Archives for May 2014

– Antonin Scalia really takes the cake.

– RIP Billy Frank Jr.

– In case you’re wondering why today you’re getting spam from every local charity that you’ve ever given any money to, oh it’s Give Big.

– But while autopsying Goldberg’s prose is fun, let’s not miss the point: while the conservative schtick-of-the-moment about liberals oppressing them is hilarious in several ways, it is useful to remember that these people are natural bullies. As in Goldberg’s case, they demonstrated this in their writing back when their tide was high — and they demonstrate it still on people over whom they still have control, namely the poor, whom they punish sadistically every chance they get. I’d say their bullshit about being oppressed is the result of guilty consciences, if I thought they had consciences.

– I’m of the opinion you can put whatever you want in your garage no judgement.

When I laid out the details of the mayor’s minimum wage proposal last week, I promised to follow up with a political analysis. But man is this a difficult post to write. Political journalists may not like to admit it, but there is an observer effect to what we do—a kinda Heisenberg uncertainty principle of politics, in which the mere act of analyzing the political process can influence its outcome.

And so it is with many, many, many caveats that I reluctantly characterize this deeply flawed and disappointing compromise as a huge fucking victory for minimum wage workers.

Um… huh?

To be clear, this is not the minimum wage proposal I would write—its phase-in is too long and complicated, its definition of “small” business too broad, and the temporary tip and benefit deduction it imposes is both unwarranted and unfair. But I’m no idiot. Given where we were just a year ago on this issue, this proposal is a bit astounding. By 2025 every worker in Seattle will earn an inflation-adjusted equivalent of $15 an hour (in 2017 dollars)—twice the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—no tip penalty, no health benefit deduction, no total compensation, no nothing. And most fast food and other national chain workers will earn this by 2017.

Come on. Be honest. When fast food workers first walked out last year demanding a $15 minimum wage, did you really think they were going to get it?

Sure, given the strong public support for $15 and the very real threat of passing a less business friendly ballot measure, I had hoped that labor leaders would have held out for a better deal. But that said, if the city council doesn’t further water down this deal, and if our local business community not only refrains from challenging the ordinance at the ballot, but stands with workers to defend it against challenges coming from outside the city, Seattle will have achieved something truly momentous. Business buy-in wasn’t necessary to pass a $15 minimum wage at the ballot in Seattle; a ton of grassroots canvassing and a couple million dollars of well-spent media likely would have been enough. But the acquiescence of businesses groups here in Seattle will help set the frame for the minimum wage debate nationwide.

Second, let’s be clear that if it breezes through into law with little further opposition, that this minimum wage proposal will not only prove a huge win for minimum wage workers, but for the advocates who fought on their behalf, from the folks at SEIU and other unions who organized the fast food strikes and masterminded the SeaTac initiative, to Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative, and 15Now.org. Yes, Sawant voted against the proposal on the committee. Because that’s her role. And she’s played it astoundingly well. For without the legitimate threat from the left that Sawant and her organization provides, labor leaders would have been less able to squeeze concessions out of a business community that went into negotiations hoping to pad their profits with tip credits and total compensation and other giveaways.

If a minimum wage ordinance passes the council 9-0, and Sawant suddenly pivots to claim victory, it will be without a drop of irony. And if 15Now.org should suddenly pivot the impressive grassroots organization it is building from pushing a ballot measure to defending against one, well, minimum wage opponents should know that they will have a helluva fight on their hands.

It won’t be easy for 15Now.org to make that pivot, as this is far from a perfect proposal. Workers at small businesses who will only be earning $11 by 2017, the same year some big business workers start earning $15, will be particularly screwed by the lengthy phase-in and the temporary tip/benefit deduction. So they have every right to feel betrayed at being thrown under the bus.

But if this is ultimately the deal, and if the council can keep itself from carving out any additional loopholes, and if the business community delivers on its promise to support and defend it, then I’m enough of a political realist to know a political win when I see one.

What a bunch of fucking hypocrites:

RIGHT now the Washington state Legislature is cringing like a student who turns in homework and knows that it is incomplete. An impatient state Supreme Court demanded a fully fleshed-out plan for financing K-12 education, on its desk, by April 30.

Last week, lawmakers handed in a report that says they couldn’t reach agreement this year. It explains what the Legislature has done so far, reminds the court of the role of the judiciary, and makes a promise: We’ll take it from here.

What the court ought to do is to take lawmakers at their word, recognize that the Legislature plays a role as important as its own, and let it get down to business.

