Brian Heywood, a wealthy hedge fund founder, and his conservative political action group, Let’s Go Washington, rallied outside the secretary of state’s office, unloading cardboard boxes full of signatures supporting the repeal. Workers in the secretary of state’s office will now verify the half-million signatures before the measure qualifies for a spot on November ballots.
Officials say it will take two weeks to verify the signatures.
“It’s an income tax, but it’s not really an income tax, it’s accumulation of all the regulation and taxation that’s made this state less and less affordable and less easy to live in,” Heywood said. "This is the start where we begin to fight back with this taking down the income tax.”
Let’s Go Washington has been lobbying support for its repeal effort since May and has collected far more than the 300,000 signatures required to put an initiative to voters. While the group has successfully gathered signatures for several initiatives in recent years, this new tax repeal effort garnered a record amount of signatures in the shortest amount of time yet, said Hallie Herzberg, director of communications for Let’s Go Washington.
How the fuck did they get over 300,000 signatures so quickly too? It has to be the rest of the state since Seattle is only about 600k.
I know there were people at my grocery store for the last few months petitioning in front of the ‘No Petitions’ sign. I’ve seen that store manager chase down a homeless person stealing a bundle of firewood in the dead of winter but they never once seemed to enforce that rule for these guys.
Based on the arguments they were using, it was mostly just basic libertarian stuff about taxes being bad. The Libertarian pivot has been a pretty common tactic in the southwest region.
Do you mean like the Vancouver, WA area? I’ve heard that it’s very right wing in that area. I’ve also heard they’re the tax dodgers where they go to Oregon and not pay a sales tax, but then live in WA where there is no state income tax. I wouldn’t care so much if they were poor, then who cares. But something tells me that it’s wealthy area dudes using tax paid-for roads to do it.
I used to live and work in Vancouver, and yeah. In the old district Glusencamp-Perez now holds there’s a lot of ‘fuck you don’t tell me shit’.
But frankly that energy starts pretty much south of Olympia. It goes a bit out on the peninsula too with the folks that primarily live off the reservations. But those folk are much more the homesteading types than the capitol stormer types like down southwards.
And the tax dodgers are real, but there’s an equal amount of Oregon residents that refuse to pay sales tax. Had to once process tax exemption waivers for Oregonians to the principled amount of 11 cents. Each category spends hours a day stuck in bridge traffic, so fuck em.
Yeah, that all tracks. I saw a confederate flag prominently shown in their window in downtown Olympia for years, I wouldn’t be surprised if it started in Olympia. The reason that’s even more crazy is because I’ve only been to Olympia around 10x.
Yeah, though there’s also the military factor. JBLM along with Bangor and Bremerton have brought a lot of the south to the PNW.
Also, fun fact: BP. The spill in the Gulf caused a sudden migration in the fisheries industry from the South up to the PNW and Alaska.
*edit, possible memory sparked: If the stars and bars were just outside downtown Olympia hanging from a house balcony over a decade ago, I believe that was a super gay Rainbow Coalition inspired collective house. But if memory serves I think it was still rainbow colored.
There was a rainbow flag near by the confederate, but they were in different spots. We just thought it was both sides being stubborn and yelling at each other, lol. Cool that you remember though.
I firmly believe that they were paying people to go collect signatures outside Walmart, grocery stores, etc. I ran into some in eastern WA and the young man I engaged with seemed really disinterested in discussing it which seemed odd for a political volunteer. I asked him questions to force him to admit it was on people making over a million per year and then I laughed out loud and said bro I don’t make anywhere near that. I didn’t say, but wanted to: and you don’t either.
It looks like you are allowed to pay people to get signatures, it doesn’t have to be just volunteers. I thought that was the case, but I double-checked.
https://southseattleemerald.org/civics/2018/06/14/what-everyone-needs-to-know-about-paid-signature-gatherers
Thanks for checking. I’m not surprised it’s legal but it definitely feels like astroturfing to pay a bunch of people to campaign for something that only benefits rich people.