Letter to the editor: Republican opposition to wealth tax reveals how out of touch their positions are with local reality

Posted 1/15/25

When Sen. John Braun claims Washington has a spending problem rather than a revenue problem, he's asking Lewis County residents to ignore the reality we see here every day.

His recent editorial …

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Letter to the editor: Republican opposition to wealth tax reveals how out of touch their positions are with local reality

Posted

When Sen. John Braun claims Washington has a spending problem rather than a revenue problem, he's asking Lewis County residents to ignore the reality we see here every day.

His recent editorial paints a simple picture of wasteful government overreach, but visit our rural communities and you'll see first-hand what chronic underfunding — not overspending — looks like.

Our hospitals struggle to maintain services while our neighbors drive to Olympia or Tacoma for basic mental health care. Our emergency responders cover vast areas with limited resources. Our fire districts need updated equipment, and our aging infrastructure requires increasingly expensive maintenance.

These aren't examples of government waste — they're essential services that have been operating on shoestring budgets for years or decades.

In Lewis County, where our median household income of $69,690 sits well below the state average of $129,559, Braun's solution is to cut the very services many families rely on to survive. Our poverty rate of 12.4% (rising to over 16% for children) exceeds the state average, yet he defends protecting the ultra-wealthy over supporting working families.

Walk through many Lewis County schools and you'll see a bleak reality. Our rural districts struggle to hire and retain teachers when they can't offer competitive pay. Districts can't afford enough counselors to meet growing student needs. School buildings in Morton, Onalaska and elsewhere need critical repairs and upgrades they can't afford.

Meanwhile, our students are still working to overcome pandemic learning losses with zero extra support.

Are these schools swimming in money, as Braun claims?

Braun argues that since education is our state's "paramount duty" under the constitution, it shouldn't require new taxes to fund it. But if education truly comes first, we be willing to use every tool available, including asking the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share, to ensure our children's futures are fully funded.

Instead, Braun seems more interested in using our constitution's education mandate as a shield to protect wealth than as a sword to fight for our children's needs.



Republicans’ opposition to the wealth tax reveals how out of touch their positions are with local reality. They claim taxing individuals with more than $100 million in wealth — a group that includes zero Lewis County residents — would somehow hurt local jobs and economic growth.

We've heard this trickle-down argument before, but when billionaires got richer during the pandemic and the wealthy and corporations received massive tax breaks under Trump, we saw no surge of investment in our community — only tremendously higher prices.

We're still waiting to see how shielding multi-millionaires' wealth helps Lewis County families pay their bills or access health care.

The choice before our Legislature isn't between fiscal responsibility and meeting community needs — it's about priorities.

Lewis County deserves better than austerity politics that protect top income brackets while cutting services for everyone else.

We need solutions that recognize the real challenges facing our community and the vital role that state services play in meeting those challenges. Our lives, and our neighbors' lives, depend on it.

 

Zac Eckstein

chair, Lewis County Democrats