That’s right, the same editorial board that urges legislators to hold students and teachers accountable through rigorous standardized testing and inflexible graduation requirements, advises the Washington State Supreme Court to back off from holding legislators accountable for failing to meet a court order to which they are clearly in contempt.

Personally, I’m not confident that there is anything the legislature can do anymore to head off this looming constitutional crisis. But encouraging the court to do nothing pretty much assures that it will be ignored. And that’s bullshit.

Also, there’s this:

For too long, they have shorted education in all its forms, and they have spent the state’s money where the special interests were the noisiest.

… Now that Washington’s economy is recovering, the Legislature should earmark the majority of its rebounding tax revenue for education. That won’t sit well with public-employee unions and other interests that would prefer to see a tax increase.

First, that was Rob McKenna’s gubernatorial platform. And he lost. So fuck you.

Second, if the editors at the Seattle Times have any idea as to where in the state budget legislators can find an extra $3 billion to $7 billion in unnecessary spending, they have a fucking daily newspaper editorial board page in which to enlighten us. But of course, they’ve got no ideas other than UNIONS! and SPECIAL INTERESTS! and useless dog whistles like that. So fuck you.

We’re talking about our constitutional “paramount duty” here, for chrissake! We need billions a year in new tax revenue to meet McCleary. Nothing else can do it. It’s simple math. And any advocacy against raising this revenue is advocacy against both the interests of our children and against the preservation of the rule of law.

It’s Tuesday, and that means the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally will be gathering for its evening of politics and pints. Please join us!

We meet tonight and every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks show up earlier for dinner.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state DL over the next week. The Tri-Cities chapters also meets on Tuesday. The Lakewood chapter meets on Wednesday. On Thursday the Bremerton and Spokane chapters meet. And, the Centralia chapter meets on Friday.

With 214 chapters of Living Liberally, including nineteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.

I’d been meaning to comment on this Jonathan Martin post for quite some time, but got distracted by my non-Seattle-Times-bashing pursuits. Writing on the paper’s editorial board blog, Martin echoes a trope that has grown quite popular with minimum wage concern-trolls these days: that a $15 minimum wage would ironically hurt poor people, by making it too expensive to provide vital human services!

As Martin correctly points out, human services are largely provided by low-wage workers—some of them college educated social workers who make only $12 to $13 an hour themselves. A $15 minimum wage would indeed cost Seattle’s not-for-profit human services agencies millions of dollars a year in additional labor costs. So Martin defends these “abysmal” low wages as “just the financial reality of holding together the human services safety net.”

Responding on Facebook, millionaire minimum wage advocate Nick Hanauer aptly describes Martin’s reasoning as “silly”:

Building an economy that generates huge human services needs by impoverishing most people by underpaying them, and then builds infrastructure to do damage control [on what] this poverty creates by employing people at poverty wages to do it, is economically inefficient, socially ineffective, and morally dubious.

If the argument made by Martin is correct, that raising the minimum wage is bad for the city because then we will be able to pay for less human services, then by definition he must also believe that if the minimum wage went down it would be good for the city because then we would be able to pay for more human services.

“So let me get this right,” Hanauer asks rhetorically, “You guys at the Seattle Times think that the answer to our problems is to impoverish more people, so that you can employ ever more people dispensing services to [the] poor?”

Well justified sarcasm aside, Hanauer’s larger point is that poverty is inextricably linked with the social ills these human services agencies are there to address. If we reduce poverty, argues Hanauer, we will also reduce demand for some of these human services.

It’s compelling logic. But Martin is having none of it. “That is, at best, utopian thinking,” scoffs Martin. “At worst, it’s a fantastical theory that will put a vise on already struggling human services.”

You know, because!

In his defense, Martin is a journalist, so he has an understandable self-interest in maintaining social services he may soon have a need to utilize. Also, the Seattle Times editorial board just does something awful to people. (Anybody else notice a hint of Sméagol finally peeking through her Gollum exterior the further Joni Balter distances herself from the Ring of Power?) But to simply dismiss as “fantastical” the suggestion that higher wages might reduce demand for services aimed at the poor—well, that’s just plain lazy.

The smarter retort would have been to argue that what cost savings might be realized from reduced demand cannot materialize fast enough to offset nonprofits’ short term rise in labor costs, whatever the length of the minimum wage phase-in. But that would bring Martin dangerously close to addressing the human service agencies’ real problem: We don’t spend enough on them! We just don’t.

