Goldy

So, the House transportation budget released today doesn’t just pull the funding from the state’s previously agreed to portion of Sound Transit’s I-90 crossing… it completely bars DOT from allowing Sound Transit to use the bridge at all:

(17) The department shall not sign the final environmental impact statement for the east link project or negotiate an airspace lease with sound transit for the use of the Interstate 90 center roadway for exclusive use by light rail until completion of an independent facility asset assessment by the joint transportation committee.

That’s right, even though ST Phase 2 was overwhelmingly approved by voters, and even if ST were to find the money to fund moving the HOV lanes itself, House Democrats intend to bar DOT from even negotiating an airspace lease to use the center roadway.  I mean… what the fuck?!!

Dollars to donuts, a few years from now, when ST is behind schedule and over budget on the I-90 crossing because the legislature intentionally knocked them off schedule and over budget, we’ll hear lawmakers opining about ST’s mismanagement in an effort to justify a “regional governance” package that would gut light rail and take transportation planning out of the hands of those who pay most of the bill.

(Hat tip Seattle Transit Blog.)

When Republicans and their editorial board surrogates argue for an all-cuts budget, they routinely decry the spurt in state spending over the past couple years as evidence that state spending is out of control.  Long term trends however, show quite the opposite.

Above is an OFM chart that tracks growth in the number of full time state employees versus growth in population, and as you can see, the two numbers track quite closely.  This is an imprecise metric, as demographic shifts impose varying demands on state government (for example, the current surge in K-12 enrollment dictates the hiring of more teachers), but it clearly doesn’t indicate a state goverment that’s out of control.

I’m just sayin’.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuAstDdFA2M[/youtube]

I’m hearing scattered reports of problems accessing HA and Publicola today.  Everything is currently working fine via my Qwest DSL and my iPhone’s 3G connection, but Darryl can’t access it via his Comcast service at home, and I’ve heard from folks in Olympia with similar problems.  Not sure what’s going on, but it’s likely a DNS issue of some sort.

UPDATE:
My hosting company has provided the following response:

There is a connectivity issue with an upstream provider in California. Your web site and email service is up and running, but you can’t access it because of this problem with the upstream provider. It is only affecting certain isps and should be fixed soon.

Locally, this appears to be affecting mostly Comcast customers and some local government networks.  Not much I can do about it.

It’s B-Day in Olympia, and not likely a happy one, as the Senate introduces its general operations budget at 10:30AM, while the House introduces its transportation budget at noon.  The smart money is on an all-cuts budget coming out of the Senate, with, of course, Seattle and light rail getting screwed by House transportation planners.

We’ll soon see.

UPDATE:
The TNT’s Political Buzz blog wins the local prize for first word on the Senate’s budget proposal:

Senate Democrats just unveiled their budget proposals, documents that proposed to close a $9 billion gap between tax collections and planned spending by freezing public school and state workers’ pay, closing a prison, eliminating 7,000 state jobs and lowering enrollment at colleges by more than 10,000 students.

Still waiting to see the specifics.

I’ve used the term “structural deficit” a lot over the past few years, only to have it pooh-poohed by the anti-tax/anti-government reactionaries on the right, so I thought it might be useful to spend a little time discussing exactly what I mean.

Washington state relies on the sales tax for about 56.5% of general fund revenues, one of the highest ratios in the nation, and yet as this study paper produced by Economic Opportunity Institute cogently explains, our sales tax base over time gradually represents a smaller and smaller portion of our overall economy.

The sales tax base is growing more slowly than demand for state investments and the economy overall. Historically, sales taxes have been applied to goods and not to services. However, personal spending on services is steadily growing, and spending on goods is falling as a percentage of personal consumption. Goods and services subject to Washington sales tax represented 32% of total consumer spending in 1959, but only 26% in 2000.

And when your tax base shrinks, you really have only three options:  expand the base, raise the tax rate, or shrink the role of government in our economy and society.  And despite all the rhetoric about state government growth in real dollars over the past two budgets, Washington lawmakers have largely chosen the third option over the past couple decades, steadily shrinking both revenues and spending as a percentage of our overall economy.

As the following chart prepared by the Washington State Budget and Policy Center shows, both state revenue and spending have fallen or remained flat since 1995, relative to the state economy.

(It is also interesting to note that the projected budget gap in the 2009-11 biennium is not due to an explosion in state spending, but rather to a precipitous decline in revenues.)

Yes, I know that for many of you on the right, this data may appear counterintuitive, but it is widely supported.  Indeed, even according to the conservative Tax Institute, the organization whose data Tim Eyman has long used to support his own anti-tax agenda, Washington’s state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income have fallen from 10.4% in 1994, when the Tax Institute ranked us at 17th nationally, to a 35th place 8.9% in 2008, well below the national average of 9.7%.

