Cascade Party
A new path in Washington State politics.
A new path in Washington State politics.
Read about our proposals to stop the attacks on your household budget.
Energy underlies all other costs. When electricity, diesel and natural gas become more expensive, so does manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and heating.
Transitioning away from fossil fuels is a legitimate long-term goal for reasons that extend well beyond politics. Mandating a transition faster than markets and infrastructure can absorb creates price dislocations that hurt ordinary households most.
When government policy restricts or phases out lower-cost energy sources faster than alternatives can scale, energy prices rise. This is not speculation — it is what happened. Our state’s Climate Commitment Act (CCA) raises gasoline prices by design. The idea behind this program is to discourage Washingtonians from driving internal combustion vehicles — so everyone in the world can benefit from less carbon emissions!
Ask yourself, are you driving less as a result of the CCA? The answer is we’re all paying more to get to work, school, shopping or wherever we need to be.
There’s more.
U.S. natural gas permitting restrictions, limitations on domestic oil production and aggressive renewable portfolio standards have all contributed to higher energy prices.
Cascade Party supports clean energy policies on a timeline sensitive to business and household budgets.
Cascade Party supports advertised pricing, in a competitive market, for medical services as a way to lower healthcare costs. Medical consumers are entitled to clear, accessible and accurate information about the prices of hospital services in advance of receiving care. In fact — this is federal law yet medical services are getting around the rules.
Federal hospital price transparency requirements are intended to ensure that patients can understand, compare and anticipate the cost of medical services.
When hospitals fail to comply with these requirements, patients are deprived of meaningful notice of potential financial obligations. It is fundamentally unfair to subject patients to aggressive debt collection practices for charges that were not lawfully or transparently disclosed at the time services were rendered.
Cascade Party supports policies and enforcement mechanisms that prohibit a hospital or affiliated provider from sending a medical bill to collections for any service provided on a date when the hospital was not in compliance with applicable federal hospital price transparency requirements.
Patients should not suffer credit damage, financial penalties, or coercive collection actions as a result of a hospital’s failure to meet its legal transparency obligations.
Washington State is currently facing a severe housing affordability and supply crisis, with projections indicating a need to construct 1.1 million new housing units over the next 20 years to accommodate population and job growth.
Current housing production has stagnated at approximately 33,600 units per year, the lowest level since the Great Recession, leaving a deficit of roughly 22,000 units annually against the target of 55,000.
Bureaucratic hurdles have resulted in permitting timelines averaging 6.5 months statewide and exceeding 18 months in some municipalities, creating uncertainty that deters capital investment and drives developers to other regions.
The Cascade Party recognizes that public funding alone could never fill the housing gap and that a dynamic partnership with the private sector is required to unlock capital, land and innovation.
The Cascade Party adopts the following four-point Housing New Deal framework to guide state and local policy:
