Feb. 24, 2009

Listen to Rep. Bill Hinkle on KBBO Radio with Brian Stephenson (Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009)

Necessity is the mother of invention; unless you have
the taxpayers to bail you out
By Rep. Bill Hinkle

In my career as a paramedic, my colleagues and I faced scenarios outside our normal realm of training on a constant basis.  When we pulled up to the scene of an accident, responded to an emergency call at a house or business, or rolled up to a three-alarm fire, we never knew what kind of situation we were entering.

And yet, can you imagine the outcry if every time we encountered the unusual we threw up our hands and wailed, “This is too hard!  We’re not prepared for this!  We’re going home!”

None of us would have had jobs for very long, that’s for sure.

This “can do” attitude isn’t limited to just emergency responders, either.  In just about every profession I can think of, workers are forced to adapt to the circumstances at hand and make the best of it.

Whether it’s the farmer in the field dealing with unforeseen irrigation problems, the auto mechanic encountering a new glitch in a fuel system, or a real estate agent suddenly faced with a glut of homes with no homebuyers in sight, simply giving up won’t get you far in life.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention.  I suppose it is, unless you have the taxpayers to bail you out.

Some legislators in Olympia, whose job it is to work on the critical issues facing our state and citizenry, are about to throw up their hands and quit on trying to solve our $8 billion budget shortfall.  Rather than make difficult decisions, some lawmakers are poised to take the easy way out by sending a tax increase to voters after the legislative session ends.

To me, and to the taxpayers of Washington, this is unacceptable.

We’re now in the seventh week of session and we’ve yet to send a substantially meaningful spending reduction bill to the governor’s desk.  We’ve been relegated to taking small steps by passing “budgetary reduction” bills that reaffirm state hiring and travel freezes which amount to more feel-good language than substance.

The strategy employed by legislative budget writers appears to be to wait until things get so bad, and the proposed cuts go so deep, that the people will accept the idea of a tax increase as a viable solution.

However, taxpayers didn’t increase state spending by more than $8 billion over the last four years.  Taxpayers aren’t the ones who couldn’t say “no” to special interests and new entitlement programs.  Taxpayers didn’t spend more money than we had coming in.

In short, taxpayers didn’t create the problem; they shouldn’t be expected to finance another government bailout.

Without new taxpayer dollars to back them up, I have no doubt the Democrat majority in Olympia would be working feverishly to arrive at a no-new-taxes solution to our budget problem.  Instead, the path of least resistance appears to be the one that leads directly to the pocketbooks of Washington citizens.

My hope is that the citizens of Washington reject any tax increase put before them and hold elected officials accountable for their poor job performance.

(Rep. Bill Hinkle represents the 13^th District.  He is the House Republican Whip and serves on the House Ways and Means Committee and the General Government Appropriations Committee.  He is a former paramedic with over 15 years of emergency responder experience.)

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