Northwest now is supported in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Four ballot measures threatened to cancel some of the biggest pieces of progressive lawmaking in Washington state history.

The right says it's about trusting the marketplace and lowering the burden on overstressed taxpayers.

The left say repeals threaten the planet and billions of dollars of new revenue that fund schools climate resilience and health care.

The Let's Go Washington slate of ballot measures next on northwest.

Now.

Very few elections in this state are competitive or likely to change the balance of power at any level of government.

But the Let's Go Washington slate of ballot initiatives have the potential to solidify this state's bonafides as a progressive thought leader, or sharply repudiate a left leaning agenda that some say has gone off the rails, Initiative 2109 would repeal the state's capital gains tax, which could bring in as much as $2 billion a year.

2117 repeals the state's carbon tax, which could pump billions of to education, school construction, early learning and childcare.

2124 repeals the mandatory payroll deduction for the state's long term care insurance program, instead requiring taxpayers to opt in 2066 repeals.

The disincentives passed to discourage the ongoing use of natural gas.

Steve Higgins Now with more on Let's Go Washington.

said, hey, I'm going to do it.

Families in Seattle's Wedgewood neighborhood gathered this month sharing resolve to protect what makes Washington The Evergreen State.

Now, all these people organized by tree action Seattle neighbors mourn the fate of multiple cedars slated for removal.

Developers received city approval to cut down about a dozen trees behind this fence on a property near Wedgewood Elementary, to make room for new homes.

I can't change what's happening next door, neighbor Susan Mills believes Seattle's newly updated tree ordinance is flawed, saying future construction threatens our urban forest.

She worries the project next door could injured the Cedars in her own yard.

So this one here, and then there's a really big one in the back by our garage.

And we realized that it was noted that the our trees were going to be damaged by the construction.

And the city again said, there's nothing you can do.

You can go to Sandy.

Shetler helps organize with Tree Action Seattle when development includes clear cuts.

They're standing up for trees in their own neighborhoods because we are seeing this kind of deforestation.

She says that's why Tree Action Seattle joined a large and growing coalition opposing initiative 2117.

I have no faith in their ability to administer $2 billion, Brian Hayward, the wealthy hedge fund manager sponsoring Let's Go Washington's Initiatives, laid out to support for 2117 to the Seattle Times editorial board in August.

I 2117 repeals Washington's landmark climate legislation that requires industry to reduce pollution and funds clean energy, air quality, transportation, and many other projects.

Hayward blames high gas prices in the legislation, telling voters approving the initiative which power and money back into their own hands.

But detractors warn the initiative derails the state's attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 95% by mid-century.

We can't afford the cuts to transportation.

We can't afford the damage to our environment, and we can't afford to not have a plan to address climate change.

Groves are the answer to our climate resilience challenge.

Okay, that's why Chevron rallies communities when trees are threatened and why Seattle Tree Action urges voters to reject it 2117.

We cannot simply go back and think that that will solve the problem.

In Seattle, Steve Higgins, northwest now Redmond businessman Brian Haywood is the point man and major funder on Let's Go.

Washington.

Brian, thanks so much for coming to northwest now.

What a start.

Out with a philosophical question.

I have to admit, a lot of the progressive solutions for things are what I like to call broccoli.

When we'd like some ice cream.

I say to myself, you know, those are some important problems to solve.

But then the solution comes and it's kind of, you know what?

I want higher taxes, legislative boxes, administrative rulemaking, a bunch of stuff that the market doesn't want to do.

And frankly, we don't want to do either.

With that said, though, where are the good ideas to do things like climate change, tackling that and long term care and early education?

Why isn't don't we?

Why can't we get good ideas to do the hard stuff?

What are your thoughts on that?

I think the legislature has become really arrogant and they quit listening to people.

I think that's the very heart of it.

You know, they'll have a group of people that are sort of their friends and they'll come up with something.

And I think there's actually two parts.

One is I don't think they listen to people.

So when the, when the, citizens have voted, you know, 11 times not to have an income tax or they voted against the carbon tax or they voted against these different issues.

Olympia just ignored them.

The second is, I believe there's become in this day.

We used to be sort of libertarian left, and I think it's been attacked by authoritarian left.

And there's a fight going on there.

And I would frankly say people are afraid of opposing something that's closer to an agenda than a solution.

What are your good ideas for helping us want to do the hard stuff?

I believe in most situations.

Not everyone, but I think you have the government play a small regulatory role, and then, you encourage and incentivize a very healthy, free market to come up with solutions to the to the big things that it's hard for.

It's hard for government to come up with solutions.

They almost never get it right.

And the market will get it wrong.