If we really value the services these government-funded agencies provide, then we should instruct our government to spend the money necessary to pay our social workers, childcare workers, addiction counselors, and other human service providers a living wage! We don’t need to abandon a $15 minimum wage in order to protect human services—the City of Seattle just needs to spend more money. Simple as that. And if the money isn’t there, raise taxes. We can start by taxing millionaires like Hanauer.

One can only get to Martin’s dystopian vision if one starts from the position that raising tax revenue is not an option. But it is.

Seattle is a wealthy city. And we will only become wealthier still once a $15 minimum wage starts recirculating billions of dollars in additional wages through our local economy rather than having it extracted out-of-state in the form of higher profits to low-wage national chains. Even at $15 an hour, minimum wage workers will spend almost everything they earn—spending that will bump up local sales tax collections as well as the prospects of local businesses. So if spending an additional $10 million to $15 million a year in taxpayer dollars is the price we have to pay to help human service nonprofits transition to a $15 minimum wage, it will be well worth the investment over time.

Sometimes you can throw money at a problem. And that’s all it takes to address the human services trope that minimum wage opponents are cynically pushing.

In a 5-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled today that the practice of offering predominantly Christian prayers before the start of government meetings does not violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment. The press is describing the split on the bench as one between “conservatives” and “liberals.” But notably, it is also largely a split between Christians and Jews, with five of the six Christian justices joining the majority, and all three Jewish justices signing on to the dissent.

No doubt judicial philosophy had something to do with the split, but I’m not sure that the Christian members of the court fully appreciate the depth and scope of our nation’s inherent religious bigotry toward non-Christians. Or if they do, they just don’t give a shit.

“No one can fairly read the prayers from Greece’s town meetings as anything other than explicitly Christian — constantly and exclusively so,” Kagan said. “The prayers betray no understanding that the American community is today, as it long has been, a rich mosaic of religious faiths.”

The legal tussle began in 2007, following eight years of nothing but Christian prayers in the town of nearly 100,000 people outside Rochester. Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens, a Jew and an atheist, took the board to federal court and won by contending that its prayers – often spiced with references to Jesus, Christ and the Holy Spirit — aligned the town with one religion.

Once the legal battle was joined, town officials canvassed widely for volunteer prayer-givers and added a Jewish layman, a Wiccan priestess and a member of the Baha’i faith to the mix. Stephens, meanwhile, awoke one morning to find her mailbox on top of her car, and part of a fire hydrant turned up in her swimming pool.

And no. No kid has ever had the shit beaten out of him for refusing to participate in a Christian prayer.

Perhaps if our court’s papist majority had a firmer grasp on the history of religious intolerance in America, they’d have greater appreciation for the often uncomfortable experience of our nation’s religious minorities.

– Who could have predicted that less stimulus would mean a slower economy?

– But, as the media and general public turn their attention to other issues, it’s worth remembering that Bundy’s fringe ideas are mirrored by current efforts in many Western states to seize federal lands

– A while ago, I was farting around downtown and got on the Atlantic Street Overpass sidewalk. It wasn’t particularly helpful, but it’s nice to see that there’s now a bike path under it.

– The situation at the Bundy ranch, where armed militiamen and “Patriots” are camped out, has deteriorated so badly that competing factions apparently drew weapons on one another during heated arguments.

– Well, it’s a lousy substitute for losing our buses, but bus poetry is coming back.

– Oh, hey guys, we know the length of a day on Beta Pictoris b

Last week’s contest was unsolved as of Friday night. It was the athletic complex at Northwestern University, where the football team is voting to unionize.

This week’s is a random location somewhere on this planet, good luck!

Leviticus 24:16
And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.

Discuss, God damn it.

Thanks to a link yesterday from our good friend Atrios, HA experienced its first sustained peak traffic surge since switching servers about a month ago. Longtime regulars know that HA’s server had a ton of performance issues over the past couple years, coughing up 508 errors at even the slightest bump in traffic. But yesterday we handled hundreds of simultaneous users with hardly a hiccup.

What changed? After way too much procrastination I finally moved HA from the iffy shared hosting account it had called home since November, 2002 to a spiffy new “droplet” at cloud hosting company DigitalOcean.* In the process, I traded limited server resources and a $30/month bill for 1GB of RAM and a dedicated processor core at only $10/month, plus an additional $2/month for automated backups. Such a bargain!

