What is Governor Ferguson doing to stand up to the government shutdown? He did join the No Kings anti-Trump demonstration in Everett last month. The Governor vowed to “never, ever under any circumstances, bend the knee to this autocrat.”
The Governor also claimed to be leading the resistance: “I have good news, despite the challenges we’re facing in the country. No state in the country is doing more to stand up to this administration and this autocrat than Washington State.”
Besides attending protests, what is Ferguson doing while the Republican Congress refuses to fund food stamps for almost one million Washington residents and while Trump has cut Head Start funding for 4,000 children in our state? Thousands of federal employees in our state are either working without pay or laid off.
Food banks have already started to limit services and food for people in need as convicted felon Trump has cut $500 million in deliveries of U.S.-produced meat, dairy, eggs and produce to food banks.
The federal government is cutting an ever increasing amount of human services for Washingtonians, education funding for Washington students, clean and renewable energy development, Affordable Care Act subsidies and Apple Health coverage, mental health grants, and disaster mitigation funds. And that is just a start.
Standing up to Trump includes standing up to the corporations who put him in office and adulate him at every chance. Standing up to Trump includes standing up to his billionaire friends — Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft and president Brad Smith and CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates, and T-Mobile and former CEO John Stanton.
But how could the Governor stand up to Trump and his corporate minions? In this climate of killing public services, Governor Ferguson, State Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, and House Speaker Laurie Jinkins should immediately call a special session of the legislature to put in place progressive taxation, taxing the very people who are benefitting from Trump’s tax cuts to the already wealthy, and using those revenues to fund the services which the federal government has cut.
We have to build our own commonwealth, separate from and, indeed, seceding from the fascism of the Trump administration.
We can tax the wealthy and realize immediate revenues. A statewide excess compensation tax, like that which Seattle voters passed last February, would generate over $2 billion a year. The beauty of this tax is that it has already withstood a legal challenge, the Department of Revenue knows what corporations to tax for excess compensation for which employees, and the revenue could be forthcoming within a couple of months — if it was passed in a special session.
If the Governor got a little more creative, we could extend this tax to corporations that have a nexus to our state – like Tesla. We could tax excess compensation proportionately to sales in Washington as compared to global sales. That way, when Elon Musk gets his $1 trillion in compensation, Washington state would receive $2 billion in revenue.
What could the Legislature and Governor do with these new revenues?
- Make up for all gaps in food stamp funding.
- Restore child care for toddlers which they repealed a few months ago.
- Expand child care for working class and middle class families, something they said they were intent on doing but instead denied state-supported child care for these families.
- Fund universal school lunches, which they have said for years they wanted to provide but just couldn’t find the funds.
- Take over the tax credits for working class families who get their health coverage through the health benefit exchange, the tax credits which the Trump administration has repealed.
- Boost the housing trust fund and expand it to housing which is available for low income, working class, and middle income Washingtonians.
- Fund the state law for child care workers compensation, which they passed in 2005 and ran away from in 2014.
Another revenue source should be the workforce education investment tax. Amazon and Microsoft boast about this tax, and how it funds higher education and apprenticeships. What they don’t say is that they are excused from paying hundreds of millions of dollars in proportional taxation. Instead, they made sure that the law has a ceiling in place for those companies with more than $25 billion in global revenue.
If this ceiling was removed, so that Amazon and Microsoft would pay proportionally the same amount as all other knowledge-based companies, the state would realize $800 million more a year.
With this revenue, the legislature could decrease college tuition and enable students from middle class families to gain the College Grant to pay for their tuition. This could be an immediate benefit, as Representative Julia Reed (D-Ballard, 36th Legislative District) has already drafted a bill to close this loophole for these oligarchic corporations which are literally paying fealty to Trump.
These new progressive revenues would come from Amazon and Microsoft, which are realizing record stock gains while laying off thousands of workers in our state. These are the elite corporate oligarchs, those who stood with convicted felon Trump at his inauguration, who gained billions of dollars in the Trump tax cuts, and who are financing the destruction of the East Wing of the White House for a Trumpian ball room.
Unfortunately, Ferguson fought tax-the-rich efforts during the last legislative session and is renewing his opposition. “I’m skeptical of additional revenue at this time,” he recently told the Washington State Standard.
We should be fighting with everything we have to block the pathway to fascism. Now is the time for Governor Ferguson and Democratic legislative leadership to realize true patriotism and stand up and tax the oligarchs who are destroying our democracy and our public services. That would go a lot further than just announcing that the Governor participated in a No Kings rally.
John Burbank (Guest Contributor)
John Burbank founded the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute in 1998 and led it until his retirement in 2020.
