Like you, I recently received my voters’ pamphlet and tried to carefully read through it all. What a mess of legalese nearly incomprehensible to the average voter; especially when it comes to the initiatives.
I’d already come to the conclusion I won’t vote for a Democrat at the state or national level after listening to what they have planned; more taxes, endless hearings and witch hunts, no pro-growth agenda, just anger. No thanks. I like the economy we have today, despite being told over eight years it wasn’t possible anymore and get used to it.
I’ve seen lots of letters supporting the Democrats’ candidate against Jaime Herrera Beutler, Carolyn Long. All I needed to hear was she wants to give people more “free” stuff.
We have to figure out how to pay for what we’ve over spent on for years and can’t afford to keep giving anything more out until we do. The fact that President Obama endorses her only tells me that despite her denial otherwise, she is just like the rest of the very liberal Washington elite and will be in the pocket of the Nancy Pelosis (or even worse) of Washington.
But it’s the verbiage in the initiatives, their titles, and double speak that are most confusing to me … and the numerous references to unknown costs and impacts should worry us all.
Starting with I-1631: Among other things it’s going to create and fund another costly bureaucracy empowered to spend a pot of money, decide “reasonable” administrative fees and fund pet projects while costing us a bunch more money at the gas pump and everywhere else we get anything from that uses a fuel. Ha! what in government is actually a “reasonable” cost?
That’s an oxymoron.
This will affect everyone, including low-income people, but there will be “subsidies” to offset those. But only 15 percent of the revenue generated by this mammoth fee will be used to do that so any low-income folks over that amount, are just out of luck.
And beyond the significant impacts on local and state business, there are impacts (unfunded mandates) to state and local governments as well. Those patrol cars you see driving? School busses? It’s going to cost more to drive them.
Like what you’re paying at the pump so far? It’s going to get a lot worse and be run by the likes of Governor I’ve-never-seen-a-tax-I-don’t-like Inslee who is more conservative than what we’ll likely get next time. It appears to go up endlessly so things start bad and just get worse. No on I-1631.
I-1634 is a no, too. If read carefully it prevents local governments — like Seattle — from adding a sales tax to something specifically prohibited, but it exempts the state — so they can.
Just say no to more taxes every chance you get.
I-1639 has been called the safe schools initiative, but really just creates ways to make otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals, adds expense to the right to own a gun, and makes an owner who has a right to a firearm in their own home responsible even if someone breaks into the home and steals it — and much harder to legally use for defense in their home.
Of course guns should be safely stored, but inside a locked residence with an alarm doesn’t appear to be adequate even if there are no kids living there.
There is a lot in there that would do nothing to make kids safer, while at the same time there is much in there to just make otherwise law-abiding citizens criminals and cost a lot of local governments money — money they don’t have.
The situation is ripe with irony. At the same time they want to create another class of criminal, our state can’t find enough ways to get real criminals out of prison fast enough — many of whom broke into houses like those containing firearms, which will make the homeowner the criminal and put them in jail.
I’ve gotten used to being asked by my doctor if I feel “safe” in my home, so being asked if I know guns can be used in suicides isn’t too intrusive. Not sure the logic makes sense, but nothing in government does anymore.
A no vote on I-1639 doesn’t mean a vote against safer schools. Rather it means I also want common-sense reforms that will actually do that. And I want to know why, in many of the cases cited in support of this initiative, the tools that could have stopped a shooting were not applied?
Why have agencies missed legitimate opportunities to intervene? We know in at least one case it was politics and federal money that created the policy to ignore certain behaviors to keep getting the federal money.
It means I don’t see a bigger, cumbersome, and as-yet-undetermined bureaucracy doing something different than other useless bureaucracies — being effective.
Instead, I see unfunded impacts to local governments, fiscal impacts on gun owners, and ways to make new criminals out of people who simply choose to own guns.
•••
John McCroskey was Lewis County sheriff from 1995 to 2005. He lives outside Chehalis, and can be contacted at musingsonthemiddlefork@yahoo.com.
