In the wake of the Seattle City Council’s vote on Monday to approve an illegal, unconstitutional income tax, the Freedom Foundation is prepared to challenge the action in court – hopefully with a coalition of other freedom-minded organizations.
The Freedom Foundation has a 25-year history of standing up for taxpayers, and it’s clear the end game for Washington leftists is to create a test case they can take to the liberally configured Washington State Supreme Court in hopes of invalidating the state constitution and more than 90 years of court precedent.
Their first attempt failed last November when voters in Olympia rejected a ballot measure that would have imposed a tax on the city’s wealthiest residents to fund college scholarships. Seattle was the next move on their chess board.
“Liberals have long wanted a statewide income tax to fund their Big Government programs and hire thousands more unionized public employees,” said Freedom Foundation CEO Tom McCabe. “But voters have consistently rejected the idea.
“So they’re trying to get around that problem,” he said, “by imposing a tax that, at least at first, only the ‘rich’ will have to pay. But there are two problems with that idea. One, it’s a lie. No matter who starts out paying it, everyone will eventually suffer. And two, it’s manifestly illegal and unconstitutional in Washington to impose a tax that treats people differently based on income level.”
Seattle’s insistence on targeting a few of its residents with tax collections has now been adopted as city policy. Seattle’s city council members 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.
