"Our budget situation is grim, but it soon may become dire." These are not my words, but the words of our governor from a foreboding press conference he gave today (watch the entire thing, if you can stomach it). We learned that the budget hole created by the Democrats was not 12 billion dollars, as we feared, but a shocking *16* billion dollars. Just for context, California, which many consider the worst run state in the Union, has a budget deficit of 30 billion dollars. But California has a much larger population than Washington. If we adjust for population, our deficit is the equivalent of almost 80 (EIGHTY) billion dollars 😳 Before you let that bleak fact sink in, consider also our state's rainy day fund is less than 10% of our state's budget, a fact the governor bemoaned, stating that "we're one of just four states in the entire country with Reserves at 10% or less of our annual budget" So what happened? Was there a massive emergency that required us to spend the rainy day fund? Have we gone through a deep recession in the last few years that reduced revenues significantly? How is that Florida has no income tax but is able to RETURN 1billion dollars back to the Federal government, yet Washington seems on the edge of collapse if a single federal dollar does not come our way? The answer is simple my friends. Tax revenues have grown consistently in Washington for over a decade. Last budget cycle the state had a budget surplus of 12 billion, and despite piling on more taxes on the residents of Washington, including a business-destroying capital gains tax, the legislature has managed to swing that surplus to one of the largest deficits in the country. "So if revenues continued to increase how on earth do we have such a huge hole?" you are wondering. It's because our Democratic controlled legislature and past governor, spent money like drunken sailors. Any responsible family or business would quickly recognize the recklessness of such spending and cut back to live, or do business, within their means. Instead of doing this, the Washington legislature proposed a series of harebrained new taxes, including an unprecedented wealth tax. Such taxes have been tried many times around the world and have always failed to raise revenue, because the people the tax is intended to loot simply leave. Our governor flatly rejected the budget proposals from both the Democratic House and Democratic Senate and this has already received much attention, with some suggesting that Bob Ferguson is being true to his inaugural speech: he's going to govern from the center as a unifying moderate. The truth is much darker, however. Ferguson only rejected the wealth tax proposals because he did not believe they would survive a legal test. “We cannot rely on a revenue source with a real possibility of being overturned by the courts,” Ferguson said. He did leave open the possibility of a smaller wealth tax that raises no more than $100 million, just to test the legality of the proposal. A trial balloon to see how far Washington Democrats can take their extremist tax policies. What we are witnessing is the complete implosion of good governance in Washington state. The situation may get even worse as Federal funds may be cutoff with our governor deciding an ideological war with the federal government is a more important priority than solving our own state's urgent problems (like 70% of our 8th graders not being proficient in math.) The Democratic party controls the governorship, has a super majority in both houses, and controls the state supreme court, which is packed with far-left judges. The slow-motion catastrophe we are witnessing is entirely on them, and unless the people of Washington wake up and decide they've had enough of extremist policies, we are, as our governor observed, in a very dire situation.