This November, residents of Washington state will have two tax-related ballot questions before them. One — Initiative 1053 — would re-introduce a crippling super-majority requirement for the state legislature to raise taxes. California has already provided ample evidence that such a step leads to budget gridlock.

A second question on the ballot, however, is more worthwhile. Intitative 1098 would create an income tax for Washington’s wealthiest residents, applying a 5 percent tax rate on incomes exceeding $200,000 for individuals and $400,000 for couples, and a 9 percent tax rate on incomes above $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for couples. The money raised from the tax would go to fund K-12 education and health care services in the state, and would also allow for a reduction in property taxes and small business taxes.

The attempt to implement an income tax in a state that currently doesn’t have one has led to quite the uproar from corporations in the state, led by behemoths Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon. Microsoft Corp. co founder Paul Allen has given $100,000 to the opposition campaign against 1098. (On the opposing side, Allen’s co-founder, billionaire Bill Gates, and Gates’ father, Bill Gates Sr., both support 1098).

These huge corporations argue that instituting an income tax on the wealthiest Washington residents will drive business out of the state and make it harder to recruit workers. But only the richest three percent of the state’s residents would be affected. And at the moment, Washington state has one of the nation’s most regressive tax systems, due to its heavy reliance on sales taxes.

Currently, a resident in the poorest 20 percent of Washington residents can expect to pay a whopping 17.3 percent of his or her income in state and local taxes. A person in the next 20 percent can expect to pay 12.7 percent. A resident in the richest one percent of the state’s population, however, will pay just 2.9 percent. There is no other state in the country that places such a large burden on its poorest households.

Nicolas Hanauer, a partner at the venture-capital firm Second Avenue Partners, is for the change (and raising his own taxes), saying “nothing bad will happen to you as a consequence of me paying three, four million more in taxes.” “I won’t cut back on the number of homes I own,” he added. “I probably won’t even cut back on the number of hours I fly in my very own private airplane.”

Big Businesses and their Washington allies tend to resort to the same arguments when it comes to raising taxes on the wealthy, though their fears of blunted economic growth have historically failed to materialize. There’s no reason for Washington to continue to place such a heavy burden on its poorest residents, particularly when money raised from taxing the wealthy can be plowed back into the education system.

To that end, Gov. Chris Gregoire (D-WA) has challenged the mega-corporations opposing 1098 to explain how they expect the state to create a world-class workforce without funding its school. “That’s their workforce of tomorrow,” she said. “I ask them, ‘If not this, then what?’”

Last night, the Associated Press reported on new depositions regarding the “robo-signers”: bank employees who signed thousands of mortgage foreclosure documents without reading them or verifying any information. According to the depositions, “financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in ‘foreclosure expert’ jobs with no formal training.” One bank employee reportedly said “I don’t know the ins and outs of the loan, I just sign documents.”

The still unknown extent of these problems has led a handful of banks to voluntarily freeze foreclosures, as they look to see exactly how many foreclosures they’ve initiated that were improper or based on fraudulent documents. And already stories have emerged of banks foreclosing on homes without the proper paperwork (in some cases, when the homeowners never even took out a mortgage).

But could these problems have been avoided? Elizabeth Warren, who is heading the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), thinks so, saying “had a similar agency been in place three years ago” this problem could have been nipped in the bud. “Little problems are a lot easier to fix than great big problems,” Warren said.

As Annie Lowery pointed out, the CFPB “has the mandate to oversee and write rules for mortgage servicers, though it is not staffed or set up yet.” Having one agency in charge of this will be a distinct improvement, as right now at least four agencies have some jurisdiction over mortgage servicers, as Andy Kroll pointed out:

This lackluster and balkanized oversight of the servicing industry helps to explain why companies passed off bogus paperwork and allegedly committed fraud on the court for as long as they did…This is where a consumer protection bureau dedicated to proactively safeguarding American consumers comes into play. Odds are, the kinds of assembly line-like foreclosure processes that’ve landed banks in hot water would never have lasted so long nor grown to such size (one Chase employee, or “robo signer,” describes 18,000 legal filings passing through her department every month) with an independent consumer watchdog in place.

“Moving forward with the regulations under the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau makes a lot of sense. This is a reminder of why those kinds of rules are necessary,” said Harvard Business School Professor Nicolas Retsinas. But if Republicans have their way, the CFPB is going to have a hard time getting off the ground.

House Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee have already made clear their intention to deny the agency funding. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) has announced his intention to defund the agency entirely, as he believes it “assaults the liberties of the consumer.”

Now, come July 2011, these problems will be alleviated, as the CFPB transfers to the Federal Reserve and has an independent source of funding from the Fed budget, which is not subject to Congressional approval. But in the meantime, the agency needs to staff up and start moving. If the CFPB staff needs to spend the next eight and a half months in a funding fight with Congress — as opposed to filling the critical and obvious gaps in the regulatory system — it will take that much more time for the agency to catch up with the finance industry’s shenanigans.