Archives for March 2010

The Google Maps Street Views below look like typical small-town scenery, with a lot of open space and far from the hustle and bustle of urban America. But they’re not quite as rural as you’d think. Each of the intersections above are only a short bike ride from downtown Detroit. In fact, much of the old neighborhoods around downtown Detroit have simply disappeared, with no development to replace the bulldozed homes. New Detroit Mayor Dave Bing (yes, that Dave Bing), has a plan for fixing it:

Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.

Near downtown, fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighborhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots. Suburban commuters heading into the city center might pass through what looks like the countryside to get there. Surviving neighborhoods in the birthplace of the auto industry would become pockets in expanses of green.

This would be like Queen Anne or Capitol Hill becoming completely abandoned and turned into farmland again. Hard to fathom, but this is what happened to what was once one of the wealthiest cities in the United States in the early half of the 20th century.
[Read more…]

The Seattle Center’s Fun Forest was a virtually unique family amenity: an outdoor amusement park near the center of a modern American city. And our children deserve to have it replaced with something just as unique, and just as entertaining, instead of yet another pay-for-view museum.

So if you were designing a really kick-ass playground, what might it look like?

Wal-Mart fired a cancer patient in Michigan (who had been named Associate of the Year in 2008) after they discovered that he was authorized by his doctor to use marijuana. That occurred back in November. Wal-Mart is now even going so far as to try to challenge his eligibility for unemployment compensation.

You’d think this story of an orphaned 11-year-old might make a pretty compelling case for health care reform, but I suppose conservatives like Dori Monson would just say that the kid only has himself to blame for making the poor choice to be born to a mother who got sick, lost her job, lost the health insurance that came with it, and subsequently died as a result.

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When I talk about replacing the Seattle Center’s Fun Forest with a really kick-ass playground, I want to be clear that I’m not just talking about a teeter-totter and a couple of climbing toys… the type of installations you find at schoolyards and parks throughout the rest of the city. No, I’m talking about creating the kinda nowhere-else-on-earth one-of-a-kind destination that could be just as much a work of art as that pay-to-view Chihuly museum the grownups propose to be built in its place.

So come on, Seattle… let’s use our collective imagination and make our kids the envy of children worldwide.

According to the Seattle Times editorial board, Democrats are bad people:

THE priority of the majority Democrats in Olympia has not been economic recovery. If it were, the Legislature would not be leaning on the taxpayer for nine-tenths of a billion dollars.

Damn… they finally caught on. Yes the priority of us Dems, as always, has been the destruction of the economic and social fabric of these United States. “Heil Osama bin Stalin!”… or something like that.

Or perhaps, it’s possible, there might be a legitimate debate to be had over economic policy, with the majority of Dems genuinely believing that the anti-stimulative effects of further state government cuts would be greater than the anti-stimulative effects of minor tax increases? But, you know, it’s always easier just to question your opponents’ motives.

If the priority were economic recovery, Thursday’s page-one headline in The Seattle Times would not have been, “Despite cuts, state spending actually on track to go up.”

Oh God… if the Legislature’s spending, regulatory and revenue priorities were based solely on coaxing complimentary headlines out of the Seattle Times, Washington state would look like Somalia by now. I mean honestly, this is a paper that has steadfastly refused to cover the billions of dollars in spending cuts over the past two years, and the impact it has had on Washington families, yet we’re expected to accept their headlines as a generally accurate let alone evenhanded depiction of reality?

The priority of legislators has been protecting state employees. In the past two years, when private employment in Washington has plunged by 7.5 percent, the total of state workers outside of higher education has been shaved by 0.7 percent. The Legislature might have increased that rate in the coming year, but it didn’t.

A.) The past performance of the Times’ editorial board has given me absolutely no reason to accept that assertion as fact. B) Nice job cherry-picking data by excluding a big chunk of state general fund spending. I mean, it’s kinda like saying that “Nobody in Times management, outside of Frank Blethen, has ever shot a neighbor’s dog.”

Many voices, including this page, told legislators to declare a fiscal emergency and reopen state employee contracts. Raising the employee share of health-care premiums from 12 percent to 20 percent — a share that is still below the average in the private sector — would have saved about $50 million in this biennium. The Legislature didn’t do it.