So why didn’t I do this sooner? I had played with VPS hosting in the past for other projects, but I’m not a server administrator and didn’t want to develop the level of expertise necessary to run a secure and reliable site. DigitalOcean offers nifty one-click distros for setting up popular Linux packages, but is otherwise unmanaged. So I was leaning toward a much more expensive managed VPS solution.

And then I discovered ServerPilot, a remote automated server management, monitoring, and control panel service that configures your firewall and handles all software and security updates for you. Just spin up a DigitalOcean droplet with a basic Ubuntu installation, SSH in to copy over ServerPilot’s install program, follow a few clear instructions, and minutes later you’ll have a modern, secure, and very fast Nginx, Apache, PHP, and MySQL stack ready to go.

ServerPilot’s basic firewall and security update service is free, with real-time stats, log monitoring, email notifications, and more offered in monthly subscription packages ranging from $10 to $199 a month. As an unpaid blogger, I love free. (FYI, I also moved my horsesass.org mail domain to a free account on Zoho—setup is clunky, but once you get it working it works great.)

Together, this DigitalOcean/ServerPilot combo offers many of the advantages of a managed VPS at a fraction of the price. It’s not for newbies. But trust me, I’m no Linux command line jockey. If you understand this post you probably have enough expertise to spin up a fast and secure server in minutes.

* (Yes, this DigitalOcean link includes a referral code that nets me a $10 credit if you sign up. But I wouldn’t plug it if I wasn’t pleased with the service.)

 

Ann Telnaes: Cardinal Dolan, loyal anti-gay marriage American.

Baptism by Palin:

• Jon reacts to Sarah Palin’s waterboarding comments.
• David Pakman: Sarah Palin on baptizing terrorists with waterboarding.

White House: West Wing Week.

Liberal Viewer: Will immigration reform pass Congress in 2014.

Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: The dangers of a Republican Senate.

David Pakman: SC’s bullshit “Stand Your Ground” law for fetuses.

Down Goes Wisconsin Draconian Voter ID Law:

• Young Turks: WI voting law struck down.
• Sam Seder: Judge rules WI voter ID law violates the Voter Rights Act.
• David Pakman: Federal Judge rules voter fraud almost never happens.

Jesse Ventura for President. Maybe.

Young Turks: Bundy ranch lunatic threatens U.S. Senator.

Michael Brooks: Scott Brown, “I’m totally not from MA!”

Sharpton: Republicans shamefully reject minimum wage bill.

SCTV: Hobby Lobby’s Employee “Benefits”.

Jon on how bad the government is.

Mental Floss: 32 car name meanings.

Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: Seattle and the $15 minimum wage.

Stephen demands to know why Clay Aiken is running for Congress.

WaPo: Mark Pryor’s quiet Arkansas race.

The Week in Racism:

• Funny or Die: NBA conference highlights.
• Thom: Why the Koch brothers are behind Bundy.
• Larry Wilmore: What a week to be Senior Black Correspondent!
• Ana Kasparian: Clippers owner banned for life.
• David Pakman: Who is surprised the Donald Sterling is a racist?
• Funny or Die: Another leaked tape
• Sam Seder: Donald Sterling banned for life from NBA
• Maddow: Racism in U.S. Sports, Part I
• Maddow: Racism in U.S. Sports, Part II
• Chris Hayes and Bill Maher: On Donald Sterling, Part I.
• Chris Hayes and Bill Maher: On Donald Sterling, Part II.
• David Pakman: Bundy, “I am just like Rosa Parks!”
• Young Turks: Donald Trump is happy to defend Donald Sterling.
• David Pakman: Did you know that there is no racism in the Republican Party???
• Ann Telnaes: Racism is dead:
• Seth Meyers on Donald Sterling

Mark Fiore: NRA Hypnosis.

Late night laughs: Chelsea Clinton edition.

Absurdity today: If you Fucking LOVE SCIENCE and Fucking LOVE Laughing…

Jon is disappointed in Michael Grimm’s lame Healthalicious scandal.

Ed: Nutjobber Glenn Beck, “Hillary will be having sex with a woman on the White House desk.

WaPo: Could Sen. Warren be the next Obama?

BENGHAAAAAAAAZZZZZZIIIIIIIII!!!!!1!11!!!1!!

• Alex Wagner: Benghazi trufers pounce on newly declassified emails.
• Cenk gets angry about latest Benghazi conspiracy theory.

Thom: How George W. Bush screwed college students.

Sam Seder: Scalia embarrasses himself in botched opinion.

