HorsesAss.Org

Longtime readers, both here on HA and on Slog, know that I’m kinda obsessed with fixing Washington’s absurdly regressive and unsustainable state and local tax structure. Yet more than a decade of kvetching, cursing, and exhaustively explaining why our 1930s-era kludge of a tax system can’t possibly meet the needs of our 21st century economy has sparked little serious debate amongst our state’s politicians and pundits. It’s the blogging equivalent of pissing into the wind.

And so it is at least a little bit encouraging to see state Representative Reuven Carlyle (D-Seattle) use his position as chair of the House Finance Committee to publicly advance the issue:

All of these dense policy issues fail to capture the human impact of morally bankrupt tax system. By any standard our tax system has become the most unfair to the middle class and low income in the nation. According to the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, the lowest 20% of income earners in Washington–making an average income of $11,500 per year–pay 16.9% of their income in state and local taxes. The national average for this group is 11.1%. The top end–the proverbial one percent earning average income of $1.1 million per year–pay 2.8% of their income in combined taxes in Washington, dramatically less than the 5.6% national average.

We can no longer continue down the same path of tinkering with a broken, unfair and economically inefficient tax system that is divorced from our economy and fails to serve our communities. The 20-year trend shows absolutely no signs of relenting.  In a handful of years we are likely to be 40th in the nation in the combined level of state and local taxes based on personal income.  And a few years beyond that we can expect to reach 45th.  Is that our vision for ourselves? Are we so caustically anti-tax that we would close the doors of our colleges to our own children?  Would we close foster homes for our most vulnerable?  Would we allow traffic to suffocate our industrial economy and our quality of life?

Again, nothing in Rep. Carlyle’s blog post will come as a surprise to my regular readers—I’ve been writing about this stuff for years. But I hope that the fact that it’s coming from the House Finance chair will lend the issue the gravitas that a dirty, foul-mouthed, blogger like me could never give it.

– So, it’s January, and you have to recycle your food waste. Are you ready (if you weren’t doing it already)?

– Sen Wyden and his staff handled a hands up protest about as well as one might expect, but I’m surprised it was organized without anyone on staff’s knowledge.

– Another reminder that the Supreme Court is not always going to do the right thing.

– Yawn + seethe = contempt

– Male Nerds Think They’re Victims Because They Have No Clue What Female Nerds Go Through [h/t]

Matthew 21:18-19
Early in the morning, as Jesus was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered.

Discuss.

Mental Floss: What is dirt made of?

The “Duke” of Louisiana:

• Steve Kornacki: GOP manages political fallout of Scalise speech to racist group
• Chris Hayes: Conservatives clash with GOP leaders over Scalise
• Ed: Steve Scalise claims ignorance after giving speech before a hate group
• Young Turks: Hate group scandal engulfs top Republican Congressman
• Steve Kornacki: Steve Scalise addressed racist group in 2002
• David Pakman: House majority whip was honored guest at White supremacist group
• José Díaz-Balart: Republicans eat their own over Steve Scalise’s speech to David Duke group
• Sharpton and friends: Steve Scalise and David Duke

Thom: Who should be drug tested?

Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: Republicans have moved to crazytown on immigration reform.

White House: West Wing Week.

Obama messes up wedding…but helps makes it memorable.

“President” Michele Bachmann delivers on $2/gal gasoline (via Crooks and Liars).

It’s Back, Baby:

• Sam Stein and Jared Bernstein: Americans show confidence in economic recovery
• Steve Kornacki: Americans feeling effects of improved economy.
• The Rundown: 2015 marks turning point for economic recovery (and G.O.P. re-messaging)
• David Pakman: Obama’s approval rating matches Ronnie Reagan’s approval rating:

Thom with some Good, Bad, and Very, Very Ugly.

Al Sharpton: Six years and running…Obama’s greatest accomplishments.

Michael Brooks: Freedomworks hilariously attacks net neutrality.

Mental Floss: 21 things that turned 21 in 2014.

