Ross Hunter

Category: Budget

  • Revenue Collections – October

    Every month we get a report on the amount of tax revenue collected over the previous month. We all put it in our teacups and swirl it around hoping to see some wisdom in it, but are usually denied any new wisdom. Compared to our prediction we are down about $20 million for the month,…

  • 2009 Session Notes – Tax Policy

    (I orginally posted this on a different blog in April 2009. I am consolidating into a single presence and am re-posting here. ) A number of key tax policy bills were passed this year. These are interesting to me because I chair the Finance committee and am responsible for making sure the system works. I…

  • Changes to Sales Tax Resale Certificates (SB 6173)

    The Senate budget assumed a change in how sales tax resale certificates worked. As the bill implementing this idea came over from the Senate it made substantial changes to how resale certificates work for retailers and wholesalers (which was fine) but also made a change I found punitive to how resale certificates worked for contractors…

  • Tuition Increases?

    The Seattle Times wrote an interesting article in this morning’s paper about the budget question facing us about higher education. Both House and Senate proposals do terrible things to the higher education system in Washington. It’s worth the read. We have to decide if we want to allow the universities to raise tuition, or just…

  • HB 2343 – National Board Certification Bonus

    HB 2343 does a number of ugly things to the K12 system as part of the terrible, devastating budget cuts to education and everything else the state does. One of the proposed changes is to permanently eliminate the inflation adjustment to the bonus we pay to teachers who have achieved National Board Certification. I do…

  • Misc. Budget Notes

    I’ve answered a lot of mail on the budget so far. Some items come up over and over again – Adult family homes, family planning funding, Children’s Hospital, and the State Auditor and his I-900 audits. Here are some notes on these things. Family Planning There has been about $10 million in the state budget…

  • Hobbesian Choices

    The chairs of the House and of the Senate budget committees both introduced their budget proposals this week. The committees will vote on them soon, though none of us can say exactly when at this point. Typically the bills are introduced and passed in about 3 days. The minority party always whines that they don’t…

  • Updates to Basic Ed Financing

    The Senate released their budget yesterday. The House releases its today. I’ll opine later on the differences. Both are mostly no-new-revenue budgets. The Senate packages up closing some tax loopholes. The House comes out later this morning so I can’t comment on it now. Both bodies have passed a version of the Basic Education Finance…

  • Possible Budget Choices – Criminal Justice Costs

    For the past 15 years we’ve been on a trend of increasing the number of incarcerated people. We now lead the world in the percentage of people in jail. It costs the state an average of about $30,000 per year to put someone in prison, plus all the costs of the courts and police/sheriff. Sometimes…

  • February Revenue Collections Report

    We got more bad news on the economy last week – another $63 million decline in the collections data. This was the month of Dec 10 – Jan 10, a very important period in our retail sales data.  Our total decline for the 2nd quarter of fiscal year 2009 (Oct, Nov and Dec 2008) is…