Roy Zimmerman: Cliven Bundy’s Cattle:

Ann Telnaes: The Oops factor in capital punishment.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

It’s tough running a small business.

Your rent goes up, but what can you do? So you muddle on. Fuel costs go up, but you muddle on. The cost of supplies goes up—food, inventory, whatever—and you muddle on. The cost of borrowing goes up, and you muddle on. Health insurance premiums go up (oh man do they ever), and you muddle on.

But lawmakers talk about raising the minimum wage, and you throw up your arms and threaten to close your doors.

So what makes the cost of labor different from all those other fluctuating costs business owners must deal with every day? Labor is the only cost of business where you set the price.

And that’s where I think a lot of this emotional response to the minimum wage comes from. It’s about control. Both controlling one’s costs and controlling one’s employees. A government mandated minimum wage upsets the traditional power relationship between management and labor. And understand: for many small business owners, that’s the only power relationship in which they currently hold the advantage.

Like I said, it’s tough running a small business. I know. You put so much equity into your business—both sweat and monetary—and yet it feels like so much of what determines success or failure is beyond your control. The economy. The competition. Consumer tastes. Disruptive technologies. Taxes and regulations. Hell, even the weather. And now the City of Seattle is going to tell you how much to pay your workers? Folks who’ve never owned a business—who’ve never hired and fired—may not understand it, but the experience often comes with a profound sense of a lack of control.

I get it. And I’m not dismissing the very real financial challenge that a $15 minimum wage would pose to some businesses. But my advice to small business owners in general is to acknowledge that at least some of your negative response to this proposal is emotional, and to trust that like most of the other challenges you face on an everyday basis, you will ultimately find a way to muddle on. In fact, experience from previous substantial minimum wage hikes tells us that that’s what most small businesses manage to do. Because as much as it doesn’t feel like it, you actually have a lot more control over the success or failure of your business than simply the power to dictate wages.

If I’ve learned anything from the $15 minimum wage debate it’s that $15 should be thought of not just as how much $15 can buy today, but simply as a number between $14 and $16. So Ed Murray’s plan will get us to $15 but the purchasing power of that will be $13.25 in today’s money. If there’s anything else I’ve learned, it’s that the now part of 15 now means some point many years in the future.

It was with that in mind that I read the table at the bottom of the mayor’s press release on the minimum wage. And good news! According to their numbers, in 2035 inflation will mean the state minimum wage will top $15.

So my modest proposal is do nothing and call it $15 now. Eventually it’ll be $15. Sure, the value will — by virtue of the fact that it’s tied to inflation — be the same as the value of the minimum wage now, but it’ll be the number 15. And if people have to pay rent or eat in the mean time, just tell them that $15 is coming and that they should be glad to have a job at all.

Okay, so I’ve finally had a chance to wrap my mind around Mayor Ed Murray’s minimum wage proposal, and found it to be both a little bit better and a tiny bit worse than it first appeared. The good news is that it would indeed get all workers to a $15 minimum wage in 2017 dollars—that’s about 50 cents an hour less than the wage would have been had we bumped it up to $15 now on January 1, 2015. The bad news is that some workers won’t reach this real-dollar-equivalent wage until 2025—a ten year phase-in, not the seven-year phase-in that has been touted.

Also good news is that the employee count for “big” businesses—defined as greater than 500 FTEs—refers to the number of employees nationally, not locally, and lumps franchise employees together with those at other franchises throughout a national chain. That’s great news for fast food workers for example, most of whom receive no tips or benefits, and thus would be phased in under Schedule A: $11 an hour in 2015, $13 an hour in 2016, and $15 an hour in 2017, inflation indexed after that. “The people who had the courage to walk out on strike got a pretty good deal,” SEIU 775 president and committee co-chair David Rolf told me by phone, referring to last year’s fast food strikes.

And if everybody was getting that deal, I’d be thrilled. But they’re not.

Big business employees who receive health care benefits (Schedule B) wouldn’t reach an equivalent wage until 2019. Workers at “small” businesses (defined as 500 or fewer FTEs) who receive no health care benefits or tips (Schedule C) wouldn’t reach an equivalent wage until 2021. And small business employees who receive tips and/or health benefits (Schedule D) would not reach that inflation-adjusted 2017-era $15 minimum wage until 2025, a full decade after the proposed ordinance first goes into effect.