Reflections and Resolutions:

• Young Turks: Police brutality launched a new civil rights movement in 2014
• Mark Fiore: The Year in Crazy.
• David Pakman reviews Pat Robertson’s 2014 predictions:

  
  

• Ed: The Robertson’s predictions of 2014
• Roll Call: Best Congressions hits and misses of 2014
• Young Turks: 2014 was the year the Right Wing fell in love with Putin (and then fell out of love again).
• 2014: Restoring faith in humanity
• Rubin Report: 10 most admired women of 2014.
• Rubin Report: Most admired men of 2014.
• Farron Cousins: 2014 was a shitty year.
• Ann Telnaes: Good riddance to 2014.
• Alex Witt and Beth Fouhy: The top political scandals of 2014
• Young Turks: Right wing lunacy dominated the 2014 elections
• Ana Kasparian and Dave Rubin’s best and worst moments of 2014.
• Hank Green: Best and Worst of 2014
• Ed and friends: The worst of conservative media in 2014
• Young Turks: Ebola caused more freak-outs than (U.S.) cases in 2014
• Michael Steele and friends: A year of scandal and sleaze in politics.
• Grace Parra: New Years resolutions with the probability fairy
• Young Turks: Craziest politicians of the year

Hylp: A app for ladies.

John Green: Racism in the U.S. by the numbers:

Mental Floss: Misconceptions about exercise.

Sam Seder: Republican admits G.O.P. Benghazi report is “Full of crap.”.

David Pakman: 20 states raise minimum wage in 2015.

Young Turks: West Virginia finally gets some justice, Don Blankenship is indicted.

Grimm Reaper:

• Steve Kornacki: Grimm resigns
• Michael Grimm quits over felony tax evasion
• David Pakman: Republican convicted felon Michael Grimm resigns
• Young Turks: Rep Michael Grimm resigns after criminally embarrassing Republicans
• Steve Kornacki: Fossella eyed to replace Grimm despite two-family scandal.

Thom and Pap: How the Kochtopus is reaching for our criminal justice system.

Vsauce: Reduplications and other language curiousities.

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

– Man, I’ve been taking too much time off. I’m back in real life and, hopefully, here next week. So enjoy 2015, and I’ll see you there.

– Media Follies 2014! – Local

– Looks like last year was a banner year for hate crimes in King County.

– Headline ‘O the Day

– Oh hey, baby orca.

I’m proud to have been able to cast a vote for NY Governor Mario Cuomo in 1990, and will forever regret that I never had the chance to cast a vote for him as president. He was one of our nation’s most inspiring orators, and one of the last of a generation of great statesmen.

RIP, Governor Cuomo.

Happy new year all!

Wow. How do you even begin to engage in a conversation about gun safety when the other side displays such a total lack of introspection?

“She was not the least bit irresponsible,” her father-in-law, Terry Rutledge said,

You know, except for the part about leaving a loaded gun within reach of her two-year-old.

He complained about people using the incident to attack his daughter-in-law.

Again, wow.

– Happy New Year!

– 1 Million bike trips across the Freemont Bridge this year!

– Emmett thinks that how Seattle and Portland handled Uber says a lot more about how the two cities handle competition more generally. I’m not sure I 100% buy it, but it was a fun read.

– Geez have the Metro drivers even heard of just holding it?

– Good on Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson for being a decent person in response to a letter.

– Sounds like the appropriate response to 2014

Oy…

A woman was shopping with four kids, when one of the kids reached into her purse and accidentally discharged the weapon, according to Kootenai County Sheriff’s Deputies at the scene.

The gunshot killed the 29-year-old woman. Deputies on scene said the child who accidentally fired the handgun was about 2-years-old.

No doubt this woman kept a gun in her purse to protect herself and her children. Didn’t work out that way. As usual.

Area school districts are having a helluva time attracting substitute teachers:

Some districts said teachers are missing too many school days, whether for sickness, vacation or teacher training. Some said pools of qualified candidates are dwindling for all teaching positions — not just substitutes. Others said substitutes aren’t paid enough, and that higher-paying districts attract more candidates. A substitute in Seattle makes between $161 and $187 a day, with no benefits unless the sub works more than 60 consecutive days in one place.