But 100 people getting it wrong and three of them getting it right means we're going to get the right solution.

Let's step through some of the actual, initiatives here.

First, dealing with the capital gains tax.

You know, redistribution and confiscation bordering on is offensive to a lot of people.

But the stratification of wealth in this country is clearly out of control.

And my gut says that there's, you know, the middle class is paying for everything and disappearing at the same time.

And I think I got to tell you, Brian, I think there are a lot of fairly conservative voters out there who are maybe throwing up their hands at this point and saying, you know something?

To hell with it.

Tax the rich.

How do you answer that?

Let's do it.

If we're going to do that, are you doing it for a punitive reason, or are you doing it because you're going to use the money in an appropriate way to make things better?

And I think, what if you look at our state, we've got they keep crying about a, a regressive tax structure.

But for 40 years one party has had control.

And I believe if they throw in any of these other taxes, you don't see any movement and almost no conversation of getting rid of the regressive taxes.

And so I'm not a big fan of taxes.

I don't care on the top.

I think the taxes are I think taxes are they do exactly what they're designed to do.

They punish behavior.

That's what they're designed to do.

And so I think it's stupid anyway.

But I think there's a bunch of hypocrisy from the folks that are saying, oh, it's so regressive.

We need to hurt the let's hurt the, the top guys so that we can make it better for the bottom guys while still heaping on like the the Climate Commitment Act is a massive regressive tax.

So I think we there's no honest conversation.

Let's have a national conversation about what we need and what what should be done.

You bring up the Climate Commitment Act, which is a great segue, into the next one here.

Gas prices, of course, are what captured the public's mind here.

But, you know, let's let's why not stop the massive subsidy subsidization of of gasoline?

If we don't want to subsidize health care and child care and a lot of other touchy feely stuff, why not stop the subsidies, then on fuel from the Department of Defense over in the Middle East all the way to paying the true cost of pollution?

If, I see those two as being co-equal.

I don't know if I'll accept everything in your premises, but I certainly don't have any problem of not subsidizing, fuel.

But if you go that route, then again, you put government in the role of subsidizing something, right?

There's I would say right now the subsidies that go to, green energy are gigantic compared to what's going to the to the fossil fuel industry.

And there's no accountability in the market.

There's not.

And in fact, that's my biggest problem of 2117, besides the regressive nature is that they did not contemplate, nor did they build into the law itself, a way to track the effectiveness of the money that they spend once they had taken it from the consumer.

It's just a handout, that, that I think buys by support and entrenches a big bureaucracy.

So let's again, if they used in an effective way, we have begin to have an honest conversation.

Do you think there's a kernel of a good idea, though, of dis incentivizing pollution and creating revenues from that to do the next thing, which we all know is going to be, you know, nuclear fusion or of, an array of solar over the top of over the top of us.

We're not going to be burning stuff forever.

No, and I, I but again, I think hydrogen is going to play a much bigger role than, than the government is giving it credit for.

But again, I don't know.

And the and the government doesn't know and that's part of the point.

If you, if you and the other is the speed with which they're trying to do it in, in the Pacific Northwest especially, we're, we're listening to the conversations.

They want to get rid of the dams.

They want to get rid of natural gas, and they want to get rid of fossil fuels.

There is no way on this.

And they're not fans of nuclear.

And so you can't get rid of all these, energy sources and still grow the economy.

I've seen estimates that said, we're gonna have to go back and have like two as our economy would get shut down to the, to the, to the extent of like 2 or 3 COVID's to hit some of their targets.

If you do have targets, they should be rational and reasonable and based on something other than, you know, somebody sticking their finger up in the wind and feeling what they feel like, let's do that.

This party of of I don't I don't always feel like they're scientifically decided.

They're sort of an agenda or consensus driven rather than, than, something that makes sense on what's going to happen in the market.

You're so used to talking about these, I love it.

You're providing your own Segways because I want to go next into the, the repealing the natural gas tax incentives.

My note says right here.

And you talked about this early.

You tax what you want to disincentivize.

We want to disincentivize burning gas to heat our home.

So is it really, at the end of the day, tax policy and regulatory policy, the only way here, again, which we mentioned in the last conversation, it creates this alternative market for other fuels, maybe speeds the launch towards the next thing.

I mean, we're not going to voluntarily do this.

Probably, you know, the market in and of itself isn't going to wean us away from, easily resourced, fossil fuels that have, in the case of natural gas, 100 years, provable reserves sitting in the bank.

I mean, it has to be a transitional fuel, but we can't we can't rely on it.

I don't agree that we need to get rid of natural gas.

