Yesterday was the latest cutoff day in Olympia. No, that doesn’t mean all the hottie legislative aides were running around in cutoffs—it means it was the last day for a bill to pass its original chamber—for consideration in the other. (Gotta pass both houses to become a law.)

Arguably the best bill that’s been in play this session is Sen. Craig Pridemore’s (D-49, Vancouver) bill to provide a state tax rebate equal to 10 percent of a taxpayer’s federal Earned Income Tax Credit. (The fed program gives lower-income taxpayers a tax rebate on income taxes. Since there’s no income tax in our state and there are no sales tax rebates available to lower-income residents at the state level, Pridemore’s fix simply translates federal rebates into state rebates. Smart.)

So, I was glad to see that the bill got voted out of the Senate yesterday. In fact, it was the last bill to get voted out of the Senate yesterday—32-16.

Here’s the bad news, though. The bill would cost the state about $60 million. As attentive Slog readers know, the latest state revenue projections—announced last Friday—are $423 million shy of initial expectations.

Soooo: While the bill passed, it passed in an amended form.

It used to simply do this:

Declares the intent to provide a sales and use tax exemption, in the form of a remittance, to lower-income working families in Washington.

However, before passing it yesterday, senators added a little caveat:

Declares that the department of revenue must assess the implementation of the working families’ tax exemption in a report to the legislature to identify administrative or resource issues that require legislative action.

I imagine, the legislature is going to do exactly what they did with family leave last year—pass the policy without funding it.

Annoying. And also: blockheaded policy. The way to deal with cyclical downturns is to get money into the hands of working families—as the left-leaning Washington Budget and Policy Center correctly argues here.