In the quest for success, small business owners and middle-class families deserve a level playing field. Instead, they are penalized by a Washington State tax code that is stacked against them.
The business and occupation tax requires hundreds of thousands of small business owners, even if they don’t make a penny in profit, to pay tax on gross sales of their services and products. That makes no sense.
This weekend, a new crop of high-school students will be mounting the stage, mortarboards on heads and gowns over suits and dresses.
They’ll be walking across the stage to take their diplomas.
They’ll be walking across that stage as adults, ready to take their place in society.
The Class of 2010 will be walking at a watershed moment for this country.
Previously in this column, I described how Algie, our cat, developed a mysterious demon illness last year that culminated in a week-long, sleep-deprived Marathon of Grossness. Ending up in critical care, they ran very expensive tests. Which provided very few answers. (As in, none whatsoever.)
During the last November election, a lot of attention was given to ballfields, and how few of them Maple Valley has (just one). At last night’s council meeting, we got to see three options for finally building ballfields on the south side 22-acre site. Oh, it’s a grand plan, with a couple of fields for soccer and lacrosse, two softball fields, plus five (really?) tennis courts.
More than a decade after Tim Eyman qualified his first anti-public services initiative to the ballot, it appears that voters are finally going to get the chance to vote for tax reform instead of tax cuts.
A coalition of progressive public interest groups, led by William Gates Sr., is pushing ahead with an initiative that would create an income tax on high-earners. The initiative is built around two closely related and important ideas: Making our tax system fairer for middle and low income families while simultaneously strengthening our common wealth.
Last year, our cat, Algie, became very, very ill. I had a job, and was very, very busy. This year, Al got sick again. I didn’t have a job. And it was all very, very messy. This is what happened:
We’ve been reading about the new state income tax proposal (Initiative 1098) for about a month or so, and I don’t know that either side has made a compelling case so far.
Maybe it’s the inevitable result of realizing I’ve been unemployed for five months now. Or maybe it’s that comment from last week about job postings as smoke screens for referral-hiring that I just can’t get out of my head. But I’ve hit the point at which this job search process not only feels like a colossal waste of time, but is beginning to chip here and there at the edges of self-worth.
Last week, you might have read about the developer of the Fred Meyer project at Maple Valley’s Four Corners, where he’s complaining about the high permit costs and saying that the project might be dead unless the development fees and improvement costs are cut in half.
Ouch. Half of the total fees and improvements totals about $2 million, according to his figures.
Memorial Day became a national day of remembrance thanks to the efforts of wives and mothers of fallen soldiers. Civil War widows lobbied for years until Memorial Day originally Decoration Day was officially proclaimed in 1868.
Four members of the County Council are balking at putting a sales tax boost on the August ballot.
Reagan Dunn and Jane Hague (both of whom represent portions of Bellevue), Kathy Lambert and Peter von Reichbauer don’t like the idea of raising taxes while taxpayers still are climbing out of a recession.
Good for them. Let’s hope this sends a message to the rest of the County Council.
Just so you know, I was properly admonished for going MIA on y’all in last week’s paper. Travis (my husband) was packing the car for a drive to Mount Rainier on Saturday when a neighbor pulled up to say hello. No sooner did I walk out of the house, than he gave a friendly wave and called out from his truck. “Hey! Where were you this week? I didn’t see your column! What, did you get a JOB or something?”
When I submitted my column last week on fireworks, I held my nose while pressing the send button. I’m normally a self-loathing type anyway, but that column smelled a lot like a “Last-Minute Deadline Special”. Well, I ended up getting more mail on that column than anything else I’d written so far.
The King County Council used to be a partisan body. It appears it still is, despite the fact that voters several years ago mandated that all nine council seats be non-partisan.
On Monday, May 10, the council passed, 5-4, a resolution praising the national health care plan passed recently by Congress.
How come I can’t find things?
Or more specifically, how come I can’t find things, but girls can?
I have discovered this is another of the many tricks God invented for heavenly entertainment. Men never get to find things and women always get to magically see things so they can make fun of the dopey loser.
Freedom ain’t easy.
I mean, it’s easy to say, but it’s an even tougher concept to grasp, especially in a world of finite resources.
For hundreds of years, the United States of America has been the Land of the Free, the Land of Opportunity, where anyone, from any race, creed, culture or background, could go in order to live their life as they want.
It’s a little early to be talking about Independence Day fireworks, but it’s fresh in the minds of the Covington City Council Members.
Last month, there were two fireworks-related items on the agenda; one to ban fireworks completely, and one to consider changing the penalties. For all you fireworks lovers who aren’t paying attention, the absolute ban on fireworks only needed two more votes to become law, but fortunately it failed.
One of the things that has long annoyed me about political coverage in the traditional media is the careless, unsophisticated way that journalists – and many pundits who appear as guests on news shows – classify people according to their political views.
So how about them Mariners?
So much hype coming into to this season one would have almost expected the Mariners to be undefeated in the first month of the season. But the loss of Cliff Lee, a multi-million dollar star left hander, added to a rough start. However, some of the kids have done a fabulous job of picking up in the rotation. Both Jason Vargas and Doug Fister have been pitching like seasoned veterans.
Everybody’s got a card they could play. Be it race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, economic or – as I did last week – gender. I’m not a fan of playing those cards. Especially if you do it because you didn’t get what you wanted. I’ve always believed people should be judged by their work or their character. So I can’t say my last column was a proud moment.
