Let me see if I understand the circumstances of our state’s fiscal crisis. Thanks in no small part to our governor, we appear to have the highest estate, gasoline, sales and property taxes in the nation. Despite these astronomical taxes, we seem to have swung from a budget surplus to a structural deficit.

My impression is that public employees in our state now have higher salaries, benefits and pensions than private employees and our politicians have not had the conviction to affect a fair share of layoffs on the public sector.

However, instead of making some hard decisions over the past year to cut back our state’s unaffordable discretionary spending, our governor is running a “politically correct” campaign to ask citizens for their random ideas of how to decrease the deficit and counting on a handout from President Obama and Speaker Pilosi.

I thought we elected Gov. Gregoire and her Olympian cohorts to make decisions like this before the inertia of the recession compounded our problems to an unfathomable level. Now, due to her apparent inaction, we may have to pay for a special session of our ineffective elected officials.

Running a large complex organization requires anticipatory, hard decisions, not running a transparent popularity poll.

Harvey Gillis, Bellevue