Goldy

Oh no! “Insurers propose up to 26% increase in health-plan rates,” the headline on the front page of the Seattle Times website warns. Goddamn Obamacare ruining everything! Except, read the actual article and…

The proposed rate changes range from a decrease of 6.8 percent — from Molina Healthcare of Washington — to an increase of 26 percent from Time Insurance, a national company with relatively few Washington policyholders.

Most rate-change requests, particularly from larger insurers, were in the middle ground, with most asking for increases from about 2 to about 11 percent.

To anyone who has had individual insurance, premium increases are not surprising: Records show that, on average, insurers have proposed rate increases for individual plans from about 9 percent to more than 18 percent every year from 2007 to 2013.

So that one 26 percent rate hike proposal was an outlier—almost double the next highest request—that affects few Washingtonians, while the average rate hike request is actually lower than that during the previous six years! Yay for Obamacare! But you wouldn’t know that from the incredibly biased and misleading heading.

I mean, they could’ve written their headline to read “Insurers propose up to 6.8% cut in health-plan rates,” and been just as accurate. But they didn’t.

This is actually a really important election year story. Republicans have been looking to the rate hike requests as an election year opportunity to spin Obamacare into a disaster for consumers. But if the rate hike requests are actually coming in lower than in previous years, then that is at least preliminary evidence that the exchanges are pulling in enough healthy Americans to balance the costs.

So thanks, Seattle Times editors, for attempting to spin relatively good news on one of the first post-Obamacare rate hike requests into an anti-Obamacare national headline.

UPDATE: So how do other headline writers interpret the news? “A Washington State Health Insurer Plans to Cut Rates in 2015,” declares the Wall Street Journal, taking the opposite (and arguably sexier) spin. Pretty embarrassing for the Seattle Times.

UPDATE, UPDATE: As Richard points out in the comment thread, the editors updated the article at 10:35 am, changing the headline to the far more neutral: “Most state health insurers seek rate boost: Proposals compared.” Score another victory for Seattle Times Voluntary Ombudsman David Goldstein!

By all accounts Mayor Ed Murray is expected to ask the city council to send to the ballot a measure to buy back in-city Metro bus service cuts via a $60 car tab fee and tenth of a cent hike in the sales tax. Sound familiar? That’s the exact same tax that was rejected by King County voters last month in the form of Proposition 1, because it’s the exact same taxing authority also granted to the city via a transportation benefit district.

Call it Proposition 1.1.

I suppose this funding option is as good as any other, especially considering that Prop 1 passed here in Seattle. Even better, it’s Ed’s idea rather than Ben’s, so that means Prop 1.1 will enjoy Ed’s enthusiastic support. Which is fine. I don’t really care who gets the credit for things as long as good things get done. And buying back Metro bus service cuts is a good thing.

That said, I just can’t help but feeling a little wistful over the fact that just couple years ago Seattle voters rejected a similar car tab measure targeted toward expanding transit service—precious taxing authority we’ll now be using merely to preserve transit service. That’s not much of a step forward. Also, it is of course a shame that suburban and exurban Metro riders will be totally dicked over by these cuts.  But what are we to do? Suffer in sympathy?

Feisty and I just went for a walk, and I took the opportunity to stream Philadelphia sports radio station 97.5 The Fanatic on my phone. Because I’m a diehard Philadelphia Eagles fan, and I was interested in hearing Philly sports talk’s take on the Eagle’s draft. But all any of the callers wanted to talk about was The ESPN Kiss: Missouri linebacker Michael Sam’s emotional embrace of his boyfriend after getting the news that the St. Louis Rams had made him the first out player drafted by an NFL team.

Most of the callers were pretty damn mad. Or disgusted. Or both. Which I guess is a sad commentary on how much anti-gay prejudice remains in mainstream America.

But here’s the thing: host Mike Missanelli forcefully defended the kiss, repeatedly calling out his callers on their bigotry. “If Michael Sam chooses to kiss is boyfriend on national television, what rights does that take away from anyone else?” Missanelli rhetorically asked his audience. “Zero,” he answered. Indeed, Missanelli didn’t just defend Sam’s public display of gay affection, he ridiculed his callers for their outrage, repeatedly comparing it to the outrage people used to express at seeing a black man kiss a white woman.

This is sports talk. In Philadelphia. A disproportionately white, middle-aged, blue collared, Catholic (Italian & Irish) audience. And the hosts are calling their listeners bigots for objecting to a televised gay kiss.

The next generation of sports fans are going to be influenced by these talkers. And that’s progress.