Different organizations may calculate different raw percentages, but they all generally report the same ranking and the same relative decline.  According to the Tax Institute, Washington’s 2008 state and local tax “burden” was exactly the same as that of Mississippi. That’s a fact.

And these numbers should come as no surprise.  Our over-reliance on a retail sales tax levied on an ever shrinking portion of our economy makes this long term structural deficit inevitable, and unless we reform our tax system to broaden the base, or permanently increase sales tax rates, the ability of our government to provide the services taxpayers expect and demand will continue to shrink in proportion to its revenue base.

There is a legitimate debate to be had over the proper size and scope of government… but we’re not having that debate.  Instead, even as Democrats dominate the Legislature and the governor’s mansion, the lower-tax/smaller-government Republican agenda is winning by default.

Sometimes, you just have to do the right thing…

The last time the state had a comparable budget shortfall was in 1981-1982, when Republicans controlled both houses and the governor’s mansion. The Republicans raised taxes to help deal with their budget woes, and come the 1982 elections, Democrats were elected back into power in both the House and the Senate. Two years later, Republican Gov. John Spellman was voted out as well. In 1993, majority Democrats had to raise taxes and cut programs to deal with budget problems, and in 1994, lost their majority in the House and hung on to a one-seat majority in the Senate.

Gregoire said that history lesson shows it won’t be easy.

“There’s no easy way out of this,” she said. “And you have to look past the political consequences, and do what your heart and your head says is the right thing to do.”

And if the right thing to do is raising some taxes to help the state through these tough economic times, as both Republicans and Democrats have reluctantly done in the past, let’s hope that Gov. Gregoire is able to lead the legislature toward it, the political consequences be damned.

So… if I were to urge people to take up arms against batshit-crazy Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), would that be going too far?

It was close, but in a streak of futility that rivals that of the Chicago Cubs, King County’s conservation community once again failed to win its chosen candidate a seat on the board of the King County Conservation District, with (u)SP endorsed Preston Drew edging out HA favorite Mark Sollitto by a 1,357 to 1,199 margin.

Ah well.  I guess the people have spoken.  You know, all 2,757 of them… out of a pool of over 1.1 million registered voters.  That’s a turnout rate of less than 0.25%, compared to the respectable 83.9% of registered voters who turned out last November.

What a stupid, fucking, ridiculous way to run an election.  I mean, why even bother?  Why not just rename the damn thing the King County Conservative District, and save the half-hearted effort to pretend this is an election at all?

No vote-by-mail, no neighborhood polling places, no voter’s pamphlet… not even a goddamn postcard reminding you to vote. Only a handful of blog readers and well-informed activists on either side even knew there was an election, as evidenced by the fact that Sollitto got 43.5% of the vote as a write-in candidate, seven times that of third place David Mauk, who was one of only two names on the ballot.

Standing in line behind Richard Pope at the Bellevue Library voting station, a poll-worker chastised me for talking politics in the polling place, warning that I was violating the law—oh God was I tempted to challenge her to call the cops.  In fact, I wasn’t talking about the race at all, but rather, how stupid, fucking ridiculous the entire KCCD election process is.  I mean, only a 0.25% turnout, and there’s a fucking line?

What a total joke.

Eric Earling of (un)Sound Politics has given up blogging for a paying gig on the other side of the media relations divide.  Eric was a relative voice of reason on (u)SP (even when, as usual, he was dead wrong), and I genuinely wish him the best of luck.

But I’m not nearly as sanguine toward the blog he leaves behind.

After our friend Stefan burnt out or lost interest or went into rehab or whatever has distracted him from blogging, Eric quickly became (u)SP’s most prolific writer, and his departure will surely leave a big hole.  How big?  (u)SP recently went nearly two days without an update (three if don’t count Pudge’s contributions as actual posts), and one of the first rules of blogging is that you don’t keep your audience if you don’t keep up the frequency.

I know how much I’ve come to rely on my HA co-bloggers to keep the content fresh; it will be interesting to see how Stefan copes with losing his top contributor.

It’s not often I have the opportunity to disagree with The Stranger’s David Schmader and the ultra-conservative American Family Association at the same time, but Family Guy is by far the funniest show currently on broadcast television, and I have absolutely no qualms about watching it with my 12-year-old daughter.  (Children benefit from a robust comedy education.)

Sure, Family Guy is offensive and often way over the top, but it is the near total freedom of the creators to both offend and disappoint that makes possible some of the show’s funniest moments.

[flash]http://www.hulu.com/embed/aSjjHG1uriBTSojiT2dZUQ[/flash]

Gross?  Yeah.  Relentless?  Well, that’s kinda the point.  But man did my daughter and I bust a gut watching this scene.