I remember not so long ago, in fact, a very short while ago, that we were told that we can no longer afford to buy $100,000, diesel busses because we had to switch to $400,000 natural gas busses.

And they were, it was called the Clean Natural Gas.

All over the busses, all over the dump, the, the, garbage trucks.

I saw signs that were driven by government policy that said, hey, clean natural gas, clean natural gas, clean natural gas.

And now that they've decided that it's no longer the holy metric, it's now they've they've even stopped calling the natural gas.

They're calling it methane, because that sounds more scary.

And I believe that's that's again, I don't think we're ready to get rid of natural gas.

I don't think it is the dirty pollutant that they're putting it out to be.

I'd like to see their evidence on that.

It would it be ideal if we had some perfect, magical, green energy?

Yeah, I would love that.

If if hydrogen comes along and obviates it, I'm all for that.

I don't I don't have any problem against new technology between now and then, those restricting natural gas and incentivizing it actually pose a bit of a danger to people's health and safety, I think restricting natural gas.

Yes.

I think it poses a huge danger to, I think you're going to have grandma's living up in cold areas that that run out of heat when the electricity goes down and there's nothing there for a week or two.

Natural gas is the is the most common backup.

And I even read about one of the, one of the utility companies was was positing how are they going to get the electricity to power all the electric cars if, you know, if we get rid of natural gas.

And so they were talking about building natural gas plants so the private citizens couldn't have natural gas, but the utilities would have natural gas plants to generate enough electricity to power all the cars that can hypocrisy to me, just says that this is this is an agenda.

Not, not science.

Yeah.

Forget about forget about cars.

How about the data center and and I, that's going to be a massive, call on the grid and on power generation.

I will say you've done it again by mentioning grandma.

Another perfect Segway and a perfect segway into the repeal of the long term, Washington CARES act.

Long term care is an emergency.

If families are failing.

So the question here, what's the better plan?

Is it the marketplace?

I mean, come on, Brian, the marketplace doesn't want to touch this with a ten foot pole.

It's expensive and expensive.

So one, we're not repealing it.

All we're doing is allowing people to opt out or opt in.

And I might, note that I was going to discussion with several of the framers of the original law, and they were complaining, saying that some of those 500,000 people that were lucky enough to opt out in the first couple of months of the law, some of them want to get back in.

And I said, well, you guys had two years to fix that and didn't.

My law lets them get back in if they want to, and anyone else that wants to get out can get out.

I think there's there's a couple of things with this and this.

This is that I know we've got a short time here, but fundamentally, I think the floor, there's a flaw in this, this law that that punishes people at the low end of the spectrum.

It doesn't provide any sort of long term care.

It's a joke to call it long term care.

And, secondly, you'd mentioned about the market before this law went into place.

There were five companies offering long term care plans.

I'm not saying they were the cheapest things in the world, but they were real long term care.

There was no cap on the benefit like this.

Long like this walk cares thing has 36,000 and you're done.

That means three months and you're done that.

There were options in the market.

As soon as this law came out, all five of them disappeared.

All those long term care Gen Worth and GE and all those companies pulled out of it because it's so, so crazy expensive, unsustainable.

And any government fund, you know, is going to have to have a bailout at some point in the future when the actuarial blow up.

But still, Brian, where's the better?

Right.

Where's the better idea?

I, I suspect if you looked into the insurance, I, I've gone down a bunch of rabbit holes.

But I suspect if you looked into the insurance rules in this state and the requirements that we put on insurance, that if you loosen those up, you could get a wide variety of, products, much like we have in the automobile industry, where you get somebody might only want to have a $10,000 policy, and someone else might want to have a $2 million policy.

And with some deregulation, you could get that whole spectrum.

Brian Heywood, thanks so much for coming to northwest.

Now, a great conversation.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

Opposing the slate of Let's Go Washington initiatives is Andrew Villeneuve, founder of the Northwest Progressive Institute.

It really seems that the argument for, for, for not repealing some of these is but we want the money and, and some might argue that the progressive agenda really is always more about liver and broccoli as opposed to to ice cream.

It's always redistributing.

It's always higher taxes.

It's always paying into something.

I look at some of the problems that you want to solve and I'm like, you know, that's important, that's important, that's important.

But but then the solutions are really higher gas prices.

Something coming out of my paycheck.

La la la.

Talk a little bit about that.

And why do things that are framed as part of the progressive agenda always seem to come with so much pain?

So thank you for having me.

I'm really glad to be here.

And so this slate of initiatives, we really think of it in economic terms, first and foremost, these initiatives would all raise Washingtonians costs, and we can't afford that.

