An earlier post on Dino Rossi's donors purposefully didn't include much commentary, in part out of interest in seeing how readers digests the information.
To put the numbers in perspective, both Rossi and Christine Gregoire are well on their way to smashing their record setting totals from 2004 for an Evergreen State Governor's contest ($6.25 million and $6.36 million respectively). Gregoire in particular will have enough to spend this time around, whatever the final totals.
The trick for Dino, as Renee Radcliff Sinclair alluded to in the previous thread, is that many of the same corporate and PAC interests that split their money or went in his direction in that year will either donate to Gregoire this time or sit out thanks to her incumbent status.
The rough math on Rossi's contributions thus speaks for itself. He has raised approximately $4.376 million in cash from about 30,000 donors as of the end of April. In that month, he pulled in nearly $630,000 in cash contributions from over 4,000 donors. That's an average contribution consistently in the ballpark of $150, i.e. grassroots support.
Or as Joel Connelly puts it in today's paper:
The Outlook for 2008: With Rossi running again, polls are all over the place: Some put Gov. Chris Gregoire up by 10 points. Others show a statistical dead heat.Rossi just welcomed his 33,000th donor, proof of a broad base of support. Gregoire has an activist record, but Rossi can point to a still cumbersome state government. He can, too, bring up the failure of King County's Democratic rulers to deal with transportation gridlock -- and their tendency to nanny-state excess.
David, I beleive it has been posted here before that Gregoire does favor an income tax and had started to talk about it last year, but like many things it is on the back burner till after teh election.
Posted by: TrueSoldier on May 21, 2008 07:43 AMThe tribes make billions in this state and don't give a dime for the privilege.
Posted by: Hinton on May 21, 2008 10:34 AMNow thems R sum talkin' points!!!
Posted by: John425 on May 21, 2008 10:59 AMShe appears to be betting that the takings coalition will invest enough campaign money to cover a multitude of sins. It is a formula that has worked in the past.
Posted by: russell garrard on May 21, 2008 02:44 PMShe never stops picking your pockets.
She's gotta go
Out with the thief
Posted by: gs on May 21, 2008 05:19 PMHowever, there are some glimpses of the truth coming out from Joel Connelly, liberal columnist who exposes Gregoire for having zero leadership and bringing on the large budget deficit, but also puts the owness on Rossi to be more specific in how he proposes to resolve these issues. No doubt that the government would be more efficient with the new Governor, but people here are so archaic and can't stand to think outside the box - many of them happen to be registered Democrats. Get a clue, vote for change - you can do it with Obama whose change is risky, so try being consistent and do it in this state - game on !!
Posted by: KS on May 21, 2008 10:09 PMThere was a story in the PI about it recently, and the comments from readers on the PI web site were overwhelmingly negative. Several said that they planned to close their on-line businesses. These were PI readers....
Posted by: russell garrard on May 22, 2008 07:45 AMJust a wild band of thieves.
Posted by: gs on May 22, 2008 09:01 PMImportant Tax Cases: Quill Corp. v. North Dakota and the Physical Presence Rule for Sales Tax Collection
by Chris Atkins (he wrote this article)
In the Complete Auto Transit case, the Supreme Court articulated a four-part test to determine if a state tax scheme unduly burdens interstate commerce. The first prong of the Complete Auto test requires a taxpayer to have nexus (i.e. a connection) with a state before it can impose its tax jurisdiction. In Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, the Supreme Court explained that a business had to be physically present in a state before that state could require the business to collect use tax on its behalf.
The facts in Quill Corp. are as follows: North Dakota sent a notice to Quill Corp. that it owed use tax (a companion tax to the sales tax) payments for purchases that North Dakota residents had made through Quill Corp.'s catalogue. Quill responded that it did not have nexus in North Dakota because it had no physical operations or employees and hence did not have to collect North Dakota use tax on sales made to North Dakota customers.
The Supreme Court sided with Quill, ruling that a taxpayer must have a physical presence in a state in order to require collection of sales or use tax for purchases made by in-state customers. Physical presence means offices, branches, warehouses, employees, etc. The existence of customers alone (i.e. economic presence) did not create sufficient nexus under the Commerce Clause for North Dakota to impose a sales tax collection burden on Quill Corp..
The Supreme Court's reasoning was at least partially based on the fact that, at the time the case was decided in 1992, there were over 6,000 separate sales and use tax jurisdictions in the United States (states, localities, special tax districts, etc.) and to impose a collection obligation on a remote seller would impose a crushing burden that would severely restrict interstate commerce. Today, a movement is afoot to simplify state sales tax systems in order to lobby Congress to overturn Quill and require remote sellers to collect sales and use tax.
Update: Professor John Mikesell from the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs writes that at the time of the Quill decision, his data (compiled for a brief filed in the Quill case) shows that there were 6,277 separate sales tax jurisdictions and 4,452 separate use tax jurisdictions. Thus, there were less use tax jurisdictions than sales tax jurisdictions at the time the case was decided, though the number was still substantial.
Amazon is just one of many in the groundswell of fighters keeping the Internet tax free as it should be.
Gregoire will have to turn a herd of high paid attorneys and a P pot full of tax $$$ making her case stick on this one.
Not to mention the army of attorneys she will need to police every single sales site on the internet.
KEEP THE INTERNET TAX FREE!
Altogether, $11.87 billion in state taxes was collected in fiscal 2001.
To see the manual, please go to http://dor.wa.gov/reports/taxref2002/contents.htm?noframes or look under the statistical reports tab of the agency's web site, http://dor.wa.gov.
Current budget 32 Billion Dollars
Additionally Man made Global Warming structure 2.16 Billion Dollars
State estimate tax on co2 "cap and trade" will be 21.16 Billion Dollars 33+21=54 Billion dollars?????