Ross Hunter

Category: Budget

  • New Economic Forecast Available

    The Washington Economic and Revenue Forecast Council (of which I am a member) released its Washington State Economic Review on Friday. The document is a pretty good read. It comes out a week before our revenue forecast does and experienced tea leaf readers can often predict the revenue forecast from this document. Flat is the…

  • Taxing Gold Bullion?

    Taxing Gold Bullion?

    One of the first things new legislators say to me when they review the “Tax Exemptions 2008” report from the department of revenue is that we should eliminate the tax exemptions for gold bullion and bull semen sales. They stick out as crazy exemptions. NPR even did a story on the bullion loophole. Governor Gregoire…

  • Thanks for attending my telephone town hall

    Thanks for attending my telephone town hall

    We made almost 30,000 calls to people in the 48th district tonight. Over 6000 attended part of the town hall, with about 500 people on the call for most of the time, and 160 die-hards who stayed until the end. I’ve never had more than 200 people at a town hall before, so this reached…

  • New Newsletter Available

    I emailed out a newsletter today. I’m attaching a link to the PDF version of it – this is somewhat easier to print out and read if you’re a print person. 2009-12-15 Newsletter I expect to produce much more regular newsletters now that we are approaching the session. Please let me know if there is…

  • Local School Levies

    School districts are allowed to raise local levies to fund things that are not “basic education.” The state limits the amount they can raise to a percentage of the total they receive in state and federal funding. This is so that districts like Bellevue don’t raise twice as much as districts like Yakima. The standard…

  • Race To The Top Funding

    The Obama administration under Education Secretary Arne Duncan has made $4.35 billion available to districts that demonstrate they are making progress in four areas: Standards and Assessments Data Systems to Support Instruction Great Teachers and Leaders Turning Around Struggling Schools We have real work to do in order to have even a remote chance of…

  • Education Funding in 2010

    This will be a difficult year for short-term funding of education in Washington, and in almost all of the other states. In 2009 we cut everything that moved in the budget, but made the smallest cuts in the K-12 budget. I expect this to be true in 2010 as well, and will work hard to…

  • Budget Stalemate in Albany Puts Strain on New York State – NYTimes.com

    It’s worth reading this article in today’s NY Times about how dysfunctional the NY legislature is in dealing with their budget problem. We will have a significant problem this year and I hope we won’t display the same inability to work together to resolve the problem. Budget Stalemate in Albany Puts Strain on New York…

  • Another Bizarre Supreme Court Decision

    Today the WA State Supreme Court issued a decision in the Federal Way school district case. Federal Way sued the state complaining that our distribution of funds did not meet the constitution’s requirement for a “general and uniform” way of funding schools. In specific, the district complained that since allocations to school districts for teacher…

  • New Tax Foundation Study – Where do states spend their money?

    I find the research this organization does fascinating, which probably says more about me than them, but there it is. The Tax Foundation is the organization that brings you “Tax Freedom Day.” I agree with them on some of their principles about well-designed tax systems, but they have a “less is more” strategy to government…