Which is surprising, because if you’re gonna take fiscal advice from anybody, it’s a company that pissed away a half a billion dollars of equity over the past decade.

There is also the matter of step increases — an automatic pay increase for an employee not at the top of the salary schedule. In the worst crisis in years, with taxes being slapped on all sorts of things and the unemployment rate close to 9 percent, the Legislature continued to fund step increases.

While what the Times really wanted the state to do was use this crisis as an excuse to break contracts and crush the public employee unions.

The state might simply stop doing some things. A bill was introduced to end the state’s retail monopoly of liquor. The Legislature didn’t pass it.

And regardless of whose numbers you believe, passing it would have done absolutely nothing to address our current budget crisis. But again, if we can exploit the Great Recession as an excuse for privatizing something for the sake of privatization, why not have at it?

A year ago, when the economic omens were worse, the Legislature made it through without big tax increases. Back then, Initiative 960 required a two-thirds vote, and they didn’t have that. This year, I-960 was amendable by a simple majority, and they quickly amended it. After that, the tax proposals scurried out like crabs from under a wet rock.

If all you knew about politics came from the Times’ headlines and editorials, you might think that you have to handcuff those tax-and-spend Democrats to the radiator to keep them from raising taxes every full moon, when in fact when it comes to major taxes, the opposite has been true over at least the past quarter century.

Despite the fact that the sale of goods has represented an ever shrinking portion of the state economy since the 1950’s, there hasn’t been a hike in the state portion of the sales tax rate since 1983… the longest such lag, by far, since the sales tax was implemented back in 1935. The B&O tax on manufacturing was cut in 1995 and again in 1997, and now it too stands at 1983 levels. And while the gas tax has been raised 14.5 cents since 2003, that jump followed a nearly unprecedented 12-year period of stagnation, with the current 37.5 cent a gallon tax still falling below the historical average as a percentage of the price at the pump. Only the tobacco tax has seen substantial increases, but primarily for public health reasons, and with bipartisan support.

Meanwhile, the Democratic controlled Legislature has spent much of the past decade passing billions of dollars worth of tax exemptions. And let’s not forget car tabs, which the Legislature eliminated in 1998 by feebly reenacting Tim Eyman’s unconstitutional I-965, essentially cutting a chunk of annual revenue equivalent to a one cent per dollar reduction in the state sales tax rate.

Indeed, even with the plethora of property and sales tax increases approved by local voters, total state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income fell from a high of 10.4% in 1994 to 8.9% in 2008, ranking us 35th nationwide according to the conservative Tax Foundation. So the very notion that it was I-960 that handcuffed Democrats, rather than their own well-documented reluctance to anger taxpayers, is complete and utter bullshit.

Raising taxes is never an easy thing for politicians to do, not even Democrats. Never. And to imply otherwise is nothing short of slander.

Senate Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, blamed her urban colleagues. “I think a majority of our caucus is from very safe districts.” she said. “As a result, they just feel like we don’t want to reform.”

Lynn Kessler is a Republican. There, I said it. At least on fiscal issues, the Democratic caucus is led, if not dominated, by politicians who would have been Republicans two decades ago. And yet even with the outsized influence that these economic DINOs have on the caucus’s agenda, Kessler has the nerve to publicly criticize her urban colleagues for occasionally voting the needs and interests of their constituents over that of the BIAW and Frank Blethen?

There’s a part of me that almost wishes the Democrats would lose a bunch of House seats come November, if only to foment a caucus revolt that might install some new and more effective leadership, that truly reflects the values of the Democratic Party.

Somebody, sometime, is going to make them reform state government. It will happen. But it didn’t happen this year.

Reform? What reform? The Times didn’t call for reform; they called for busting state employee unions and dropping temporary assistance to those unable to work due to physical or mental disability. Would that save money in the short term? Sure. Would it address the bureaucratic inefficiencies and misplaced priorities that surely exist? Nope. And it sure as hell wouldn’t do anything to address the long term structural revenue deficit that results from clinging to an early 20th century tax structure that simply doesn’t fit the reality of our post-industrial, 21st century economy.

But again, you know, if there’s an opportunity to impugn the character and motives of the majority Democrats, why not take it?

The bill to expand Washington’s medical marijuana law has passed the House after some late amendments were made to require tamper-proof authorizations (as a way to reduce fraud). After Senate re-approval, the bill will land on Governor Gregoire’s desk. The bill doesn’t address some of the major flaws in the medical marijuana law (such as full arrest protection), but it does make it easier for people in rural areas to get authorizations.

One thing that’s interesting about this legislation is that the Cannabis Defense Coalition (a group I work with – and that I can truly attest works on a small budget) actually hired a lobbyist to make the case for this bill. I think it caught a lot of us by surprise how much can really get accomplished when you have someone effective in the halls of Olympia fighting on your behalf.

UDPATE: More news on the legislation here.

Nothing against Dale Chihuly, or museums in general, but I was deadly serious the other day when I proposed a kick-ass playground to replace the Seattle Center’s soon to be closed Fun Forest, instead of the lovely, respectable, and inevitably kid-unfriendly look-don’t-touch museum that appears to be the favorite of city planners. And I sure do hope that council members and civic leaders take my proposal seriously.

The Seattle Center has long been the number one family destination in a downtown that, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly family-friendly. There are no K-12 schools in downtown Seattle, no athletic fields or basketball courts or other youth-oriented amenities. And little in the way of playgrounds, kick-ass or otherwise.

And yet if we want to build the kind of downtown urban density necessary for our region to grow sustainably into the 21st century and beyond, then we’re going to have to do something to keep couples from moving out into the suburbs the minute they pop a bun in oven. And, well, replacing a virtually unique, downtown amusement park with a pay-to-view glass museum doesn’t exactly strike me as a move in the right direction.

A playground on the other hand — a really kick-ass playground — would not only provide a desperately needed family amenity, but would be entirely in keeping with the spirit and heritage of the Seattle Center, which from its very inception has always been a destination for families seeking diversion and amusement.

And don’t be so limited in the scope of your imagination to believe that a mere playground can’t be as much of a tourist attraction as a Chihuly museum. I’m not talking about a couple of jungle gyms and a seesaw here; think of it as a one-acre canvas for showcasing the inventiveness, creativity and yes, playfulness of our city… perhaps a gigantic, multi-level Rube Goldberg contraption filled with running, joyful children.  I mean hell, if something as inherently boring as a library, for chrisakes, can be reimagined into an instant architectural landmark and cultural icon, then so can a playground. You know, a really, really kick-ass one.

Seattle’s civic leaders should stop trying to prove how grown-up we are by matching older, East Coast cities museum for stodgy museum. A) We’ll never do it; and B) being a grown-up is way overrated. Instead, let’s unleash the inner child in all of us and build something that no other downtown in America has: the most amazing, jaw-dropping, joy-inspiring, kick-ass public playground any child or adult has ever seen.

Hey Itawamba County School Board… way to assure that this kid gets the shit beaten out of her by her fellow students:

A Mississippi county school board announced Wednesday it would cancel its upcoming prom after a gay student petitioned to bring a same-sex date to the event. […] The announcement alarmed [18-year-old senior, Constance] McMillen.

“Oh, my God. That’s really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one,” she said. “A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this.“

Ya think? And you think the vindictive pricks on the school board didn’t realize this when they canceled the prom in response to her request? I imagine it’s hard enough being openly gay in rural Mississippi, but now the local school board has publicly branded her as the dyke bitch who ruined prom.

I guess the real message to students is, “Shut the hell up and stay in the closet, or else the figurative gay bashing may become a literal one.”

Eleven Republican state senators filed a bill yesterday, SB 6883, that would bar legislators from collecting a per diem during the coming special session, which I suppose might be taken as a serious attempt to protect the interests of taxpayers, if not for the fact that its last-minute filing ignores both Senate rules and the Washington State Constitution.

ARTICLE II, SECTION 36: WHEN BILLS MUST BE INTRODUCED.
No bill shall be considered in either house unless the time of its introduction shall have been at least ten days before the final adjournment of the legislature, unless the legislature shall otherwise direct by a vote of two-thirds of all the members elected to each house, said vote to be taken by yeas and nays and entered upon the journal, or unless the same be at a special session.

I heard  Sen. Joe Zarelli, SB 6883’s prime sponsor, on the radio this morning attacking majority Democrats for wasting the 60 days they had, yet I’m not really sure how filing a symbolic bill that can’t be considered helps to explicate matters during the busy final days of the regular session? Republicans complain that they have been excluded from crucial budget negotiations, but if this is the sort of “constructive” role they hoped to have played, it’s easy to see why.

