Where Business Won on Election Day

Locally, yesterday’s elections will be known for the victories for business interests rather than the losses.

Uh… make that ‘loss,’ singular.

At the moment, the only definitive loss in business’ column was Initiative 1082, the one that would allow private insurance companies to offer workers’ compensation. This had been pushed by the Building Industry Association of Washington, allowing them to compete with the state. I-1082 went down in flames.

But the rest: even though I-1105 (privatizing liquor stores) went down, the Seattle Times is reporting its counterpart, I-1100 (the one that Costco was backing), is still alive, although it trails by almost 4 percentage points. Even if it fails, it doesn’t mean things will be worse off for businesses going forwardthey’ll just have to wait a little longer with the status quo before they can have another run at breaking the state monopoly. Would have been nice, but not a big loss.

But the victories: I-1098 was the big kahuna. An income tax that would only affect those making more than $200,000 per year, and then only be levied on the amount above $200,000, went down by a solid 30 percentage points. This one in particular had divided the tech community, with some, like Bill Gates (both the elder and the younger) supporting it, while others (Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos, venture capitalists Tom Alberg and Matt McIlwain) pushing strongly against it, saying businesses would flee. Presumably they would have gone to one of the other six remaining states that don’t have an income tax. I suppose we won’t ever find out.

The American Beverage Association’s money was well spent on I-1107, which rolled back the takes on soda pop, bottled water, candy, gun and canned-food processors. And Tim Eyman came back again with I-1053, which requires a two-thirds majority vote in the state legislature to raise any taxes or fees. (We’ll see how long that lasts, because the one thing the legislature agrees on is that they hate to see Tim Eyman forcing them into gridlock. I predict they’ll try to overturn it soon, so they can go back to their regularly scheduled gridlock.)

On the whole: the failure of the income tax, the rollback of the candy/soda tax, and the supermajority legislative requirements that businesses made out pretty well yesterday.

Nov. 4 Update: I-1100 is now officially dead.