OLYMPIA – Welfare recipients wouldn’t be able to use their benefits cards at strip clubs, tattoo parlors or taverns, if the Legislature passes bills like those considered Thursday by a Senate panel.

The cards, known as EBTs for Electronic Benefits Transfer cards, couldn’t be used for guns or body piercings, booze or cigarettes, lottery tickets or casino ATMs.

Recipients would be barred buying things clearly not for children when spending money from the state’s biggest welfare program – formally known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or TANF – under proposals considered Thursday by the Senate Human Services and Corrections Committee.

The panel got no objections about blocking such payments from Susan Dreyfus, head of the state’s giant welfare agency the Department of Social and Health Services. The state already bars their use for gambling and lottery tickets. The real question was the best way  to prevent such use with the cards, and to crack down on fraud and abuse.
  

OLYMPIA – Prison inmates would be barred from collecting damages in public records fights with state government and could be banned from court if they repeatedly file frivolous suits under bills supported this year by Attorney General Rob McKenna.



The state would also put more restrictions on eminent domain foreclosures and crack down on mail theft in legislative proposals McKenna unveiled Monday with legislators from both parties who support them.

Washington’s scheduled 105-day legislative session starts next Monday.

State law requires government agencies to release public records, and allows anyone who is denied a public record to sue and receive damages if a court agrees the record was public and should have been released by the government agency that denied the request….
  

OLYMPIA – Despite warnings of wrath from voters in November, Senate Democrats moved a step closer to a vote on some $890 million in tax increases to fix the state’s budget hole.

The Senate Ways and Means Committee approved 12-10 a three-year increase in the sales tax and a series of changes to tax laws and loopholes designed to help fix a projected operating budget shortfall of $2.8 billion. They also are proposing cutting about $829 million in programs and using federal funds or transferring money out of other accounts to cover the rest.

The 21-part tax package would extend the sales tax to bottled water, cut exemptions for some equipment on wind and solar energy, raise the business and occupation tax on service businesses and raise taxes on out-of-state firms with representatives who sell directly to Washington customers.

Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, said the full Senate could debate the tax plan as early as today.

It does not include a recent proposal to ask voters in November if they want to cut back on the sales tax in favor of an income tax on people who make more than $200,000 a year. That could come up in a separate bill before the Legislature adjourns Thursday – if it can gather enough support, Brown said.

“There’s time (to pass the income tax bill) but there has to be willingness in both houses. On that, I’m not sure,” she said.

For almost every part of the 21-point tax package, Republicans offered amendments to strip or pare back a new tax or restore an exemption, then had separate amendments to put each tax change on the November ballot for an advisory vote.

“I think it is important to let people know who is doing what to whom,” Sen. Mike Carrell, R-Lakewood, said in asking for an advisory vote on changes to rules that establish when an out-of-state company is subject to Washington taxes.

At one point, the arguments became so repetitive that Minority Leader Mike Hewitt, R-Walla Walla, merely said “Same speech, Madame Chair.” Chairwoman Margarita Prentice, D-Renton, ordered a vote, which got the same result, and the amendment failed.

OLYMPIA — Taxing bottled water is such a bad thing that Sen. Mike Carrell wondered today where it would all stop, and offered up no less an expert than The Beatles to prove his point.

But Ways and Means Committee Chairwoman Margarita Prentice, D-Renton, made it clear she wasn’t going to be out-Beatled.

Carrell, R-Lakewood, was trying to force a November advisory vote on a section of the Senate Democrats’ proposal that would extend the sales tax to bottled water. Right now, it’s considered a food item, and exempt from the tax. Republicans had already won the point that the tax should be temporary, but Carrell wanted the plebiscite “to let the people know who is for taxing.”

After all, this is taxing water, he said. What’s next? “There’s an old Beatles song about taxing the air we breathe. This is getting close to that.”

Prentice signaled she’d had enough of the argument by replying: “That Beatles reference is from their album ‘Revolver.’ ”

True Beatles fans know  one of them is wrong. Go inside the blog to find out who.