The annual Take Our Ball and Go Home bill has been introduced in Olympia. If the provincial political leaders who want to secede from Washington did some actual analysis, we could take their idea seriously. But there’s nothing to work with.

Before anyone raises the curtain on this perennial West Side story about “different values,” it needs some semblance of an economy (unless, of course, it’s going to do away with taxation, too). What would that look like?

Four years ago, a Senate study delved into the state’s finances and came to the unsurprising conclusion that most of the money comes from those values-challenged people in the Puget Sound area. From that perspective, living on the East Side is a bargain.

West Side counties have 78 percent of the population and account for 83 percent of the sales-tax base, 85 percent of the property value and 82 percent of personal wealth. King County alone has more than twice the personal wealth of all the counties east of the Cascade Mountains. The new state could always charge exorbitant fees for auto license tabs, but we have a feeling that would be unpopular.

Not only would the new state be tiny in terms of wealth, it would be tiny in terms of federal clout. Its three newly minted representatives (one in Congress, two in the Senate) would have zero seniority and be steamrollered when fighting for federal dollars and protecting federal assets. Good luck holding onto Fairchild Air Force Base during the next round of base closures.

And with such a skimpy treasury, it would be difficult to keep the doors open at the community colleges and Washington State and Eastern Washington universities – not to mention the University District in Spokane, which is a promising cornerstone of economic development.

How would this new state reimburse doctors and other providers who take care of those on Medicaid?

How would it fund the mandates from No Child Left Behind? Eastern counties get more money per student than Western counties.

How would rural counties repair the new state’s highways? Twelve Eastern counties receive at least twice as much from the gasoline tax as they pay in. If the East Side were to secede, that burden of picking up the slack would fall to Spokane County.

All of that aside, creating a state filled with people who think alike is not going to spark economic growth. Many business leaders would pick up and leave once they figured out what would happen to schools and health care facilities.

Secessionists fail to consider how many people are drawn to a region because it is diverse and tolerant.

So the new-state proposal re-emerges every few years, a bit of regional lore, like Bigfoot — unsupported by reason but too intriguing to resist.