We must be living in a bizarro world if a state Democrat is complaining about wealth redistribution.

Rep. Reuven Carlyle represents the 36th District in the heart of Seattle, the Northwest’s beacon of liberalism, which regularly makes the Top 20 lists of liberal cities in the nation. He isn’t some blue-dog Democrat who got lucky when his red-district Republican opponent got caught playing footsie with his secretary. Heck no, his website even features a photo of him embracing President Obama.

On his blog this weekend, he talks about a study he commissioned from the Office of Financial Management, the state’s official budget number crunchers. The study talks about the amount of tax dollars contributed by each county versus the amount of tax dollars they get back in services.

It shows that King County gets back about 59 cents for every dollar it sends to Olympia. In Seattle, it’s even worse, and Carlyle complains that only 37 cents for education spending is returned to the city for every dollar it sends. On the other side of the Cascades, Lincoln County receives about $2.54 for every dollar it contributes to state general budget spending, while Whitman County gets about $4.82.

If you only read the headlines, you get the impression that he’s advocating that we stop redistributing the wealth to smaller and poorer counties. That’s a very Tea Party-esque stance to take (and very uncharacteristic of a Seattle Democrat), but you have to dig a little further to see why he’s bringing it up.

On his blog, he writes, “Last year on the House floor I counted numerous times when various legislators from net recipient counties pointedly and aggressively criticized the operations, transportation and capital budgets for projects ‘that can be seen from the Space Needle.’ I can think of few instances when a legislator from an urban district took to the same floor to suggest or even imply that, in truth, the dollars flow the other way.”

The Seattle Times editorial board was also fooled by the headlines, and believes that Carlyle is serious about cutting budget dollars for eastern Washington to solely benefit his district or King County. Their editorial on Sunday would make you believe that every proposal by a legislator is meant to be taken literally and seriously.

In this case, it isn’t. Think of it more as a negotiating ploy to get the eastern Washington lawmakers to play nice, and to simply quit looking to just western Washington expenditures for cuts. The state legislature still has to find about $4.6 billion to cut somewhere, and Rep. Carlyle is tired of these “net recipient” districts voting down every tax increase (regardless of merit), while taking a disproportionate share of the funding. It’s more of an attempt to shame those legislators with real data rather than actually cutting their funding.

The new House of Representatives is also trying a similar tactic of voting on meaningless legislation just to score political points. They were eager to get their Tea Party checklist done in a hurry, and quickly voted to repeal the federal health care law, as well as cutting $100 billion from the federal budget.

Neither of those bills will get anywhere in the Senate, and neither of them were particularly well thought out. The entire budget cut resolution simply states, “To reduce spending through a transition to non-security spending at fiscal year 2008 levels.” In other words, we’ll just pass the 2008 federal budget again. I’m not sure why they stopped there; they could have saved $1.8 trillion if they rolled back the budget to 1958 spending levels.

Both bills are useless, but that’s the only way to get our attention. Our political battles these days are fought in the headlines, and among the shouters on TV and radio. Shaming the opposition appears to be the preferred strategy for convincing the people that their way is best.

In Carlyle’s defense, he has plenty of real proposals, and most of them sound like traditional Republican ideas, but those ideas don’t create headlines. He proposes, “The only long term way out, the only long term pathway, is private sector economic growth.” That doesn’t sound anything like a tax-and-spendocrat.

Both parties disagree heartily on how to get that economic growth, and we certainly won’t be able to create that growth in time to cover a nearly $5 billion shortfall over the next two years. Thank you for the fun headlines, state and federal lawmakers, but it’s time to get back to work.