Problems Too Complex For I-695

If tough public-policy problems could be solved in the space of a bumper sticker, my job would be a piece of cake: Turn on computer. Type slogans. “Cut taxes! Eliminate waste! Banish bureaucrats! Vote out politicians! Kill all the lawyers!” End of editorial. Turn off computer. Take coffee break.

Unfortunately, the longer I live, and the longer I spend wading in the swamps of public policy, the clearer it becomes: Life and politics are complicated.

Sure, simplistic slogans and firebrand rhetoric are fun to read and amusing to write. Been there, done that. But real solutions to real-life problems require more than a simple sense of the direction you want to go. Real solutions require hard work - research, negotiation and enough curiosity to stay awake through long conversations about the tedious details of budgets, law and history.

How many of us have time for all that?

Very few.

And that is why I find this election season to be alarming.

Any demagogue with a tongue in his mouth can lambaste government. Can play to fear, resentment, selfishness and cynicism. Can delude us into thinking that what our government needs is a good hard kick in the teeth. Can convince us that government is such a dishonorable line of work that only incompetent buffoons would want to serve in it.

I say this as a conservative. As one well aware of government’s inefficiencies and excesses.

But I am a conservative who feels most emphatically that there are quite a few good things about our government that we ought to conserve. From some of the rhetoric being slung this year you would never guess that the entity in the target zone maintains our transportation system, educates most of our children, protects public safety and cares for the elderly, disabled and poor.

Yet that is what government does.

So when people yell about their taxes they make a good point, for taxes in my opinion are uncomfortably high. But cutting taxes places services in jeopardy. Tax cuts, if done well, ought to be carried out gradually, in a way that keeps the overall tax burden fair and does not disrupt essential services.

This fall, people are yelling loudly indeed about taxes. Initiative 695, the proposal to repeal the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax, has touched a nerve.

At the risk of adding some unwanted complexity to this year’s delightful little experience in screeching demagoguery, I would like to make two simple points: 1. Taxes already are going down. 2. Washington’s transportation programs are a convoluted mess and the Legislature, well aware of the fact, has assigned some of the smartest people in the state to spend a few years coming up with a solution.

Not only are the state’s taxes falling, they are falling more dramatically than they would if I-695 passes. Since 1994 the Legislature has trimmed property taxes, the MVET and the Business & Occupation tax. By 2001 these cuts will have totaled $3.5 billion.

These cuts were made by informed politicians who worked hard and argued long and loudly about how to make the cuts in ways that would ease some of the most noxious, damaging levies in the tax code while making it possible for essential services to continue. This could not be said of Initiative 695, which aims a broadaxe at funding to improve seriously congested roads all over our state.

In other words, the tax cuts we already have experienced occurred because people we elect to understand and improve our system did their job.

Legislators also were doing their job when they created the Blue Ribbon Commission on Transportation. Never heard of it? Its job is to diagnose the inefficiencies in the system that maintains our roads, ferries and buses, and recommend changes that will reduce waste and get more dollars to the glaring needs we all experience every time we try to travel somewhere.

This week, one of the commission’s members sat in my office and spent an hour and a half explaining the complexities of the chore he has undertaken. His name is Dale Stedman. He is 72 years old. In between enjoyable times with his grandchildren he volunteers to help lead marathon committee meetings where top business executives and veteran politicians analyze how the state could get more out of its transportation dollars. Stedman has been doing this kind of thing for most of his adult life.

The commission has spent the past year learning how the transportation system works. Now it is nearing consensus about what’s wrong. Anyone interested in the details can visit its Web site, at www.brtc.wa.gov. Next year the commission will write recommendations, solicit feedback from the public and send a report to the Legislature.

This takes time. But, this is how good government works. Washington state does need to reform its transportation system, including the taxes that support it. But it ought to do so with scalpels, held by experienced, knowledgeable people like Stedman.

On the other hand, we could always get mad and kick government in the teeth. Which brings me to a simplistic slogan I do feel tempted to embrace, in campaign seasons like this one: Voters always get what they deserve.

Last year, voters invested the MVET in better roads. This year, do they want to reverse course?