If you follow state fiscal policy, there’s a very important battle happening in the Pacific Northwest. Democrats in the state of Washington are trying to muster the votes to push through an income tax.

As depicted by the chart, the spending burden in the state has been growing rapidly and politicians need to extract more taxes in order to enable continued big spending increases in the future (just as politicians in D.C. ultimately want a value-added tax to enable bigger government on the national level).

For purposes of today’s column, I’m not going to focus on the merits (actually, demerits) of the proposed income tax.

Instead, I want to build upon something I wrote way back in 2009 by highlighting the deceitful tactics that politicians and pro-spending lobbies use to push for bigger government.

It’s called the “Washington Monument Syndrome, though there are other equally accurate terms, as noted by this Wikipedia excerpt.

So what are politicians in Olympia (the state’s capital) doing that qualifies?

Here’s a tweet that is a perfect example of the Washington Monument Syndrome.

This is predictable…and absurd.

To build upon the chart at the start of today’s column, here’s a ChatGPT summary of the huge increase in the burden of state government spending over the past decade.

To summarize, there’s been a huge increase in government spending in the state of Washington, yet if spending isn’t allowed to continue to rapidly increase, state politicians want to scare voters that they will have to cut back on one of the few programs that people actually like.

Reprehensible, but very understandable when you understand the motives of politicians.

P.S. The absurd scare campaign in Washington reminds me of Obama’s hysteria about sequestration (automatic spending restraint) back in 2013. That episode at least led to some very amusing cartoons (here, here, and here).

P.P.S. Seems like the state of Washington (like just about every other place in the world) needs its version of Javier Milei.

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Image credit: Nils Huenerfuerst | CC BY 4.0.