Initiative 32 garnered just 42 percent of the vote in November. Under the terms of Inslee’s new proposal, the Evergreen State would:
In his announcement, Inslee called the plan “a big, bold thing that we’re proposing here,” noting that, “We’re the state that built the Grand Coulee Dam, we’re the state that built the Boeing 747, and we’re the state that can fully fund basic education after 30 years.”
Inslee has surfaced the first major plan in what’s expected to be a tough slog of negotiations in the legislative session that starts in January, according to the local news outlet. House Democrats and Senate Republicans will release their own budget plans early next year.
Indeed, on the same day on which the Governor announced his proposal, Republicans began firing back almost immediately. Inslee’s plan “looks more like another attempt to impose a new carbon tax and a new tax on income, and less like a way to thoughtfully address the K-12 funding question,” Senator Ann River (R-La Center), a member of the State Legislature’s Education Funding Task Force, said in a statement.
Inslee’s proposed tax rate would be higher than nearby Idaho’s 7.4 percent; but lower than Oregon’s 9.9 percent and California’s 13.3 percent, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank that advocates for lower taxes.
Those states, like others that tax capital gains, also have state income taxes. Washington is one of seven states that do not impose an income tax.