And if you look at across the spate of initiatives, how they do that differs, you know, like for example, 2066 would worsen energy affordability, IE 20 109 would raise child care costs.

I 2117 would raise the cost for commuting.

And then I 2124 would raise costs for long term care.

So so the taking away taxes is actually going to raise our costs.

It's amazing isn't it.

Yeah.

But you see the taxes are actually a form of investment.

When we pool our resources to get things done, we're actually investing in each other and ourselves.

It's doesn't cease to be our money when we invest it.

Rather, what we're doing is we're putting it together with other people's money so we can get something that we wouldn't otherwise be able to afford.

So the progressives had a lot of good uses for my money.

Well, you can think of it this way progressives believe in the strength of pooling resources.

We believe that when you bring your money to the table and other people bring their money to the table, then we can afford something that would otherwise be cost prohibitive and an example would be the long term care.

How many of us can afford that expensive private insurance?

Right.

It's just it's just out of reach.

And so what people end up having to do is rather than buying something they can't afford, they will quit their job so they can care for a loved one because there's no other option or go in for uncompensated care in an emergency room where it's very expensive.

That's also true.

And so what we're trying to do with these public services is we're trying to make it possible for people to live great, happy lives.

We want everyone to live a rich, rewarding, fulfilling life.

And we don't believe that cost should be a barrier to being able to participate in the economy.

So that's why child care is important.

It's why long term care is important.

It's why we want to lower the costs of commuting and getting to work, and it's why we want to lower energy costs.

But again, all these initiatives are threatening to undo that progress.

And they would raise Washingtonians costs.

So last question four and I'll start picking on you.

But can we tax our way into prosperity?

I think we can invest our way into prosperity.

But investing alone isn't enough.

We have to be smart with our money.

Progressives aren't just for raising revenue to do things, or for making government work smarter and better.

It's about effective government.

It's not about big or small.

It's about how much of a return we're getting.

And we believe that we should have audits and we should look at performance.

And so public services that aren't working as well as they should, we need to make them work better.

So we're always interested in continuous improvement.

Let's talk about them individually.

Now I'm going in numerical order 2109 capital gains.

You know, eating the rich is very attractive right now, but I think I have a couple of thoughts on this one.

Is it starting with the rich?

But a lot of people are afraid it's going to keep moving down the income ladder.

A lot of the rich have already fled the state.

Or at least some some high profile examples.

It happened in new Jersey when I was there.

It's happening in California when I was there.

It'll happen here as well.

And the other thing is to, in addition to marching down the the income ladder, taxes never really go away.

They never get reduced.

They tend to go up.

So does this open the door for only more taxation or what?

That's the argument for repeal.

What's the argument against it?

The argument against is that only 3700 of the richest families in the state pay the capital gains tax, and it was designed to be a tax that would be paid by only the wealthy, because we have an upside down tax code where the lowest in middle income families pay up to 17% of their income in taxes on the wealthy pay only like 3 to 4%.

That's unfair.

And the idea that we would just let that situation continue is immoral.

So the capital gains tax is a response to the fact that a lot of people in the lower and middle income brackets are already paying more than their fair share, and the wealthy are paying almost nothing.

We are a tax haven for the rich in Washington, and that doesn't make sense.

So the capital gains tax is the beginning of correcting that problem brings a lot of innovation, brings a lot of smart people.

So I will just say trickle down economics doesn't work.

And what we have discovered is through experience is if you give the wealthy lots of tax cuts, they hoard the money and they don't create jobs.

They can only buy so many cars and so many pairs of pants.

It only buy so many super yachts.

So what we find is that when we require the wealthy to invest in the state's future, in the country's future, with taxes, that unlocks progress that we need.

And the interesting thing is, of course, it's good for the wealthy, too.

Like it's not hurting them.

It's not a punishment, it's actually an investment.

And there are well, there are millionaires and billionaires out there who think of it that way.

They're called patriotic millionaires, and they are always explaining to other folks that it's okay to tax the rich.

It's okay, because those are investments.

We're trying to build a stronger country, and we can't do that when we shirk our responsibility to pay our dues.

2117 Repeals the Climate Commitment Act.

And this one, I think maybe was a messaging problem.

I feel like I was the only one paying attention in class when everybody's pointing at somebody else about how higher gas prices.

That's not a bug, that's a feature.

The whole idea is to get people out of their vehicles and finally have people experience the true cost of the petrochemical economy that we live in.

It's supposed to raise gas prices, right?

Well, it's not supposed to raise gas prices directly.

What it's supposed to do is put a price on pollution.

Oil companies can choose to pass on their compliance costs, and there's some evidence that they're doing that.

