Written by PEL Lab Leader Deric Gruen and Principal of Sarju Consulting David Sarju
In Olympia this session, lawmakers again confronted what looked like an impossible choice: cut services that millions of families depend on or take the political risk of increasing taxes. Do we cut spending or collect more revenue?
This session, like the last, legislators answered both ways, cutting in some areas while creating new taxes, including an income tax on millionaires.
But here is the paradox underneath the headlines: while most Americans, including Washingtonians, support more taxes on the wealthy, that same public looks at public spending and sees declining results. They want investment, but they don’t trust the institutions to fix the problems.
That is not a contradiction. It is a plea for doing things differently. From this lens, the budget dilemma is not a math problem, but a design problem. One that requires new social and economic architecture for the long game.
This isn’t an abstraction for the working people of Washington.
The farms of the Yakima Valley generate $2.2 billion in annual sales across 1.8 million acres, but the families working those fields see little of that wealth. 97 percent of patients at the Yakima Valley Farm Workers Clinic live below the poverty line. The city entered 2025 facing a $9 million budget deficit with cuts to the exact services those families depend on. Homelessness in Yakima County rose 17 percent—faster than in Seattle.
Across King County, spending on social services and public safety, from local to federal sources, reaches nearly $4.9 billion annually. Of that total, $1.87 billion (38 cents per dollar) flows not into solving problems, but into the machinery of consequence: law enforcement, corrections and jail, courts, prosecution, and public defense. These are the predictable costs of a system designed to process harm rather than cultivate community.
This is the extraction-repair cycle at the heart of public fiscal crisis: an economy structured to concentrate benefits and offload risk, sustained by institutions designed to absorb the damage at escalating cost, with declining results. Problems grow more complex and resistant to intervention. Every agency is doing its job. The system is failing.
People experience this as a loss of control—over housing, over work, over their own futures. These communities are not struggling because their residents lack initiative or their leaders lack compassion. The erosion of trust that follows narrows the political door on the very investments and policy shifts that could work. The debate between more spending and less has crowded out the more urgent question: spending on what, and designed how?
The transition we need certainly involves more shared investment. But it is not just more money. It is a fundamentally different investment thesis: creating the economic and social architecture that builds flourishing at the foundation, rather than patching damage downstream. This requires a broad coalition to move beyond the spending binary.
We envision two tracks, working in tandem:
- The first is democratic economic architecture, shifting the distribution of ownership and control before harm concentrates. This includes enterprises owned by workers and consumers, land held in trust by those who live and work it, public budgets shaped with genuine community participation. The goal is to build an economy where the people who make it function share in the prosperity it generates.
- The second is connective social architecture. This is the tissue that makes economic architecture function at scale, aligning fragmented systems around shared outcomes, building backbone organizations that hold the whole picture across silos that have never shared data or memory, and treating multigenerational trauma as a systemic condition rather than a personal failing.
For decades, our work for economic justice and our systems of social repair have operated on parallel tracks. But they should not be treated as two distinct strategies. They are two halves of one. Washington’s budget crisis is the moment when the old model’s failure becomes undeniable. That is not a reason for despair. It is an opening—not to cut or spend, but to re-imagine and re-design.
Give communities ownership and control of the assets that shape their lives and a meaningful role in budget decisions that affect them. Build the connective infrastructure that turns fragmented services into aligned systems. The question isn’t whether we can afford it. The question is whether we can afford not to.
A longer version of this article is published on David Sarju’s Substack.
