[brettmjohnson]

The problem with these types of Ballot Initiatives:

  Do you want to eliminate the state income tax?
  X Yes
  _ No

  Do you like to drive on paved roads?
  X Yes
  _ No

  Do you want fire fighters to show up if your house is on fire?
  X Yes
  _ No

As a resident of California, I can assure you that budget related initiatives should never be put to a popular vote. The voters will nearly always agree that most altruistic government expenditures are good (like roads and firemen), yet they will nearly always vote against attempts to pay for them.

In California, it only takes 50.1% of the general populace to decide to spend a bunch of money, but it requires 66.7% of the state legislator to approve a budget to pay for it.

[forkandwait]

More to the Ballmer / Bezos point (sans the cool formatting):

Do you want a motivated and highly educated worforce and otherwise high-infrastructure state?

X Yes _ No

Do you want to pay taxes to support it?

_ Yes X No

[forkandwait]

Forgive my replying to my own thread, but I would like acknowledge that much of the way public institutions do things is currently broken, even if the idea of public institutions is great -- I am very sympathetic to all the libertarians here at HN even as I vehemently disagree with them (I would say I am in favor of decentralized socialism, run by Athenian style democracies). Bad management of epidemic proportions (which I grant -- e.g. see "Waiting for Superman") makes people susceptible to a simplistic anti-government "privatize everything" sentiment (which I think is downright goofy).

But I still believe in taxing the rich, since they feed off society at least as much as they contribute.

[jseliger]

* Do you want to eliminate the state income tax? X Yes _ No*

The issue in Washington State is:

* Do you want to create a state income income tax where none presently exists? _ Yes X No*

Why not? For the same reason other posters have noted: Seattle has a thriving startup scene, and its comparative advantages over California are a) no income taxes; b) you can live in Seattle and not have a car; c) you can buy a condo on a vaguely normalish salary, unlike in much of L.A. and Silicon Valley. If you remove a), you've mostly got a state where the major city has weather that most people don't especially like and a taxation system that punishes the creation of wealth.

That's bad.

[lzw]

This is a state that paid something close to $2B for new fancy stadiums that weren't needed, and has never met a glamor or status project that it didn't want to do. It is constantly spending money on status symbols whose real purpose is not to benefit the people, but to aggrandize the politicians who got them built.

Paved roads are really cheap, and are a tiny fraction of the expenses of the state. But they let them go to hell, even though they have plenty of money to keep them up, because people notice broken roads and you can extort more taxes from them this way.

Its the oldest trick in the book.

So, talking about paved roads as a reason to create a whole new tax and remove one of the few decent things about the washington business environment is disingenuous. I'm sure you weren't being disingenuous, but the politicians who bring it up are.

[brettmjohnson]

Paved roads in the U.S. are not really cheap. A typical 2-lane rural road is about 1.7 million dollars per mile. A suburban road is double that; 3.5 million dollars per mile.

ftp://ftp.dot.state.fl.us/LTS/CO/Estimates/CPM/summary.pdf

[bhiggins]

I don't like the government subsidizing stadiums either. At least, very recently, Seattle decided not to build a new basketball stadium and as a result the Supersonics moved to Oklahoma. I think that was the right call. I just wanted to point that out just so nobody falsely accuses you of painting with too broad a brush in the future.