The Freedom Foundation has a 25-year history of standing up for taxpayers.
Recently, the Left has been bound and determined to implement wealth redistribution in our state, and the Freedom Foundation has pushed back.
Initiative 1098 from 2010 offered the income tax on high-earners to fund education. Freedom Foundation helped build the arguments to oppose the idea. Most of the state agrees.
Then they pushed an initiative in Olympia to create an income tax on high-earners. Again, the Freedom Foundation sounded the alarm, our supporters pushed back and our attorneys documented that the measure was unconstitutional in the challenge litigation. Voters rejected the measure.
Then the governor and House Democrats introduced a capital gains income tax on high earners in order to afford the union contracts the governor negotiated in secret last summer with his donors. Again, the Freedom Foundation pushed back and alerted lawmakers of our intent to file a lawsuit if such a targeted, vindictive tax was enacted.
Now, the Seattle City Council has passed a resolution whose goal is to target a small portion of the population with an unconstitutional tax. Again, the Freedom Foundation pushes back. On Q-13 Fox News in Seattle, Senior Policy Analyst Jami Lund was able to explain how unfair and un-American such a proposal would be.
“Equal treatment is why the constitution has a protection like this. We don’t let the majority persecute a minority,” he noted.
Seattle’s insistence upon targeting a few of its residence with tax collections has now been adopted as city policy. Seattle’s city councilmembers have worked on and adopted several policy dreams of the progressive leftists who are running unions lately. In recent years, union contributions to Seattle council candidates who subsequently won office have been extraordinarily high.
These kinds of resource extraction schemes are unconstitutional, they have consistently been rejected by voters, and they are extremely unfair to all citizens who must now release private information to a city intent on taking their money.
The Freedom Foundation is working to form and lead a coalition that will litigate to ensure that our constitutional protections apply equally to every citizen.
