Good Job, Gop

During the past quarter century, Washington state government ballooned. By 1994, our tax burden was 10th heaviest in the nation.

Year after year, the Legislature overspent its revenue. Then, when the economy slowed and revenue fell, it would raise taxes.

In 1993, voters whistled this game to a stop, enacting Initiative 601 to control the growth of spending. A year later, they booted out many of the Legislature’s Democrats.

It worked. This year, the Legislature’s Republican majority enacted a supplemental budget breathtaking for its fiscal restraint and innovation. Worried that revenues might slow next year, budget writers flatly refused to increase bottom-line spending. To provide a cushion for recession, they doubled the size of the state’s reserves. They reduced the motor vehicle excise tax, adding to their previous rollbacks in property and business taxes. They increased spending in selected areas of need such as literacy, salmon restoration and Basic Health Plan enrollment. They found money for those spending increases due to savings elsewhere, such as lower-than-budgeted school enrollments and welfare caseloads.

Without raising taxes they devised a program of needed transportation improvements, including major freeway widening in the Spokane Valley.

If the economy does cool, the Legislature may be able to cope next year, without a need for tax increases. It might even be able to give teachers and other state workers a raise. Why? Because its disciplined budget writers boosted the reserve, to $800 million.

Democrats, meanwhile, sneer that this was a do-nothing session. By their standards, it was. By the taxpayers’ standards, this was a session to cheer about.

Kudos to the Legislature’s budget writers: Jim West in the Senate, Tom Huff in the House, and the GOP’s leaders, Senate Majority Leader Dan McDonald and House Speaker Clyde Ballard. They and their party have earned the taxpayers’ thanks.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board