Jay Inslee: “the Seattle earthquake last week gave us a telling example why it is grossly irresponsible to bring a huge tax cut bill…”

“the Seattle earthquake last week gave us a telling example why it is grossly irresponsible to bring a huge tax cut bill to this floor before we do a budget. There is a lot wrong with this bill. Many people have heard many of these problems: the fact that it gives 43 percent of all the benefits to just 1 percent of Americans. That is a problem. The fact that it is based on really phony fiscal hallucinations based on these 10-year projections when we cannot even project 10 months from now. That is a problem. But perhaps the biggest kind of problem was made clear to us in Seattle last week on the very day that a 6.8 on-the-Richter-Scale quake hit Seattle. The administration tried to hit our earthquake preparedness programs by trying to kill Project Impact. Project Impact is a Federal program that is designed to help improve local communities' earthquake preparedness programs, a program Seattle had used to good effect and which was effective in reducing losses. Why did that happen? Well, the Vice President said that Project Impact was ineffective. Try telling that to the first graders at Stevens Elementary School in Seattle, who I visited last week, the day after the quake, who, until Project Impact came along, did their studying underneath a 1-ton tank of water that was prone to going right through the ceiling and down onto their classroom because it was not secured adequately for a standard earthquake. But then Project Impact dollars came along.…”