It’s not often that I find myself passionately on the same side of a controversial issue with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and the Seattle Times editorial board. Then again, there really shouldn’t be anything controversial about net neutrality.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has suffered a barrage of criticism since he proposed allowing Internet service providers (ISPs) to cut deals with content providers to pay more for faster service.

Wheeler’s pay-for-prioritization proposal means the end of net neutrality, the idea that all Internet content is treated equally — free of toll booths or fast lanes.

Imagine if, let’s say, HA suddenly started loading a quarter as fast as the Seattle Times—or perhaps not at all—because I couldn’t afford to pay Comcast and Qwest the “prioritization fees” necessary to get my content to their customers  via their fast lanes? No wait. I don’t have to imagine. I’ve already been through something like that in a prior venture.

When I first started up my software company in the early 1990s, large software retailers like Egghead, Computer City, and CompUSA all bought direct. We got crappy terms, and it was often a hassle (Computer City had us ship directly to individual stores, sometimes ordering as few as two copies per store), but at least we had access to the market.

But it was right around that time that an explosion of consumer titles and a wave of consolidation started changing everything for small independent publishers. One by one the major retailers stopped buying direct, instead insisting on buying through one of two or three distributors. But we were too small to get into distribution. The two largest distributors demanded annual six-figure “market development funds”—essentially a retail channel entrance fee. A second tier distributor took us on before quickly going bankrupt, stiffing us on tens of thousands of dollars in accounts receivable.

But wait. It gets worse.

Once we lost access to brick and mortar retail, the mail order catalogs, which had previously accounted for more than 70 percent of our sales, started jacking up the “co-op advertising fees” to independents like us who had no other options. An eighth of a page ad that cost us a few hundred bucks a month in 1993 could run as much as $8,000 a month by 1996. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a market for our rhyming dictionary software, it’s that we could no longer afford to access to it. So products like ours disappeared from the market until the App Store model democratized the software industry more than a decade later.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough. When I first started blogging a decade ago, I had every disadvantage but one: equal and unfettered access to readers. And so I was free to compete in the marketplace of ideas, winning what readership I could based on the quality of my content rather than the whims (or extortion) of some gatekeeper. This relatively low barrier to entry is one of the things that has made the Internet so transformative. But take away net neutrality and you will ultimately create a sort of broadband apartheid—a separate and unequal Internet forever in the grasp of those who levy the tolls, and those few who can afford to pay them.

Save the Internet!

Jeremiah 20:14-18
Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, “A child is born to you—a son!” May that man be like the towns the LORD overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?

Happy Mother’s Day! Discuss.

University of Missouri defensive end Michael Sam became the first openly gay player to be taken in the NFL draft, when the St. Louis Rams selected him in the seventh round, the 249th pick out of 256.

At 6-1, 261 pounds, Sam is considered undersized for his position and not a great fit for the Rams’ 4-3 defense, so he’d have to be considered a long shot to make the team. But still, his high-profile draft selection breaks an awfully important barrier for gay athletes weighing the career implications of coming out of the closet. So kudos to the Rams for using a draft pick to make this statement.

Ten years ago today I published my first blog post, and HA is celebrating with a long overdue facelift: Bigger, cleaner, mobile responsive, and easier on my aging eyes. (Oh no! Changes! Complain in the comment thread if you want—I’m still making tweaks, and I’m eager to consider your feedback before mostly ignoring it.)

As for HA’s bilious innards, well, that’s sure as hell not changing. Re-reading that introductory post, it’s kinda funny how I managed to get the original vision for HA so remarkably right, while at the same time being so totally clueless as to how blogging would come to dominate my life. At the start, I told myself that blogging would be a good exercise in forcing myself to write every day. Writing three, four, sometimes five posts a day was never in my plans.

Anyway, I don’t feel like getting sentimental, and I certainly don’t want to put too much thought into the next ten weeks of HA, let alone the the next ten years. For the moment, I’m back writing here part-time while making a living taking on contract and freelance work. Thank you to everybody in the HA community (except for some of the vilest trolls) for this amazingly weird and gratifying decade. I appreciate being appreciated. Though of course, I also appreciate money.

Lots of changes to the website going on tonight. Hopefully. So if you find HA temporarily in a state of disarray, don’t worry. Either I’ll fix it, or give up and return everything to the way it was.

Local transit advocates are righteously pissed at Mayor Ed Murray for his public and private opposition to an initiative that would raise $30 million a year in property taxes to buy back looming Metro bus service cuts within Seattle. And Murray—who has always bristled at the charge that he is in any way “anti-transit”—is righteously pissed right back. So as a public service, I thought I’d take a moment to explain the two sides to each other in the hope of encouraging a Murrayesque consensus.

