Taxes

Taxes taxes taxes!

So my first elections came around here in Washington when Obama was being elected for president. I voted for Hillary Clinton and the opponent to the person who won the Governer's job here.. I voted for the guy who called "Greg's" bluff while running and she retaliated calling him a huge liar and all that to make people vote for her.. anyway.. her bluff? "I will never raise taxes in this bad economy. The other guy will, mark my words" ......

I mark her words today as the government tries to balance a budget.. with a .6% "temporary" (we all know it'll be permanent) increase in sales tax, sin taxes, and taxes now on bottled water. She actually wanted to tax 1 cent per ounce on pop and bottled water.. until people had to whisper in her ear that it would increase the cost of things enormously.

The kicker on this tho, is that apparently the year before we moved here, the people had voted on an initiative that mandated a 2/3 vote in congress in order to raise taxes... about two weeks ago, the government voted to repeal that initiative just so they could raise taxes.. The lady who ran on "I wont raise taxes" went awful far to raise taxes.

I see everyone ranting about it on the komonews.com site.. but this state (well, actually its this county, but it makes up the majority of the states population soooo) is as blue as Nebraska is red (outside of Omaha) and I am betting that all those people complaining will look for the little "D" next to the name of the people up for reelection.. which is like over half of the state congressmen/state senators, and we'll have this all over again.

We dont have a state income tax here. Thats great, tho I'd rather be like in Oregon where its no sales tax, and you have an income tax. They're trying to slowly introduce income tax here tho.. but the problem is, is we have such high sales tax (After the budget is done, it'll be 10.1% sales tax, and 10.6% sales tax in restaraunts) that they'll introduce the income tax and will NOT reduce the sales tax.. leaving everyone to exit stage left out of the state.

I do smell a trip to Oregon in the future though.. we can get a good shopping trip done there with no sales tax, and get to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings in Portland. I bet we'll be going there a lot more in the future when we need to make some big purchases because over 10% sales tax is rediculous.

P.S. if you didnt know, they are going to try to raise the sales taxes in restaraunts in Lincoln (not sure if its the whole state or just the city, but city for sure) by 2% to fund some Arena thats supposedly to replace the old Pershing Auditorium or some junk. I highly urge anyone to vote that down and make them find another way to fund it because once something is in place its going to take a miracle for that tax to go back down, and it will only go up.. I've learned that so well in the little time I've lived here that the government will find reasons for temporary stuff to stay or why they'll need to tax people more and more. If you get a chance to vote on it, you'd better vote tax increases down!!!