Ten years ago, I wasn’t highly skeptical of state spending. I’m not so sure anymore.
I covered Olympia long enough to know that most of the people there genuinely want to help. The problems they’re wrestling with — homelessness, addiction, education, housing — are real and genuinely hard. A pandemic hit at the start of the decade and scrambled everything. The population grew. I get it.
But at some point, the results have to show up.
WA spending doubled. The numbers don’t lie
Washington spending has more than doubled in the past 10 years, from $81.8 billion to $173.5 billion. Some of that is inflation, and our population grew, too. Fair points. But even after you account for both, we’re spending about 40% more per person in real dollars than we were a decade ago.
And I keep waiting for the results to show up.
For that kind of money, it’s fair to expect something. Better schools. Less homelessness. Fewer people dying of overdoses. Easier commutes. Instead, just about every one of those metrics went in the wrong direction.