First of all, Ed, you have to understand that when critics call you anti-transit what they really mean is that you are not sufficiently anti-car. Nobody really thinks you hate buses and trains (well, nobody whose opinion you should care about). They just think that you are way too conventional in terms of your transportation thinking. Not 1950s conventional. But 1990s conventional. And a lot has changed in Seattle since you first headed to Olympia. The shift toward transit, bike, and pedestrian oriented transportation planning that may have seemed radical a quarter century ago is the consensus in Seattle today. And many transportation advocates here rightly fear that your lack of buy-in will get in the way of their urbanist vision.

It’s a balance thing. You may be more pro-transit than the majority of legislators. But that’s not good enough for Seattle.

As for Murray’s critics, you have to understand that he really means this when he says this:

Regionalism must be an element of any transit plan: Any transit financing plan – either short-term or long-term – must reflect the reality that Seattle’s economy depends on people coming into the city from throughout the Puget Sound region.

Ed and I have been having this argument for years. This isn’t just talk. He passionately believes in taking a regional approach to transportation planning, and chafes at any suggestion to the contrary. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t vote for him. But of course, he’s absolutely right. I mean, there’s at least as much utility in saving bus routes serving commuters heading to and from Seattle as there is in saving routes that operate entirely within city borders.

So regionalism should be an element of any transit plan. But the same could be said of the minimum wage, paid sick leave, and universal preschool. All of these would be better implemented at the county or state level. But they’re not. So Seattle has chosen to go it alone. Because that’s the only practical political option we have.

Still, nothing seems to shake Murray’s core belief in the efficacy of regional transportation planning, or his skepticism of Seattle-only solutions, be it for funding light rail expansion or saving the bus service we already have. So if you want to win Murray’s support for a Seattle-only bus funding measure you are going to need to convince him that it is both absolutely urgent and absolutely short term—and that you absofuckinglutely pledge to support his efforts to achieve a permanent regional solution. (Personally, I’m in a fuck the rest of King County mood at the moment, but I understand that’s not constructive.)

Shorter Goldy: Ed, stop being so defensive about being labeled “anti-transit”—it’s meant as a relative term. And everybody else, you need to pledge to support Ed’s regional approach. Then maybe we can all quit the kvetching and save some bus routes.

In fact, it’s so secret that Mayor Ed Murray doesn’t even know it yet! But if he really wants to save Seattle from devastating Metro bus service cuts, and he really wants avoid putting a transit-oriented property tax initiative on the ballot this fall, here’s all he and his allies on the city council need to do: restore the head tax and and raise the commercial parking tax.

Both can be done councilmanically—that is, without being referred to voters—and combined, the two taxes could raise up to $50 million, almost twice that under the proposed property tax initiative. Just push a transit package through the council now, and there’s no need to send the initiative to the ballot. Simple!

That said, I sure don’t buy the argument that there isn’t available levy capacity to fund both transit and universal preschool, and I caution both transit and preschool supporters that this is a rhetorically dangerous argument to push.

I hadn’t noticed it at the time, I suppose because I was so focused on my own employment situation, but the Seattle Times lost another two political reporters this spring, longtime Olympia correspondent Andrew Garber and promising young local reporter Brian Rosenthal. (And that’s on top of the paper’s recent exodus of women reporters.) Garber has joined the Seattle Police Department as a senior media advisor, while Rosenthal’s Twitter bio says he he is now covering Texas state government for the Austin bureau of the Houston Chronicle.

Congratulations, Brian, I guess. But how bad must it be to work at the Seattle Times to make moving to Texas a better option? (I know—Austin. But still, it’s fucking hot, and filled with Texans.)

As for Garber, I believe his departure may leave the Olympian’s Brad Shannon as the last man standing from the Olympia press corps I met when I first started going down to the state capitol a decade ago. So I’ll make the same joke I made when David Postman left the paper: If many more reporters leave the profession to take media relations positions, pretty soon there won’t be any media left to relate to. (Oh wait. That’s pretty much what’s already happened.)

As far as I know, neither Garber or Rosenthal have been replaced yet.

What the headline says:

The research literature on whether minimum wage increases kill jobs is decidedly mixed. Some economists have found that hikes lead to small job losses among teens and in industries like fast food. Others have found that losses are nonexistent, or at least negligible. In the end, I tend to argue that even if you assume reasonable job losses, middle-class and poor families come out ahead in the bargain. Though some workers end up unemployed, enough get raises to make the tradeoff worthwhile.

