Democrats continue to pass regressive taxes in Washington | Rep. Chris Corry

In your opinion, what makes it a crisis at this point? Well, it is just year after year of adding more and more uh to working and low-income Washingtonians across the state. Uh this year, the legislative session was no exception. Uh we were told by the progressive majority it was going to be a year of progressive revenue, that we were going to tax the rich. And unfortunately, uh, what ended up passing was just more regressive taxes on, again, working Washingtonians across the state. And there's a variety of examples of that. I think probably one of the ones people are starting to see the most now is, uh, when they go to fill up their car, uh, we just increased gas taxes. And that's on top of the Climate Commitment Act, which is adding an astronomical amount of revenue or, excuse me, of cost to a gallon of gas. So while the nation is seeing uh declining gas prices, Washington were going the exact opposite direction as far as uh the tax increase that you were talking about in the last legislature. That is mostly though for large companies. It is a BNO tax. So when you talk about uh you know lowincome Washingtonians, it's not like they're the ones directly paying that BNO tax. Well, actually I would I would disagree. I think that um they we passed uh new BNO taxes across industries that didn't have it before. So if let's say you have a storage rental that is now subject to BNO tax, it wasn't prior. And you know our our research showed us that a majority of the people that are utilizing uh like let's say a public storage or a U-Haul type facility um those are renters typically low or moderate income folks. Um, so that is going to you're going to see increased costs there. Uh, we passed increased taxes on uh different types of uh let's we'll call they call them sin taxes, right? But whether it was ZIN um other nicotine alternatives, we we made alcohol licensing more expensive. Um, and those taxes I think back to your original point will go back down onto consumers. And one area that I think is going to be particularly interesting to see as it rolls out is in our grocery prices. though we passed in our state this year the uh extended producer responsibility. So it is going to be more expensive for uh food packaging and other um ongoing products in that cycle which I think will lead to higher costs for consumers. Yeah, I hear a lot of people though talking about making plans to move especially after that huge tax hike we got. A lot of people are fed up, but the Democrats have the majority in the legislature, so it's not going anywhere anytime