As I posted earlier, a new Washington Poll reports 71 percent of respondents supporting at least some new taxes to help close the state's additional $2 billion revenue shortfall. Crosstabs on that question have not been published, but you don't get to 71 percent without at least some support from Republicans.

What this tells me is that even Republicans—even some rural Republicans—recognize that some of the proposed budget cuts simply cut too deep. And chief amongst these cuts, I'm guessing, is Gov. Chris Gregoire's proposed $150 million halving of "levy equalization," a program that subsidizes tax-poor school districts unable to raise sufficient funds via local school levies.

Levy equalization is one inefficient/unsustainable/anti-market big-government program that rural Republicans seem to love. So my advice now to Democratic budget negotiators, as it was a year ago, is to force their Republican colleagues to fight to keep it:

Yeah, I know, levy equalization is good policy and all that, but let's try to approach this from a classical, free market, Republican perspective for a moment. I mean, if folks out in rural Washington are unwilling or unable to raise local school levies sufficient to educate their children, then perhaps they shouldn't even have public schools? That's the market at work, right? So why should taxpayer dollars be sucked away from school children in Seattle to help pay for schools in communities that obviously don't care enough about their children to properly educate them? At a time of budgetary crisis like this, how can we possibly afford to pay for all this rural welfare?

Or, of course, we could offer to maintain levy equalization transfers, in exchange for enough Republican votes necessary to raise the revenue to pay for them. Pay as you go: that's Republican Budgeting Philosophy 101, isn't it?

That levy equalization is a compassionate, economically defensible program is beside the point. Without additional revenue we'll be cutting lots of compassionate, economically defensible programs. This is a program that disproportionately serves constituents in Republican districts, and thus it is the Republican caucus that should bear the burden of corralling the votes necessary to raise the revenue to pay for it.