Is the Kohl-Welles income tax bill for Washington State a scam? Sure seems like it.

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On the aptly named April Fool's Day, I posted about what, on the surface at least, just appeared to be the typical democrat class warfare scam: Our democrat legislators in action: the start of class warfare and the camel's nose under the tent flap income tax.

Well, Pudge, over at Sound Politics, discovered a nuance that clearly escaped me: This was nothing more nor less than a state income tax bill... not just for those making $500,000 a year as the bill's proponents claimed... but for EVERYONE.

Legislation, like contracts, typically contain this arcane item known as a "severability clause."

(From Wiki) The severability clause (sometimes referred to as a salvatorius clause, from the Latin word salvatorius) is the name for a special clause that regulates the legal consequences or the applicability of the remaining clauses of a contract when some clauses of a contract are or become ineffective or infeasible. The goal of the severability clause is usually to maintain the spirit of the contract as much as possible.

Severability clauses are sometimes used in statutes, to preserve the effectiveness of certain portions of the statute if some part is struck down as unconstitutional by a court acting in judicial review.

Pudge concludes this:

The bill offers a standard deduction of one million dollars for people filing jointly, and half a million for singles, so few people would end up paying it, as written. As Kohl-Welles says on her web site, the measure would "impose a state income tax upon Washington's highest wage earners."

However, Washington State's Constitution requires that all taxes on property must be uniform (Article VII, Section 1), and the state's courts have consistently recognized income as property. So this form of tax would likely be stricken as unconstitutional, as it is clearly intended to be non-uniform.

If this bill were passed, and the Court did rule that provision to be unconstitutional, the bill's severability clause means the rest of the bill would remain valid, and it we would then immediately have a tax on every federal income tax payer, instead of just the wealthy.

There is no question that we all knew this thing stunk. Pudge's deft analysis gets to the underlying cause in a way that just blew right past me.

Recently, government here locally and now, clearly, at the state level, have been trying to screw us on a variety of levels. They hide behind "Madisonian" concepts that he never intended, claiming that their election allows them to but us in billions of debt without asking us... and then they try and pull a deliberate scam like this crap.

Stains on democracy abound. Will these ever wash out?
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