Standing in the fab lab of MacDonald-Miller, a manufacturing shop off Martin Luther King Way S. that specializes in green and efficient building materials, US Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA, 1), the Democrats' candidate for governor, gave a jobs speech Monday afternoon pitching a bevy of tax breaks for research and development and small business hires to tap Washington State's "spirit of innovation." [full plan here]

(Note: McDonald-Miller President Derrick Simonds has contributed $1000 to Inslee's campaign; the company's VP, Perry England has contributed $1250; and an engineer has given $99.)

Inslee came on strong with his longtime theme—"clean technology"—as one of the industry "clusters" (the others being aerospace, life sciences, military, agriculture, and information technology) that will be the "cylinders of job creation in the state." Hyping Washington as the place that led the aerospace revolution and the internet revolution, Inslee said: "We're going to get our state working again. We're going to return Washington to the forefront of technological development. We've done this before, haven't we? We led the first technological revolution in aerospace. We led the second in computers and Internet. Now we will lead yet another technological revolution when I'm governor in clean energy technology."

Inslee himself has been here before too; he's been pushing clean energy as a Congressman for years and wrote a book in 2007—Apollo's fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Economy—all about it.

Inslee said clean tech comes with the added bonus of being "an industry that can unite both sides of the Cascade mountains. The farmers in Colfax, the welders in South Seattle, are equal partners, with the wind from the east that will power the skyscrapers in the west. I believe it is our destiny to do this."

Inslee was undeterred by the recent doubts about green "Solyndra" jobs; the Republicans put out a memo as Inslee began his speech with stats such as: "$500 million in economic stimulus money spent on green jobs— [only] 52,762 have been trained out of the 124,893 promised." They also ridiculed Seattle's own lackluster weatherization jobs project.[pullquote]For those that don't understand, let them go to Marysville and talk to Silicon Energy [which is] producing the best solar cells in the world.[/pullquote]

Asked by a reporter to defend the green jobs elixir, Inslee said that "for those who think clean technology has been oversold, we in Washington understand the power of innovation ... innovation is tough ... of course there are failures ... Thomas Edison made 300 light bulbs that didn't work before he made the one that did. Why would we give up on finding the next Microsoft? For those that don't understand, let them go to Marysville and talk to Silicon Energy [which is] producing the best solar cells in the world. The problem with the naysayers is they haven’t walked around and talked to Washingtonians” who are creating green-energy jobs.

Inslee was asked how he would pay for the R&D tax breaks (the state is already groping to cover its costs with a $2 billion shortfall) saying only that the breaks would "payback starting as soon as you hire that first worker."

Pressed on how he would pay for it up front, Inslee said he would close tax loopholes, pledging, as he has before, that he would close the loophole for "out-of-state Wall Street banks." That tax break—as current Gov. Chris Gregoire has noted—is only worth about $18 million.

Pressed on closing tax breaks—did he have a list of others?—Inslee (sounding a bit like Seattle state Rep. Reuven Carlyle), said "the problem with exemptions is that they don't have a sunset provision ... once the lobbyists get them on the books they never have to make the case for themselves to be renewed. When I'm governor that will change."

Inslee noted that he's stood up to corporate lobbyists before boasting that he defied Wall Street lobbyists (and his own party's president, Bill Clinton) by voting against dismantling the Glass-Steagall Act which erased the bright line between commercial and investment banking—one of the culprits in the 2008 Wall Street crash. (I'd add that Inslee also voted against the bank bailouts.)

Inslee eventually turned the tables on the his opponent Rob McKenna, whose centerpiece proposal to increase funding for education doesn't appear to pencil out. "This is not based on fairy dust as the AP and others have reported," he said about McKenna's bad math on cutting state workers' pay.



There's another problem, though, with Inslee's pitch on repealing tax breaks: You need a two-thirds vote in Washington State to repeal loopholes, a tall order. I asked Inslee about this as he was getting into his car after his speech. He smiled, tapped his chest, and said, "When I'm governor, when I'm governor."