Way to parrot Frank Blethen's bullshit, courageous reporter!

Where did this fired up Gregoire come from?

Well... less fired up farther in, but a least some passion.

State workers pay sales tax like everyone else. Is the questioner retarded or simply an imbecile?

state employment is bloated. Cut the fat. CUT. THE FAT.

This will never pass.

There's no way to effectively communicate the need to the voters.

@5 Where would you suggest? Teachers? Cops? I'm sure you have the facts right there.

@5 highways and roads? militarized police? sure! cut it!

@5 most of that are federal grants - if you'd like, that work could be done in other states, and they'll get the sales taxes and property taxes and income taxes instead of WA.

But good point re the militarized police ... start with the DEA.

@6 - why do you say that? Many of the voters are the same people receiving unpaid furloughs, getting layoffs, just generally taking it in the shorts right now due to the horrible economy. I don't actually know a whole hell of a lot of people who are prospering right now.

Internet Troll becomes real life news reporter, film at 11.

We need to get rid of the initiative and referendum system before we destroy ourselves.

She could stop laying them off and pay them less instead. Paying a 3% 401k match (which many employees wouldn't even take advantage of) is a lot cheaper than funding a pension. If they paid 25% of their insurance premiums that would not only cost the state less but also decrase their incentive to ask for more expensive insurance going forward. And if the state stack-ranked workers it could cut the pay of lower-ranked workers while continuing to reward its most productive workers. (That list would come in handy when it came time to do RIFs, too.)

We already are being paid less. We have taken large pay cuts for three years straight. We have had our office staff cut by over 30% to the point we can no longer function effectively, and the Leg. has now contracted out to a private corporation (HMS) to do part of our job - who get to keep the $$ they bring in, not the State, who got 100% of our recoveries before this mess. Cutting State workers does nothing but create less $$ flowing into our local economies, more local money moving out of state, and less services for our citizens.

Or we could just expire the corporate tax exemptions and other tax giveaways to Millionaires and Big Business.

@15 is correct.

I'm glad the reporter asked the question. A lot of people think it and this was an opportunity to say: No and here's why.

Kind of surprising to see that opportunity taken I suppose.

Several times a month I listen to British interviews with press, just to remember what it's like to hear hostilish detailed questions that are obvious to ask and answers as a matter of course. Sometimes the answer is obvious B.S. and sometimes an action is clearly and powerfully defended. It's a beautiful thing if the point is for the reader or listener to actually have some idea of what is going on. This was a little like that.

The believe that raising taxes to protect civil service jobs will help the economy is false. A transfer of funds from the private sector to government does not increase the amount of disposable income in the economy, it remains the same. Sure, you hate to see anyone lose his job. Civil servants have enjoyed relatively good salaries and benefits for years, while the rest has suffered a steadily declining standard of living and less opportunity. Plus, let's face it, much of our current economic dilemma is the result of onerous now-growth restrictions imposed by government regulators who didn't mind who they hurt, so long as their jobs were protected. Finally, no one can deny that state government is replete with laziness, inefficiency, and downright corruption. DSHS is so maladroit it cannot prevent kids from being murdered by those who are supposed to protect them, and DOL is thoroughly corrupt. It is a system of nepotism, party hacks, and poorly-educated hangers-on who spend much of their day playing computer solitude and figuring out how to suck up to their supervisor. People dont like to hear this sort of thing, but its true. The problem is, there's no longer an independent media that keeps tabs on it.

Terrence. Your facts. Your grammar. Your reasoning. It's a right-wing troll hat trick. Congratulations.

Private entities are no different except you can't vote the CEO of Boeing out on his ass. You are completely blinded by hatred of government. Any organization is going to be subject to the problems you cite. Some are better, some are worse. The mechanisms are there to expose and correct these problems in government. The fact is, you just don't see them in private entities because they aren't transparent. People waste time and money in the private sector all the time. There's theft, corruption, cronyism, nepostism. So what, do we get rid of privately-owned business? Of course not.

Stop making blanket statements and ranting and do something positive to make government better. Sorry, but it aint going away.

@ David Wright, Terrence Knight, - sound good, but obviously don't know your sh*t. The mainline workers (the lower ranked) are the ones who do all of the field work. They are the ones who rescue babies from meth houses. They are the ones who are at accidents picking up pieces of the dead after an accident, they are the ones who have given up 3% of their wages, taken unpaid furloughs, accepted a pay freeze for nearly 4 years, are paying an increase in the medical benefits. The reason why a lot of of the "lower workers" don't invest more in a 401K is because they cannot afford to. And many State workers earn far less than their education would earn them in the private sector. Blind hatred is just that - blind. How many of you can look at a child beaten black and blue, then have to deal with the legal system and their parents w/o losing it? Do not judge so much without understanding the work. The workloads are out of control due to not enough vital front line workers. That in itself leads to not being able to oversee the vulnerable as often and as intensely as they should be overseen. Privatization means the dollar becomes the driving force and the quality of trained workers goes down due to inexperience and lack of education. Then the vulnerable really will pay more of a price. Some people amaze me with their ignorance....

Looks like I hit a nerve. Any schoolboy knows that raising taxes will make the recession worse and result in even bigger deficits – that ridiculous state parks fee is proof of that. In any case, the defense, "it's the same in government" is really an admission tbat I am right. But it misses the point. Sure, the corporate machine is blind and cynical, but government, as you yourself admit, is no better. The difference, of course, is that IBM is not accountable to the public, while government is. Stockholders can vote out a bad CEO, at least theoretically; just as voters can vote out bad officials, just as theoretically, but there are many reasons why that is not a practical reality – note that when voters turned the government over in '08, things got worse.

I stand by what I said about state employees. I personally know government workers who do nothing and are only waiting out their retirement; I know a DSHS employee who knocks down $70k a year plus bennies, who purposely takes sick days and then goes to work on weekends so he can claim OT; and there are hundreds of 'policy analysts' that nobody can tell what they do and in fact can't even describe their jobs. Problem is, there is no longer any press oversight, so these things continue. The left, thru its effete ignorance, lost the battle to the corporatists long ago – then they lost the battle for a free press. With those august defeats, it is now nearly impossible to fight at all.

It's useless to accuse me of being a "right-wing troll" – I am a democratic socialist and Jeffersonian who has been active in the Democratic Party for many years – that kind of hysterical talk only exposes the neo-left as a pack of arrogant elitists who, let me remind you, Orwell warned us about. (In '1984' the government has been taken over by leftist bureacratic statists who are intolerant of dissent.) It's exactly this kind of attitude that has caused most people to no longer much care about state workers. I don't hate civil servants or anyone else – certainly not the government, which is an abstraction anyway – but mostly I care about ordinary working folks, regardless of their party affiliation, who are being bled dry by greedy corporatists and cynical public employee unions. These days its hard to tell the difference.