Considering how disrespected they are by politicians and pundits, it’s hard to understand why anybody would want to be a school teacher these days. But a substitute? Yikes. Even if one were to get an assignment for all 180 school days (and you won’t come close), $161 a day comes to only $28,980 a year with zero benefits. For somebody with a college degree!

So here’s an idea: If we want to attract more (and better!) teachers to the profession, maybe we should try both paying them more, and showing them a little goddamn respect? I mean, isn’t that the way labor markets are supposed to work?

Join us tonight as we close out 2014 and toast in the new year at this week’s Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

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

Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings over the next week. Tonight the Tri-Cities chapter also meets. And next Monday, the Yakima and South Bellevue chapters meet.

There are 177 chapters of Living Liberally, including fifteen in Washington state, four in Oregon and two in Idaho. Chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.

As I’ve mentioned a few times in recent weeks as I’ve wound down the Street View contest, I’m planning to dive back into some regular political blogging again. For those who’ve been here a while, you’ll know that my main focus has long been the drug war. And even with the significant victories the drug law reform movement has achieved recently, it still remains an important subject to me. But I want to expand out what I follow to track a wider range of battles for civil liberties throughout the world, especially highlighting areas where basic human rights aren’t being upheld. The drug war remains part of that picture, particularly in non-western countries where even non-violent drug offenders sometimes still face lengthy prison terms or even execution. But I’d like to follow and highlight more than just that.

One thing that I’d like to point out up-front is that this won’t always be an exercise in moral equivalence. For example, I might share links to a story on North Korean death camps alongside a story on states trying to enact death with dignity laws. I obviously don’t think that the lack of a death with dignity law is as serious a problem as North Korea’s horrifically tyrannical regime, but I do believe both issues are examples of authoritarianism that deserve more attention. On the other hand, I will sometimes draw certain types of moral equivalence between various regimes when necessary. For me, an American torture regime is no less heinous than a Syrian one. Drawing this equivalence is often difficult for traditional media in the United States, and I hope to do a better job of framing those issues in the proper perspective.

For this effort, the ideal I’m working towards is that there are some very basic rights that all governments, elected or not, should be held accountable for protecting. Obviously, the right to vote out your government is the most basic one, and it’s alarming how much of the world still doesn’t have this right. The absence of this right does separate out the worst of the worst governments in the world. Beyond that, the right to speak your mind and dissent from the government is just as important. The right to disseminate news and the right to assemble and travel freely are also basic. The right to make moral choices, practice religion freely and to have control over your body are also essential, along with the right to fair trials and the ability to defend oneself from the state when accused of a crime. Issues of discrimination and collective punishment against a minority population will be part of this. Finally, the right to privacy and to be free from warrantless searches and seizures will also be part of this effort’s scope.

What much of this boils down to for me is that the government shouldn’t have a veto over an individual’s moral conscience, so long as that person doesn’t directly harm others. What separates this personal outlook from what’s generally considered a ‘libertarian’ philosophy is that I make a distinction between an individual’s pursuit of peace of mind and an individual’s pursuit of profit. All of what I’ve pointed out above relates to one’s conscience and their personal sense of moral guidance and free will. The pursuit of profit takes place within a system that requires a number of balances and sacrifices in order to function properly. Maybe some libertarians agree with the importance of this distinction, but most that I’ve encountered certainly don’t. And while I often agree with libertarians on a number of things, this distinction tends to be a pretty major divide. I don’t consider things like an individual mandate in our health care system (no matter how inefficient) to be an assault on liberty in the same way as a ban on drug use.

Of course, when you’re talking about things like drug use (or gambling, prostitution, or other vices), the line between what’s part of the economic system and what’s part of a person’s moral conscience is blurred. The distinction that I make is that blanket prohibitions on some type of adult consensual behavior are a violation of our civil liberties, while strict regulations on how people profit from it are not. There might be a lot of instances where I find those strict regulations to be completely idiotic, but they’ll still be outside of the scope. For example, debates over how we re-work the I-502 language that passed in 2012 to end marijuana prohibition in the state will be really interesting to me, but I won’t be discussing it in these posts.

