A Central Washington legislator wants to make Aplets and Cotlets our official state candy.
Stop him.
In recent years I’ve opposed the state vegetable, the state marine mammal and the state frog.
We didn’t need them, just as we didn’t need a state animal, state fish, state fruit, state gem, state dance or state tartan.
But this one could get ugly.
First, it designates a commercial product as an official state symbol.
What’s next? The Boeing 747 as the official state airplane? Starbucks the state coffee?
Yes, the state Apple Commission wanted the designation of the state fruit, but “apple” isn’t a trade name, and the fruit has an association with the state beyond the marketing of the product.
Second, Aplets and Cotlets could have competition.
The Tacoma legislators who sought state-candy status for Almond Roca eight years ago are likely to be back.
We may get a compromise like the one in San Francisco between fans of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and those of “San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate.” The Board of Supervisors named one the official city song and the other the official city ballad.
When the Washington Potato Commission protested the proposal two years ago to designate the Walla Walla Sweet Onion as Washington’s state vegetable, one legislator suggested making the Walla Walla Sweet the state edible bulb and the Russet potato the state edible tuber. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.
I hope those cooler heads will be there to prevent naming Almond Roca the state sweet and Aplets-Cotlets the state confection.
A state income tax doesn’t have to mean more taxes
A letter writer in last week’s Enterprise said that if we start an income tax, we should eliminate the sales tax. Otherwise our Legislature would have two taxes that it could increase.
The answer is a constitutional limit on both taxes. Both our sales-tax rate and our property-tax rate are too high. The writer points out that, even with an income tax, a lowered sales-tax rate could creep up.
So the answer is to put firm limits in the constitution on the income tax, the sales tax and the property tax.
We have states with income taxes, states with sales taxes and states with both. Whether a state’s overall tax burden is high or low has little relation to what kind of tax system it uses. What an income tax does do is make the system fairer.
Because we don’t have an income tax, we have raised sales-tax rates to outrageous levels. With local options, the sales-tax rate in King County now exceeds 10 percent. I want a constitutional amendment that caps the state’s sales tax at about 5 percent and the local rate at about 2 percent, sets a cap on property-tax rates and sets an income-tax-rate limit at a level to cover cuts in the other taxes.
Evan Smith is the Enterprise Forum editor. Send comments to entopinion@heraldnet.com.
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