Well, the local 2010 general election votes are counted - whoops, wait, here's a couple more ballots. OK, now they're all counted. And what did we learn? Mostly, that voters, taken as a collective body, can be idiots.
No, I'm not referring to the nationwide and statewide gains by Republican candidates, many of whom appealed to the basest and most ignorant impulses in the electorate. (However, if the shoe fits....) I'm instead specifically referring to this year's slate of initiatives and what they portend for our future public policy in Washington state.
It takes no rocket scientist to notice two things about this year's election. First, the vast ocean of corporate money unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision had a huge impact, not the least on anybody's willingness to answer the phone in the two weeks before Election Day.
But in our state, the biggest corporate impact was on the initiatives, all but one of which were essentially bankrolled by deep corporate pockets.
Several of these did not succeed: the efforts to privatize the state's workers' compensation system and sales of hard liquor.
But the ones that did succeed did so by tapping into the second obvious trend, which was a strong anti-tax impulse. A new state high-earners' income tax, Initiative 1098, went down hard. Tim Eyman's latest effort to make legislative tax increases impossible, Initiative 1053, passed easily. A King County sales-tax measure to fund public safety - normally a slam dunk - barely passed. And Coke and Pepsi succeeded in their effort (Initiative 1107) to kill the Legislature's new tax on soda, candy and chewing gum.
In a down economy, people voted with their pocketbooks, which shouldn't be surprising.
But here's the thing: Many of the successful ads used in those anti-tax measures were blatantly deceptive.
Coke's - excuse me - the American Beverage Association's I-1107 ads featured bags carefully designed to look as much as possible like an ordinary sack of groceries, falsely implying that the Legislature was taxing all food, not just the discretionary stuff that's really bad for you.
(I kept wondering why our mythical purchaser of the bag of groceries pictured in many of the I-1107 ads was buying three or four different brands of sweetened raisins, which many folks don't realize are dried fruit and thus fall under the standardized food-industry definition of candy.)
Eyman's "grassroots" effort to stop tax hikes on ordinary folks was largely funded by BP, Chevron, Bank of America and other corporate giants looking to kill industry-specific user fees and save existing corporate tax loopholes.
The assorted pro-liquor privatization ads claimed the state liquor-store system was a drain on taxpayers, an odd claim to make for private companies like Costco that poured in millions of dollars to get a share of that supposedly money-losing business.
And I-1098 somehow became a referendum on what Olympia might do in the future - extend an income tax to all taxpayers, which it couldn't do without specific voter approval - rather than what was actually on the ballot, a measure that would have cut most people's taxes through property and B&O tax relief, often substantially.
Even more than is usually the case, the misinformation this year was staggering.
What was missing from the discussions of all of these revenue measures and from the news coverage of their respective campaigns was any sort of discussion of the alternative. Because - as we're going to see when the state Legislature reconvenes in January - none of these measures operated in a vacuum.
The choice of, say, the soda tax, wasn't to tax Pepsi or don't tax Pepsi. It's tax Pepsi, or, say, lay off thousands of elementary-school teachers, or whatever the state decides to do. Because after two decades of budget cutting - only some of which was temporarily restored by Gov. Christine Gregoire's early budgets in a boom economy - there's no mythical waste left to trim.
Voters kept in place (by rejecting I-1098) a state tax structure that penalizes poor, working and middle-class people more than any other in the country and then declared that they didn't want to pay those taxes. I hope those voters don't have any use for roads, cops, jails, K-12 schools, or a social safety net of any kind, because none of those essential services can operate without money, the money that voters just turned down this month.
Here's where the "idiots" part comes in: In January - when city, county and state legislative bodies are sweating bullets and making life-and-death decisions on which essential services to abandon (prediction: schools, health care and DSHS will be the hardest hit) - many of the same people will be the ones screaming bloody murder.
But that's what this election was about: whether to fund essential services. Voters decided not to, even though, if you ask any of them, they'll generally tell you they want those services.
In other words, in the time-honored American tradition, they want something for nothing. What we're going to get, instead, is reality: Nothing for nothing. And it's going to be ugly.
GEOV PARRISH is cofounder of Eat the State! He also reviews news of the week on "Mind Over Matters" on KEXP 90.3 FM.[[In-content Ad]]
