OLYMPIA – Someone please give Senate Republican budget writers a new metaphor for hyperbolic parsimony.

Looking at the state’s less than cheery prospects of matching income to outgo last week, the chief GOP Senate budgeteer deployed the well-worn image of personal thriftiness, the squeezed toothpaste tube.

“I’m the kind of guy who, with toothpaste, I squeeze the tube as empty as I can get it and then I cut it open and scrape out the rest and then I buy a new tube,” Sen. Andy Hill, R-Redmond said. “That’s the way I approach budgeting this year" . . . 

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. . . He wouldn’t absolutely rule out any tax increases, but only after the budget has been scraped of any remaining bits of, well, stuff that can be scraped out.

When Rep. Ross Hunter, D-Medina, his House budget-writing counterpart, said he thought the tube has been squeezed pretty dry over the last few years, Hill wasn’t convinced. Everybody says that when the session starts in January, Hill countered.

“For the last four years I’ve heard that tube of toothpaste has been squeezed all it could be squeezed,” he said. And yet, they find “other ways to get more toothpaste out.”

Setting aside the question of whether Hill actually does the toiletry shopping for his family or lines his children up to dab toothpaste remainders onto their brushes at night – someone that cheap wouldn’t let anyone else do the tube slicing for fear of missing a bit here or there – there must be some metaphor for a $36 billion budget other than an overworked tube of Crest, even if it’s the kind that whitens, brightens, fights cavities, protects against plaque buildup and leaves one’s breath minty fresh.

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