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David Spring, a teacher and former legislative candidate, is trying to convince lawmakers to embrace a tax plan that he says would add billions of dollars for schools and state services while touching only the wealthiest 5 percent of Washingtonians.
“We don’t need to be raising the sales tax. We don’t even need an income tax,” he said. “We just need to close this tax loophole.”
Spring, 58, wants to repeal a 1997 state tax exemption for intangible property, saying that accountants are increasingly categorizing things as intangibles, shortchanging the state coffers. He’s trying to convince lawmakers to do away with part of the tax break. He estimates that it would raise $2 billion to $4 billion a year. He’s calling for most of that money to go to schools.
Under Spring’s plan, intangible property (things like stocks, bonds and cash) would be subject to a 1 percent tax. Any retirement funds would be exempt, as would the first $100,000 in personal intangible property per person.
“It is morally wrong to place tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires above the interests of our schoolchildren,” he said, adding that 95 out of 100 state residents would be untouched by the tax.
Some lawmakers are reportedly interested, and Spring’s apparently been making the rounds for weeks, talking with numerous legislators, a staffer for the governor and people from unions and other groups. So far, no one’s introduced a bill.
The matter should go to voters, Spring says, as a referendum from the legislature. Even if lawmakers take a pass on the idea, he’s hoping to put it on the ballot in November.
Richard Roesler covers Washington state news from The Spokesman-Review's bureau in Olympia.
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evergreen_east on April 10 at 12:08 a.m.
Mr. Spring’s proposal sounds like an excellent idea. This guy should probably be in the Legislature, because the governor and the legislators now in office, with the exception of a few that you can count on one hand, seemingly will not put a proportionate tax on anybody except the down and out, the poor, the low income, and the dwindling middle class through fees and sales taxes. If Spring ever decides to run for the Legislature, again (or state executive office), we, the Party of Commons, will consider him for an endorsement.
http://PartyofCommons.blogspot.com
BenL on April 13 at 10:47 p.m.
Half of the U.S. households own only 2.5% of the national wealth.
That means, the other half own 97.5% of the national wealth. You can go the the Federal Reserve report “Currents and Undercurrents”, 2006 to verify. The top one percent own 33.4% of the national wealth. The next 9 percentiles own 36%, and percentiles 50 to 90 own 28%. It may seem punitive to tax wealth, because it is savings, which we count as a virtue. But excessive wealth is not just savings, it’s excessive. We have had a massive shift in wealth and income over the past 30 years, and it’s time to reverse this trend, and what better way than to improve education. The web page toomuch.org reports about this stuff, and so does extremeinequality.org.