Tim Eyman is out of touch with reality

Tim Eyman has it wrong. In today’s Seattle Times he tries to justify his jobs-killing initiative I-1033 by saying:

It's a tug of war where the other side is always going to be pulling the rope in favor of higher taxes. There needs to be a counterweight to that.

If that is truly the case, let's remember what Washington did last winter, when during the worst economic crisis in over seventy years the state budget lost around nine billion dollars. Even with a Democratic governor and a Democratically-controlled legislature, the state did not raise taxes. Instead it allowed teachers and school librarians to be cut, it hiked college tuition to the sky, released lawbreakers early from prison, and eliminated 40,000 low-income people from the state health plan.

If there was ever a time to raise taxes and maintain a sound quality of life in our state, then this was that time.

But no taxes were raised. It seems that Washington's elected officials are not the spendthrifts that Eyman’s I-1033 is trying to protect us against.

And while the state’s all-cuts budget irritated progressives, it should have made far right-extremists like Tim Eyman happy. But it didn’t.

Let's get real. Eyman doesn’t honestly care what the state's actual fiscal situation is, he just wants to continue in his mission to be Washington’s highest paid initiative profiteer. For the record, from the Times:

Tim Eyman was asked recently if he could imagine a time when he wouldn't feel the need to file another anti-tax initiative. Eyman, in essence, said no.

And Eyman told the Seattle P-I in 2002:

The fact is, it is true that I made money in past campaigns and planned to make money on future campaigns.

I want to continue to advocate issues and I want to make a lot of money doing it.

The effects on the state be damned.