium budget (ending June 30 of this year) has been financed with over $45 billion in state taxes and over (a projected) $26 billion from the federal government. (Of note here is that Washingtonians paid $22.5 billion more to the U.S. government than we got back in 2022. We are subsidizing states like Idaho and Mississippi through our taxes.) Millions in expected revenues from the federal government have already gone missing this year. It will be much worse in the next fiscal year.
So rather than carve out “efficiencies,” we need to build up our own ability to deliver public services. That means we need new robust progressive taxation, bringing funding for public services and equity in taxation to the citizens of our state. We need the bolder Bob Ferguson from 2017 to lead us forward.
John Burbank (Guest Contributor)
John Burbank is the founder and retired executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute in Seattle.