But what's more important to keep in mind is that if we don't put a price on pollution, if we don't find a way to transition away from our fossil fuel economy, we are going to continue to exacerbate this climate catastrophe.

And the climate catastrophe comes with serious costs for Washingtonians.

It comes with cost to our health.

It comes with cost to our families ability to live, prosper in a prosperous manner.

You know, we're going to have difficulty in the future if we don't tackle the climate crisis.

And we have to do our part as Washington and lead the country in the world in tackling this, we can't just say, oh, well, we'll wait for somebody else to step up.

That's not leadership.

Folks are paying more money at the gas pump and paying higher prices for products to have a small impact on the climate, while China is pumping out enough in one day to wipe out anything we're going to do in Washington state for the next ten years, how do you answer that?

Well, first, I would point out that the initiative doesn't actually lower gas prices like proponents claim.

There's nothing in the initiative that requires lower gas prices.

You could vote for the initiative, and you lose the climate law and the billions of dollars that we're investing in statewide transportation infrastructure.

You mean the oil companies won't lower their prices?

Is that what you're telling?

Shocking, right?

But but the proponents could have chosen to write an initiative that lowers the gas tax, or they could have chosen to write initiative that requires the oil companies to pass on their savings.

They didn't.

They're expecting the oil companies will, I guess, do this out of the goodness of their hearts.

And we all know oil companies don't behave like that.

Let's talk about 2066 repealing natural gas disincentives.

This one scares me a little bit.

Someday we're going to be an advanced society.

We're going to stop burning things to make energy.

But we have a 90 year reserve in this country, a national natural gas.

As we're getting into electrification for AI and a new industrial revolution, a new a new attack against diseases and all the problems that vex us, should we really be writing off an important transitional energy source and telling people, you may not be able to build a home, or you may be go cold in the winter if we if we, as Jay calls it, get away from dirty gas.

This one actually is a little scary.

The funny thing about 2066 is that it does the opposite of what the proponents say.

So it actually make gas less affordable.

And the reason is because it takes away tools from utilities to plan for a more stable price future.

So if you're someone who's on gas now and you don't anticipate that you're going to be making the switch by electrifying in the next few years.

Unfortunately, the initiative robs utilities like Puget Sound Energy of the tools that they need in order to ensure that prices remain stable for those who remain on gas.

So it's actually doing the opposite of what it claims.

So worsening energy affordability is the last thing we want to be doing for struggling families right now.

And how could taking away an important source of that's already plumbed in, piped in and and taking it away make energy cheaper that justifies?

Remember the the initiative doesn't stop what it's proponents say is it's happening because we're not actually at risk of gas disappearing like that because there is no ban on gas.

Like the proponents are saying.

That's a myth.

They made it up.

It isn't real.

So because no one is at risk of losing their gas, the initiative can't prevent something from happening that isn't isn't happening.

Right.

So what they're what they're saying is you have to vote for this initiative.

You want to keep your gas.

But nothing in current law is taking away people's gas.

I know this goes quickly in our last 50s here.

2020 2124 repeals long term care insurance.

Here's another mandate.

I got to get a deduction out of my stinking paycheck.

And let's face it, this is eventually going to need a bailout.

It is not going to remain solvent.

There's going to be billions more to make the fund to pay for itself someday.

These never go away.

They never sunset, and they always need a bailout.

Well, actually, what the facts show is that if we let people opt out, as the initiative proposes to, that's what we'll send the CARES fund into a spiral and cause its collapse.

So we have to remember our approach with all of these initiatives.

Is everybody in, nobody out.

That's why we have to vote no, because when we all participate, we can afford things.

But their approach is everybody for themselves.

And so we just get rid of all the taxes and the regulations and everything.

And what we've discovered through experience is that doesn't work.

We've tried it in this country and it led to disaster.

So our message is to vote no on all these initiatives, prevent your costs from increasing.

Andrew, thanks so much.

I know it's a lot.

And that ten minutes goes quickly.

But you did a great job.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

You know, something progressive lawmakers don't like?

Washington's initiative process.

They're the same lawmakers, by the way, who claim something called legislative privilege to keep their documents and processes secret.

The bottom line Like the Public Records Act, this state's initiative process is one of the few checks to single party rule or bad governance.

The people of Washington have consistently shown that they don't want to be forced into ideological boxes when it comes to taxation or things that attack the libertarian vibe in this state that people who aren't from here tend to greatly underestimate.

Here's to the initiative process.

No matter what you think of the measures on the ballot this year.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

You can find this program on the web at kbtc.org.

Stream it through the PBS app or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

That's going to do it for this edition of Northwest.

Now, until next time, I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.