Governments should exist to protect people from the unexpected, not to protect people from themselves. Within an economic system, especially this complex global economy that we all share, this requires a certain amount of rules and regulations in order to keep people from having their life savings wiped out or for the cost of basic necessities to rise beyond what people can pay without opportunities to get ahead. Again, believing this separates me from what most libertarians believe. But the common ground is that government should not be in the business of protecting people from their own bad – or just risky – choices. I think government has a role to play in educating people about these choices, but not in using the arm of the law to attempt to make those choices for us. But no regulatory regimes are in scope here, even if they are at the extreme left or right ends of the spectrum. They only become in scope for what I’m interested in if the regulatory regime is openly discriminatory.

There are several issues where I expect there to be a lot of contentiousness with what I consider “in scope”; gun control, environmental regulations, child protections and immigration. For the most part, gun control will be outside of the scope of this effort. The exceptions are cases where governments are implementing selective gun control – in other words, some subset of the population arbitrarily has different gun ownership rights for discriminatory reasons – or if governnments are actively trying to disarm an entire population while actively employing a military-style occupation.

Environmental regulations are also tricky. As with gun control, if there are different rules for different subsets of the population or it’s being used as some obvious form of baseless collective punishment, it will be in scope. But otherwise, environmental protection is a valid pretext for reasonable restrictions on people’s liberty. This doesn’t mean that I’ll agree with all those regulations, but I don’t intend to make those judgments as part of this effort.

Child protection and parenting issues are also very difficult to draw clear lines in this respect. I generally favor giving parents as much leeway as possible in establishing their own moral compass as parents, but I’m very wary of the limits of that philosophy, especially when it comes to things like medical care and public health. It’s unlikely that issues like this will be a part of this project’s scope.

Immigration might end up being the most difficult topic to parse out. Many countries have strict policies dictating who can immigrate. My perspective isn’t that those laws are invalid by default, but that migrations of people who are seeking out opportunities or fleeing for safety reasons are not realistically suppressible. The plight of refugees will very much be in scope here, as well as the systems in place for dealing with undocumented migrants throughout the world. In addition, the institutional abuse of migrant labor will certainly be a topic I’m interested in covering.

What I plan to focus on are stories from around the world where people’s basic rights – as I’ve tried to delineate them above – are being violated by governments. This can be any of a long list of things, and will be far too many to follow closely, but I hope that this is something that I can harness the feedback of readers and turn into a good resource for people interested in getting involved with various efforts around the world where people are fighting against injustices.

I haven’t decided if there will be a regular posting schedule for these roundups, but it’ll probably be less than once a week, maybe twice a month. I’ll also be focusing my Twitter feed on these topics more and more as I have some ideas for how to use that to collect and organize links. I really want to make this as collaborative as possible, so please feel free to shoot me an email with any thoughts or ideas.

One of the stupidest defenses of shareholder maximization theory is the bullshit argument that since everybody owns stocks these days through our 401Ks and mutual funds, then high corporate profits and a booming stock market benefits everybody! Except, not really:

The vast majority of working and middle class Americans simply don’t own much stock, because you can’t invest money you don’t have.

Forty years ago, annual US corporate profits averaged about 6 percent of GDP. Today profits consume about 13 percent of GDP. That’s an extra $1 trillion a year in corporate profits propping up equity prices. Meanwhile, labor’s share of GDP has declined by a corresponding 7 percent over the same period. Coincidence?

Righties hate numbers like this, fearing that they might be used to justify some sort of massive redistribution of wealth. But that redistribution is already going on. It’s just going in the wrong direction.

– It’s strangely reassuring to read about Oregon’s unnecessary giveaways to Nike. Oh, that sort of garbage happens everywhere!

– The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a pretty lousy economic measure, but yeah.

– The Oil Train Industry is Putting Seattle at Risk

– Twitter doesn’t think these rape and death threats are harassment

– This piece by Digby on the asymmetry of politicians unhinged from reality is pretty much all you need the next time someone is like “but both sides” or whatever.

– This Modern World’s Year in Review Part 1 and Part 2.