But that assumes we don’t lift the pay floor too high, too fast. Minimum wage studies have typically looked at small increases, somewhere around 50 cents or a dollar. Seattle’s proposal would be far larger. It would also have virtually no U.S. precedent.

So, there’s no good evidence to show that increasing the minimum wage to $15 would kill jobs, but there’s no proof that it wouldn’t. So we better not try. Or something.

Because if there’s one thing that capitalism discourages, it’s taking risks.

Now is the perfect time for Seattle to pass a “millionaires tax.” With the minimum wage battle coming toward a peaceable end (or so the mayor promises), city council member Kshama Sawant will be free to turn toward the next item on her socialist agenda: taxing the income of millionaires. And with the city in need of finding new revenue to adequately fund human services (not to mention universal preschool, transit, and parks), who better to turn to for a little extra cash than Seattle’s untaxed rich?

But more importantly, there may never come another time when the Washington State Supreme Court is more predisposed toward revisiting the controversial constitutional question that has long threatened our state’s prosperity: Is income property? 

That was the 5-4 ruling of the court in 1933 after voters overwhelmingly passed a graduated income tax initiative, and it has hampered our state government’s ability to fund our basic needs ever since. Even in its day it was a controversial ruling, based on scarce and tenuous precedent—precedent that has since been rejected by every other state and federal court in the land. Everywhere else in the United States of America the courts have determined that income is a transaction that is taxable as such. Only in Washington State do we cling to this arbitrarily contrary definition, backed by not a single word of our state constitution. Go ahead, read it. It’s not mentioned once.

Normally, our elected justices are loath to tackle issues that might anger voters—for example, the decade and a half of legal wrangling it took to force the court to issue its equally inescapable and unpopular ruling on the now-dead two-thirds supermajority requirement for tax increases. But the shameless contempt our legislators have shown toward the court’s McCleary decision may put justices in a different frame of mind.

Under McCleary, the court ordered legislators to increase K-12 spending by an additional $4 billion to $7 billion by 2017 in order to meet our constitutional “paramount duty … to make ample provision for the education of all children.” But that is a legally binding order that legislators aren’t even close to fulfilling. Sure, they’ve restored a little bit of funding to public schools as the post-Great Recession recovery continues. But anybody who knows anything about the state budget, and who discusses it with integrity (that rules out you, Seattle Times editorial board), understands that it is mathematically impossible to comply with McCleary without raising new revenue. And legislators have made zero progress toward that end.

So what are the justices to do? They can’t very well pass tax legislation themselves—that is beyond the power of the judicial branch—and even if they could seize control of the budget writing process, they couldn’t do much better given the insufficient resources available. And as much as I’d love to see some legislators tossed in jail on contempt charges, I’m not sure that would be either legal or constructive.

But what the court could do, given the opportunity presented by a Seattle millionaires tax and the inevitable lawsuit it would provoke, is overturn the 1933 decision, tossing a political hornets nest into house and senate chambers by dramatically multiplying the revenue options available to lawmakers.

That might send a message.

Again, under normal circumstances, the justices would avoid this issue like the plague. Any opportunity to defer due to some procedural or preemptory issue would likely be seized upon. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and with a constitutional crisis looming, the court may welcome any opportunity to give the legislature a kick in the pants.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat better watch his tongue, or he soon may find himself writing at some foul-mouthed blog:

Dear Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education:

Hello from the other Washington! I’m writing to say that you can take your No Child Left Behind law and shove it.

I’d add “up your ass,” but that’s just me. Other than that, I completely agree with everything Westneat has to say about No Child Left Behind’s failed testing regime, and the political stupidity of picking a fight over it with Washington State:

I’ll close by saying I think you’re messing with the wrong state. You should try to change this “fundamentally flawed” law, rather than impose it on us out of pique. A prediction: We like to do our own thing out here anyway, and your action will only fuel more boycotts of these tests, as well as suspicion of the entire education-reform industry.

When those letters go out informing parents at every public school in the state that their school is a failure, parents, teachers, and administrators should mock these letters with celebratory dunce caps and All Children Left Behind parties. Perhaps schools should even take a day off from mandated testing to teach students important lessons of civil disobedience in American history, like the pre-Revolutionary War non-importation agreements and the various peaceful protests and boycotts of the civil rights movement.

This is a teachable moment, if not a testable one. Which is exactly the point.

Washington State will be better off resisting the feds on No Child Left Behind, and the rest of the nation would do well to our lead.

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.