Washington's measure 1098

[rob in cal]

I did some reading up on Washington's measure 1098. It imposes a state income tax on married filers income starting at 400,000 (half for single filers) of 5%, which jumps to 9.0 at one million. IIRC about two thirds of the revenue is dedicated to new government spending on education and health, one third to lowering the state share of property taxes and some small business tax reduction.
    Personally, if I lived in Washington (my mom was born in Longview, and my wife has cousins there, does that count?) I'd be much more inclined to vote for the measure if it was a tax reform only plan, with all the new revenue being raised used to lower other taxes, revenue neutral in other words.  I believe Louisiana did something like this about 10 years ago, modestly raising income taxes on high earners, but using the money to abolish the sales tax on food (both the AFL CIO and Christian Coalition supported the measure btw).
     Anyway, the gigantic exemption would be the biggest income tax exemption anywhere in the US, and it also hearkens back to the origins of the income tax movement in the US.  Basically the idea of the income tax was that there would always be a huge exemption and that only the wealthy would pay, and that it wouldn't be a huge rate.  The idea was that poorer and middle classes paid a big percentage of their income taxes in sales taxes, property taxes, excises taxes etc and the wealthy paid a much smaller percentage of their income on such taxes, thus an income tax helped to distribute the taxation burden.
    Over time of course more and more income groups became impacted as the one time generous exemptions grew to be less and less, on a state and federal level.  Of course the last years have seen an improvement on the federal level with the new 10% rate and the child credit etc., but this new 400,000 exemption would be a clear return to the original populist spirit of the progressive era. 
    I can understand conservative opposition to it based on the locked in proposals for new government spending.  It would have been interesting had it been revenue neutral to see the arguments for an against, and how strong support for it would have been.