So, after a few days of taunting Rob McKenna about his free car, I want to get back to something a bit more important: Taunting Rob McKenna about his confused/hypocritical/dishonest rhetoric on budget issues. Take for example the video above that I first posted last Friday, in which, speaking before the Tri-Cities Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, McKenna acknowledges that "One thing we know about the state budget is, it does grow over time."

"On average, since 1970, the state budget has doubled about every ten years—because of economic growth, population growth, inflation—nominally, it's doubling every ten years," claims McKenna, before going on to list the many ways he would like to spend all this "new money."

Of course, as usual, McKenna pulls that "doubling every ten years" number out of his ass. I couldn't find reliable data going back to 1970, but over the past 20 years—the ten biennial budgets from 1993-95 through 2011-13—total state operating and capital fund expenditures increased from $32.8 billion to $74 billion. That's about a 63 percent nominal increase every ten years, not 100 percent. Big difference.

McKenna is absolutely right that state budgets do "nominally" increase over time due to economic growth, population growth and inflation. Independent of economic fluctuations and major policy shifts, these are the core budget drivers that raise the cost, in nominal dollars, of providing a constant level of government services. But to somehow claim, as he does, that these rising costs represent "new money," once again requires McKenna's unique and questionable brand of new math.

Thus McKenna's wish list for new education spending—spending priorities with which I 100 percent agree—is just that, a wish list, unless and until he explains how he's going to generate the new revenue to pay for these great new programs, or explain what existing programs he intends to cut in order to free up the money to pay their way. Hell, Washington's highly regressive and inadequate tax structure doesn't even keep up with population plus inflation, let alone economic growth, so rather than filling state coffers with "new money" as McKenna implies, a decade from now we won't even have enough revenue to pay for the programs we already have. You know, just like we haven't had the money in the last couple budgets to maintain state services at previous levels.

After 8 years in Olympia, you'd think McKenna would know this.

It's a pretty stunning misrepresentation of how budgets work. Which raises the question: Is McKenna an idiot or a liar? Is he simply so clueless that he actually believes nominal budget increases due to population and inflation represent "new money"? Or is he just counting on everybody else—including the real journalists—being a clueless enough not call him on his new math?