The mayor’s office has provided a nifty table detailing the full 10-year phase-in for all four schedules. But it’s kind of misleading. The way it works is that the straight-up hourly wage to which all four schedules eventually merge is based on Schedule A’s $15 an hour wage in 2017, adjusted annually for inflation. But the annual increases under Schedule A all presume a 2.4 percent annual inflation rate—substantially higher than most experts are predicting. Inflation has held steady at about 1.5 percent these past couple years, while the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland just two weeks ago forecast a 10-year average CPI of 1.87 percent. The proposal’s 2.4 percent estimate may be closer to the historical average but it is totally divorced from our current economic reality.

I’m not a gambling man, but I’d wager that this proposal would bring Seattle’s minimum wage closer to $17 in 2025 than it would to $18.13. So don’t take the numbers between the highlighted rows too seriously. They’re just estimates. Overly optimistic estimates.

The important numbers are $15 in 2017 dollars (about $14.50 in 2015 dollars) and the year in which the figure in each column first matches that in Column A: 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2025 respectively. That is what is meaningful to workers in terms of their inflation-adjusted take-home pay.

As for the meaning of Schedules C and D, well, it depends on how you choose to look at it. Schedule D is the absolute minimum wage a small business may pay its workers (again, estimated from 2022 on) as the state currently defines wage. But Schedule C is the minimum total compensation a small business employee must receive, including wages, tips, and health benefits.

A charitable spin on minimum compensation uses Schedule D as the baseline, and views Schedule C as guaranteeing that small business workers receive total compensation a little above that guaranteed in the base minimum wage. A negative spin on minimum compensation uses Schedule C as the baseline, and views the difference between the two columns in any given year as an unwarranted deduction the employer gets to take against his minimum wage obligation. It’s like that classic optical illusion: Is it a vase or is it two faces?

So that’s what the mayor’s compromise proposal does. Many, many workers—those who earn no benefits working at big businesses—would reach $15 an hour by 2017, and receive cost-of-living increases thereafter. The remaining workers will be phased in to an inflation adjusted equivalent minimum wage by 2019, 2021, and 2025 respectively. Once this 10-year phase in is complete there would be no tip penalty and no benefit deductions.

Tomorrow I’ll consider the political ramifications, and whether they conspire to make this 10-year phase-in a good enough deal.

I haven’t seen the details but it sure sounds like the minimum wage proposal Mayor Ed Murray is sending to the Seattle City Council is much along the lines of the crappy one leaked late last week: $15 in three years for large businesses (more than 500 employees), four years for those that provide health care benefits. But small businesses don’t get to $15 for seven years, with some sort of five-year total compensation scheme on top! And the minimum wage isn’t indexed to inflation until $15 is reached.

To be clear: $15 seven years from now is actually only $13.25 in today’s dollars.

Is that a helluva lot better than today’s $9.32 an hour Washington State minimum wage? Sure. Is it $15 an hour? No. It’s just not. So if Ed and his cohorts want to celebrate getting us to a $13.25 minimum wage over seven years, have at it. But don’t call it $15. Because it’s not.

All that said, I’m just watching the Seattle Channel live stream. The proposal may appear better or worse, once I read the details. More later.

UPDATE: So, I’ve finally had a chance to take a look at the mayor’s press release (I couldn’t make it to the conference) with it’s complicated four-tier schedule, and something leapt out at me right a way. Take a look for yourself. Catch the anomaly?

An estimated 2.40 percent CPI? Really? That seems overly optimistic (depending on your view of inflation). I’ve been using a relatively conservative 1.75 percent CPI estimate in all my calculations, and even that overestimates inflation by today’s standards. The Federal Reserve has a 2 percent target, but we’ve been holding steady at about 1.5 percent inflation the past couple years. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland recently forecast a 1.87 percent 10-year average CPI. So estimating 2.4 percent strikes me as an exercise in massaging the numbers in order to present a more worker-friendly 10-year outcome.

In case you’re wondering, Schedule A is for big businesses that don’t provide benefits, Schedule B is for big businesses that do provide benefits, while Schedules C & D are for small businesses (less than 500 employees). Haven’t quite wrapped my mind around how the total compensation works. More on that later.

But the gist is, to get to $18.13 in 2025, you have to estimate average annual inflation rates of 2.4 percent starting in 2018. That’s a huge assumption. At today’s 1.5 percent rate, we’d only get to $16.90 by 2025. That’s a big difference.

I’ll have a more thorough analysis later, from both a policy and political perspective. But at first glance, I can’t help but feel a tad disappointed.