Voters up and down the West Coast are quietly poised to extend a massive economic experiment this Election Day, probing the limits of how much states can soak the big guys to help the little guys.
Their efforts — in three of the hottest state economies in the country — defy decades of conservative arguments about cutting taxes to spur economic growth. Advocates are already planning how to export them to the rest of the country.
The new West Coast Model is higher taxes on the rich, higher spending by the state and wide-scale efforts to lift the working poor, all in the pursuit of stronger and more evenly shared growth. It is on the ballot in three states: Californians are set to essentially make permanent an income tax surcharge on millionaires in order to fund education. Washington voters appear likely to raise their minimum wage statewide to $13.25 an hour, and to mandate paid sick leave for workers.
In Oregon, it will be a down-to-the-wire battle to see if voters will bolster their state budget by taxing large corporations. The fight over that measure has already broken state records for spending on a single ballot measure: more than $2o million from opponents and more than $10 million from proponents.
“The West Coast is becoming more, not just the laboratory, but the breeding place for progressive beliefs,” said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution think tank. “It’s hard to argue against it when you’re in rather flush economic times.”
Oregon and California’s economies grew faster than any other states’ in 2015, and Washington wasn’t far behind. Innovation and superstar cities are powering that growth, in tech hubs such as Seattle, Portland and the San Franciso Bay Area, and the entertainment capital of Los Angeles, all of which are magnets for talented young workers.
The booms, though, have been slow to spread beyond major metro areas. Lawmakers have struggled to balance their budgets, slashing aid to higher education and straining to fund schools at what they consider to be adequate levels — a challenge that is often felt acutely in their vast, slower-growing rural regions, and among the poorest residents of the high-cost metro centers.
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