Taxes will play a larger role than usual in 2020 political season. Thanks, Eyman

It’s tempting to regard proclamations that taxes will dominate the next 12 months of our endless political season, at least in this region and state, with a dismissive, “Thanks for stating the obvious — when aren’t taxes a big political issue?”

Here’s a news tip — taxes are going to be a big issue in the campaigns of 2020 — even more so than usual.

You can blame the campaigns of 2019 for a lot of that, as the unresolved fights spill over to the next round. But 2020 will throw some of its own volatile personalities and issues onto an already raging fire.

At the national level, taxes will figure heavily in many of the major issues of the presidential and congressional races — taxes related to climate issues, taxes related to trade with China (tariffs are just another form of taxation), taxes to raise money for free college education or health care, taxes to punish political and ideological enemies. Slice virtually every issue of consequence and you’ll find taxes at least a significant component of it.

As contentious as those fights will be, they’ll be nothing next to the chair-swinging, bottle-tossing, mirror-smashing, western-saloon donnybrook we’re already witnessing in this state.

Front and center in the brawl is I-976, the $30 car-tab initiative that remarkably, with the shift in the state’s political structure and the baggage of association with Tim Eyman, managed to pass with nearly 53 percent of the statewide vote.

Now we are being treated to the spectacle of cities and counties racing to the protection of their allies, the court system, to overturn the vote; the attorney general, a mortal enemy of Eyman, “defending” the initiative in court; Sound Transit, the direct source of voter unhappiness over multi-hundred-dollar car tabs, announcing that it plans to continue collecting what it does, 976 be damned; and Eyman himself announcing a run for governor next year as an independent.

As if there wasn’t enough to make voters aware of the taxation issue, Eyman’s candidacy, should he carry through with it, will put it on a tower and shine spotlights upon it. Conventional wisdom would suggest an Eyman candidacy doesn’t stand a chance of dislodging Jay Inslee from the governor’s mansion, but the conventional wisdom suggested that Eyman and his initiatives were yesterday’s news, and he managed to flog one more over the finish line, and here we are.

Lurking at the fringes of the taxation melee is the matter of an income tax, just waiting to plunge in and add to the chaos. That opportunity may come next year at the state Supreme Court, the next stop for the city of Seattle’s attempt to enact an income tax. That particular case hinges on legal fine points such as whether Seattle can get around the constitutional ban on an income tax if it applies a uniform rate to that income; there’s also always the possibility the court could reverse decades of rulings and throw out the interpretation that Washington’s constitution does in fact ban an income tax.

Then the governor and Legislature could charge into the fray, with a carbon tax, a capital-gains tax or even an attempt to push through an income tax, figuring that political control in the state has sufficiently and permanently tilted to pro-tax forces. Or they might sit it out, figuring that 976 shows there’s still an anti-tax contingent of sufficient strength to cause trouble, and why unnecessarily rile up the electorate in an election year.

No such restraint is likely to be evident in Seattle, where the City Council’s pro-tax, anti-Amazon faction, emboldened by success in November, is taking warm-up swings for another whack at Jeff Bezos, the only uncertainty being just how hard it chooses to hit and whether it wants to clobber a few other big companies while it’s at it.

Every one of these fights, and a few more that will pop up, will have their own subsets of arguments over what’s being taxed, how much, who pays, what the money is being spent on, by whom and how effectively. Looming over them, though, is one humongous issue that has far more power than politics to affect the outcome of debates over taxes.

That would be the economy.

The latest revenue review and budget outlook issued by the state Economic Revenue & Forecast Council suggests that Washington’s economy, and the tax revenues it generates, are still healthy. Employment growth won’t be as robust in the coming years, averaging 1.1 percent a year in 2020 through 2023 (compared to 1.9 percent this year), but it is expected to increase. Risk factors are increasing — trade-dispute impacts and Boeing’s turmoil among them — but as yet the outlook remains comparatively upbeat.

Even when an economy turns sharply downward — as it did in this state in the wake of the dot-com bust and 9/11 and then again with the housing-led Great Recession — it doesn’t happen all at once or at the same pace everywhere. Taxes are a touchy issue even in a good economic climate. If the regional and state economies stall over the next year, governmental bodies and entities will be scrambling for revenue to sustain the spending levels they built up, even as taxpayers are feeling increasingly nervous about their own precarious financial situations.

And when that happens, the political and rhetorical brawls can devolve into full-fledged riots (metaphorically speaking, for the moment). Don’t think you can find a safe place to watch from the sidelines. You do have a dog in this fight. Everyone does.

Enjoy the coming months.

This story was originally published November 30, 2019 at 7:00 AM.