Regardless, it doesn’t take an act of the legislature to pass up the $90 a day legislators are reimbursed to cover housing, food, travel and all other expenses incurred during session. So I would hope my friends in the Olympia press corps might ask Senators Zarelli, Carrell, Holmquist, Becker, Stevens, Morton, Parlette, Honeyford, Brandland, King and Hewit if they’re just, you know, grandstanding, or if they’re actually willing to set an example for the rest of their colleagues by voluntarily declining the meager compensation that is their due?

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From an infamous, leaked, 2005 Citigroup memo, declaring the U.S. the world’s leading plutonomy:

[T]he top 1% of households in the U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in 2000, slightly smaller than the share of incme of the bottom 60% of households put together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie! Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S. households is paramount. The usual analysis of the “average” U.S. consumer is flawed from the start. To continue with the U.S., the top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better (or worse, depending on your political stripe) — the top 1% of households account for 40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together.

The gist of Citigroup’s analysis is that its clients should invest in the type of things that the top 1% consume — “toys for the wealthy” — because economically, the rest of us don’t really matter.

In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or the “U.K. consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

Likewise, there is no such thing as a “Washington taxpayer” either.

On average, Washington is a relatively low tax state, ranking only 35th nationally as a percentage of personal income, even according to the conservative Tax Foundation. But due to the highly regressive nature of our sales tax reliant tax structure — the most regressive in the nation — this burden is distributed incredibly unevenly, with the bottom 20% of households, those earning less than $20,000 a year, paying an average of 17.3% of their income in state and local taxes, while the top 1% of households, those earning over $537,000 a year, pay only 2.6%.

This is, of course, class warfare, and as billionaire investor Warren Buffet is famous for saying, his class is winning. And his is the class who the editors at the Seattle Times defend.

Forgive me for answering a question with a question, but when the headline of this morning’s Seattle Times editorial asks “Does Washington state want a sales-tax rate higher than L.A.’s?“, the only reasonable response I can muster is “What the fuck?”

In Seattle, the total general rate is already 9.5 percent. That is higher than New York City’s rate of 8.875 percent and the same as San Francisco’s. If Seattle’s rate goes to 9.8 percent it will be higher than Los Angeles’ 9.75 percent or Chicago’s 9.75 percent, effective July 1.

Raising the state portion of the sales tax to 6.8 percent would likely make Seattle’s rate the highest of any major city in the United States. We think people will notice. We think this will hurt investment, commerce and job creation here.

Yeah, well, we think that people who invest in job creation will notice the entire tax and business climate… you know like the fact that on top of the sales tax, Chicagoans pay a 3% income tax while Los Angelenos pay a top personal rate of 10.3%. Of course, here in Washington, we have no state income tax.

We think people will notice that on every single ranking of business climates, from Forbes Magazine to the conservative Tax Foundation, Washington consistently ranks near the top of the list, while California is buried near the bottom. Likewise, we think that people who look at tax rates when making the decision where to locate their home or business might notice that Washington’s state and local tax “burden” consistently ranks in the bottom two quintiles nationwide, while California ranks in the top.

The point is, the Times’ editors… they can’t have it both fucking ways!

They can’t argue against adding an income tax to the revenue mix by claiming it will turn us into another California, while at the same time bitching that our sales tax — a tax on which we rely for the bulk of our state revenue — now approaches that of, well, California.

Note to Times: we have one of the highest combined sales tax rates in the nation because we have no income tax! Yet when Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown proposed slashing the sales tax by a penny — a better than 10% cut in a Seattleite’s annual sales tax bill — and replacing it with a 4.5% income tax on only the top 1% of wage earners (less than half what they would pay in California), you decried it as an “awful idea.”

Again… what the fuck?

Well, the fuck is that the Times simply opposes all taxes, under any circumstances, for any reason, and all their mock-authoritative sniping on the subject is just sophistry, pure and simple. That’s why the Times only selectively picks at the bits and pieces of our spending and revenue system, and never, ever, ever debates the tax structure as a whole. For to actually talk about taxes in any meaningful way, might just undermine their publisher’s entire political agenda.

Please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Stop by even earlier and enjoy some dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 344 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.