Pierce and King county councils right to give residents a reprieve from more taxes

CALL it the magic of democracy. The rate of sales tax — 9.5 percent in urban King County and 9.3 percent in urban Pierce County — will not be going up.

In the Sound Transit taxing district, combined sales-tax rates have already gone up this year. In April, when the economy was at the bottom of the steepest slide in a generation, the sales-tax rate went up four-tenths of a percentage point for light rail. In King County, the rate had risen a tenth of a point not too long before.

Then the county's interim executive, Kurt Triplett, who replaced Ron Sims, proposed one more tenth of a point, which would have raised the rate to 9.6 percent on ordinary goods and 10.1 percent at restaurants and bars.

We understand why he wanted it. The county is in a financial bind, and if it doesn't get more money it will have to cut services, and it has cut them already. Yet the county gets its money from taxing the people, and the people have their own worries.

Triplett is not seeking election. Six of the candidates whose names will be on the primary ballot appeared at a candidate forum at The Seattle Times last week. They differed on many things, but not one dared support an increase in the sales tax. Maybe in a different year some of them would have. Not now.

A committee of the King Count Council also voted down Councilmember Julia Patterson's proposal for an increase in the property tax — and for the same reason.

It is remarkable how the fear of losing an election concentrates the political mind. In Pierce County, the council decided on a 5-2 vote yesterday not to ask voters for another tenth of a cent in November. The money was needed — but the people who earned that money also needed it.

The recession makes such questions sharper, but they would exist in any case.

Forty years ago, when astronauts first landed on the moon, the sales-tax rate everywhere in Washington was just 4.5 percent. Now it approaches 10 percent in the big cities, and on restaurant and bar tabs in King County it is already there.

That is enough.