The following op-ed appeared in the Cheney Free Press and other newspapers the week of April 27, 2025.
Sen. Shelly Short, Cheney Free Press
When the state Legislature began its 2025 legislative session, a Senate Democrat mistakenly e-mailed a strategy memo to the entire membership, outlining her pitch for the largest tax increase in the history of the state.
“We have to identify the villain and the problem blocking our progress and how we can take action to solve the issue,” she said.
She went on to name the villain – “the wealthy few” who don’t pay their fair share. If we just pounded the rich with new taxes, she explained, everything would be fine. As if the rich were responsible for her team’s decision to violate every principle of sound budgeting and put the state billions of dollars in the red.
Well, here we are four months later, at the end of our session, and majority Democrats in the Legislature have changed their minds. They’ve found a new villain to hold responsible.
It’s you.
And me, and our neighbors, and everyone else who lives in the state of Washington. Under the final tax-and-fee package adopted just before we adjourned our session Sunday night, directly and indirectly, the people of the state of Washington will be required to pay a staggering $12.9 billion so that our colleagues can cover the deficit they created, avoid course corrections and continue their multi-year spending spree.
It’s everybody’s fault but theirs.
As I write this Sunday evening, we are waiting for Gov. Bob Ferguson to announce his next move. Will he veto the budget and force a special session? Will he use his section-by-section veto authority to reduce the scope of these tax increases? Now that the final gavel has fallen, his intervention is really the people’s last hope.
Even Ferguson, one of the most liberal governors the state has ever elected, was forced to acknowledge his discomfort with the size of this year’s tax package and his own party’s reluctance to scale back its plans for new spending or make meaningful cuts. What a terrible decision our new governor faces on his first budget, having to choose between his political party and the people who elected him. All Republicans can do is encourage him to do the right thing.
This terrible outcome of this year’s legislative session is an insult to the people of Washington and a tragedy for the state. Unlike previous budget disasters brought on by recession, this was entirely the result of legislative mismanagement. State spending has doubled in a decade, most of it since 2018, when our colleagues took control of the statehouse and assumed sole responsibility for the budget. To boost spending to untenable levels, they repeated notorious practices that had gotten the state in trouble time and again, like using one-time money to create permanent obligations and deferring big new expenses to future budgets. When this created an entirely predictable deficit, our colleagues threw up their hands after a few moments’ thought and declared a tax increase was the only solution.
Out of this mismanagement we get a tax package that slams the populace in dozens of ways, big and small, from higher hunting and fishing licenses to enormous new business taxes that ultimately will be passed on to consumers. The final property tax plan is especially galling: Democrats ultimately ditched a plan for massive increases and instead gave school districts authority to collect higher local levies. This is what the state Supreme Court told us not to do in its 2012 McCleary decision, and the likely result is another school-financing lawsuit and another round of taxes. Are you ready for a general state income tax? The continuing irresponsibility from Olympia this year makes it all the more likely.
The worst part is that we ran the numbers ourselves, and we found that we could balance the budget without new taxes or harmful cuts, if we just avoided new spending.
Legislative Democrats might think the people of Washington are the villains here, but I think they have it backwards.
– Sen. Shelly Short, R-Addy, represents the 7th Legislative District and is floor leader for the Senate Republican Caucus.