While we’re talking about the budget, I’ve got three words of advice for House and Senate Democratic leaders as they ponder their vision of Washington’s future:  Governor Rob McKenna.

I’m as big a fan of Rep. Jay Inslee as any Puget Sound area progressive, and despite some recent harsh words, I’m not unfond of Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, but in my opinion, either Dem would be the definitive underdog against Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna in the 2012 gubernatorial race.  Really.

Sure, I don’t trust him as far as I can spit, but McKenna is by far the most adept politician in Washington state at the moment.  And while yeah, McKenna is totally in the pocket of Boeing, the realtors, AWB and those corrupt bastards at the BIAW… who in Olympia isn’t these days?

McKenna has meticulously crafted a moderate image despite his conservative credentials and his slavish devotion to the business interests who finance his campaigns, but unlike Dino Rossi, he’s managed to do it without coming off like a used car salesman.  Listen to him on KUOW, or even on my old show on 710-KIRO, and he comes off eminently reasonable and rational… even likeable, in his own gawky, geeky sorta way.

But most importantly, he has made a career out of pandering to a political press corps that lovingly felates him in return.  McKenna’s communications people are good.  How good?  When I lost my radio show, his was the only state office from which I received a personal note of condolence and best wishes.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and all that.

So again, as Democrats in Olympia ponder what to do with their huge majorities during these extraordinary times, I hope they fully understand that their window for effectively using these majorities may soon be coming to a close.  In another few years Republican Gov. Rob McKenna may be setting the agenda and wielding the veto pen.  And if I were betting man, I’d bet he will.

Despite the fact that the state now faces an unprecedented $9 billion revenue shortfall—nearly 25-percent of what’s needed to maintain services at current levels—the Republicans and their editorial board surrogates are still demanding that Gov. Gregoire stick by her campaign rhetoric and reject any proposed tax or fee increase.  So… what exactly would an all-cuts budget look like?  Well, we’re about to find out.

This biennium it’s the Senate’s turn to lead off budget negotiations, and word in the Capitol hallways is that an all-cuts draft is being prepared for release early next week.  I don’t have the details—they’re still being nailed down—but it isn’t hard to speculate.  A hundred thousand people cut from the state’s Basic Health plan?  20-percent from higher education?  Elimination of funding for community health clinics and many out-patient programs for the elderly and the disabled?  Temporary closure of many state parks? A dramatic reduction in ferry service?  Early release for non-violent prisoners?

Whatever it is, it’s going to be devastating, and it will be interesting to see the all-cuts proponents’ response.  No doubt some will cynically charge that Senate Democratic Leaders are merely trying to scare voters, but it’s hard to see how a 25-percent revenue shortfall can result in anything but devastating cuts in basic services and elimination of whole swaths of our health and social safety net… especially with about half of the budget completely off the table.

About 45-percent of the state budget is dedicated to K-12 education, with a constitutionally mandated obligation to fund basic education protecting the bulk of its funding.  Sure, the class size and teachers pay initiatives will be suspended, and a few other “extras” slashed or eliminated, but the state has little if any room to achieve substantial cost-savings within the biggest chunk of its budget.  Add to that fixed costs in our prisons, courts, police and other law enforcement and public safety services, and we’re left with only about a third of our state budget that can possibly be considered discretionary.

Thus even if the self-proclaimed fiscal hawks are right that the $9 billion figure is exaggerated, the shortfall softened by a few billion dollars in federal stimulus aid and a billion dollars from our rainy day fund, we’re still talking about 40-percent cuts from the portion of the budget that can absorb any substantial cuts at all.  And don’t kid yourselves that those cuts will be temporary.  The federal aid and rainy day funds are one-off windfalls, and even when the economy starts to recover, it won’t likely recover fast enough or strong enough to make up the difference by the next biennium.

Yes, this budgetary crisis was largely precipitated by a sudden collapse in home sales and consumer spending, but these revenues will never return to former levels.  The real estate bubble, like the dot.com bubble before it, is gone for the forseeable future, and with it the revenue growth that has long masked our state’s long term structural revenue deficit.  The highly regressive retail sales and excise taxes on which we rely for the bulk of our revenues are levied on an ever shrinking portion of our post-industrial, service and information based economy:  the sale of material goods.  Thus unless we raise taxes, or dramatically restructure our tax system to meet the reality of the twenty-first century, state and local government will continue to shrink as a portion of our total economy, and with it,  the services taxpayers have come to expect and demand.

When the Senate budget is released next week we will have an opportunity to examine one vision of Washington’s future… a vision much closer to that of Alabama or Mississippi than the one we hold now.  It is a vision that will surely make many Republicans happy.

And it would be a shame if Democrats allowed the minority to achieve their vision by default.