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Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, briefed members of her Democratic caucus on Friday or Saturday about the polling that has been done to find out what kinds of taxes voters would be mostly likely to support and what kinds of things they want that new money spent on.
(Just for the record, on Thursday, Brown told reporters she had not yet been told the results of that tax polling. What a difference a few hours makes.)
According to a fly on the wall of the caucus room, during her briefing Brown told her fellow Democrats that polling showed "90 percent of the public knows we have a serious financial problem..."
And Sen. Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver, immediately quipped, "..and the other 10 percent are in the Legislature."
That's my latest nominee for Quote of the Session.
Curt Woodward of the Associated Press broke that tax polling story on Saturday, but we didn't have room in our Sunday newspaper to run it. So most folks didn't see it until Monday in print. But if you read this blog, you saw Curt's story on Saturday evening.
The thing is, Pridemore is the guy mainly responsible for that "preliminary" revenue forcast back on Feb. 19, a month ahead of the March 19 regular forecast. He got some of his fellow members of the state Economic Review and Revenue Forecast Council to urge state chief economist Arun Raha to hold a hurry-up meeting. Pridemore thought a forecast more current than the one from November 2008 would be a Come-to-Jesus moment, a wakeup call for his fellow legislators.
Nope. Didn't work. And they need one, too. The deficit is $7.7 billion. Or $8.3 billion if you use Lisa Brown's number and put $1 billion in reserves instead of only the $416 million the governor held back in savings in her budget proposal.
You should see how many bills have been introduced that either spend a lot of money or give more or longer tax breaks to groups of people, all in the past two months! This is a Legislature that is in serious denial. Each lawmaker must think the cuts will come to someone else's favorite program, not his or hers.
Do not ask for whom the bell tolls.....
