HorsesAss.Org

Seattle City Council members are being lobbied hard by a group of immigrant and minority small business owners—mostly Asian—fighting to weaken the city’s proposed $15 minimum wage ordinance. So I just thought I’d take a moment to drill down to the core of their argument and remind council members that there is nothing particularly noble nor rational about defending the rights of immigrant business owners to pay poverty wages to immigrant workers.

And that’s basically what these immigrant business owners are demanding.

I suppose somewhere in the ID there might be a white suburban teenager busing tables or washing dishes or stocking shelves, but we all know that’s not the workforce we’re talking about here. Whereas minimum wage workers in general are disproportionately people of color, minimum wage workers at immigrant owned small businesses are almost entirely so. Thus any concession we make to immigrant business owners largely comes at the expense of their immigrant workers.

Yes, I know, this is a nation that was largely built on the backs of cheap immigrant (and slave) labor. And many of these immigrant business owners worked crappy, poverty-wage jobs themselves when they first came to this country. They were exploited when they first arrived, and now it’s their turn to do the exploiting. It’s the American way. Hooray!

But that doesn’t make it right.

Besides, the same economic arguments that apply to other businesses apply to immigrant owned ones as well. The personal stories of the owners may be more compelling than that of the guys my ex-colleagues at The Stranger have pimped for, but the economics are no different. Some immigrant owned businesses might struggle to pay their workers $15 an hour. Some might lay off workers. Some might move out of the city. Some might close up shop. But most will figure out a way to adjust and to thrive. Because that’s the American way too.

After the defeat of Prop 1, Eli Sanders wondered why suburban voters like light rail, but not buses.

Seattle is surrounded by a ring of voters who appear to hate the idea of funding buses. But in 2008, voters in that same suburban ring voted in favor of funding light rail. (Take the suburban city of Kent, for example. Only 27.2 percent of its voters wanted to save Metro bus service this year. But in 2008, returns showed 50.8 percent of Kent voters in favor of funding light rail.)

These were different measures, of course, but that’s very much the point. There was something in this year’s proposal — whether it be car tabs [to fix roads and fund bus service], the focus on bus transit, or Metro Transit itself — that alienated suburban voters. The result was a marked decline of support that cannot simply be attributed to anti-transit sentiments.

So what was it? The influence of the Prop-1-bashing Seattle Times on suburban voters? The weirdness of an April election? Something about the winsomeness of trains that buses just can’t match? Theories?

As a suburban voter (and a long-time Metro rider and supporter), I wish I had a better answer to this question. I was frustrated to see Prop 1 go down, but I wasn’t all that surprised. The roads near my house were littered with signs saying ‘No $60 car tabs’.

Part of the problem is certainly that trains are seen as a more efficient mode of transit than buses. But I also had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that Metro was bluffing about the need to cancel routes, and won’t actually cancel them. They cited the Seattle Times, but I’m not even sure the Times went quite that far down the rabbit hole (or maybe it did, I honestly don’t read their shit anymore). So maybe it’s not as much a negative view of buses as it is a negative view of Metro itself.

Either way, as a suburbanite who relies on the 102 bus to get to my job downtown, I have one thing to say to Seattle with respect to preserving the regional character of the Metro system.

Save your routes and don’t worry about us.

I know that I might be fucked if things continue in that direction and Metro starts to de-emphasize suburban routes, but seriously, it would be hilarious to watch traffic go to levels of shit previous thought unimaginable as all of us bus commuters get back in our cars. Let’s bring it on! Carmageddon!

In a 5-4 decision, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled today that Sea-Tac Airport workers have the right to sue their employer for providing lunches that fail to accommodate their religious beliefs:

Due to security concerns, the workers at Gate Gourmet can’t bring their own lunches to work. Nor can they leave work on their 30-minute lunch breaks.

Instead, the company provides their lunches. While there are ostensibly vegetarian and non-vegetarian options, the workers say the vegetarian options include animal by-products and allege the company switched from turkey meatballs to beef-and-pork meatballs without telling them.

Omiallah, is it possible to be a more awful employer? This is a company that is actually in the business of providing meals that comply with special dietary needs—from Gate Gourmet’s own fucking website:

Our chefs hail from different regions and countries and are experts in their respective native cuisine. With Gate Gourmet, you can count on a partner with expertise in ethnic and cultural cuisines as well as dietary and religious customs. Gate Gourmet can provide any type of special meal to cater to any specific dietary need, in full accordance with IATA specifications.

And yet they couldn’t bother to do the same for their own Muslim workers? What an utterly reprehensible display of disrespect!

One of the ironies* of the $15 minimum wage movement is the oversized role that Alaska Airlines and its Sea-Tac Airport contractors played in pushing the issue over the top. For years, airport workers had been protesting their low pay and abusive work conditions to no avail. The SeaTac $15 initiative was initially conceived as a means of pressuring Alaska to force its contractors to the negotiating table; organizers never believed they’d really have to go to the ballot. But Alaska chose to play hardball, and the rest is history.

* (A further irony is that a nation that wets itself at the thought of Islamist extremists appears to go out of its way to put Muslim immigrant workers behind airport security gates, only to pay them crappy wages, feed them pork, and fire them for praying on the job. Given our obsession with airport security, you’d think that if we can’t bring ourselves to respect these airport workers as actual, you know, people, we might think it in our self-interest to at least try to pretend.)

– I’ve been asked a couple times to sign the $15 minimum wage initiative. So far I’ve declined, waiting for the process to play itself out. But if the process plays out badly (second piece) I’ll be glad to sign it.

– The Republican base had a choice to become more inclusive as the demographic tide advanced on them, or to double down on maximizing the racist white vote.

– These are possibly the NIMBYest NIMBY’s in all of NIMBYdom.

– Rainier Valley is Fueling Link Ridership Growth

– The Case for Reparations

– I’m pretty sure this XKCD What If got written for the hover text for the penultimate picture more than anything else, although the answer itself is fun enough.

According to the latest census estimates, Seattle’s population grew by 2.8 percent last year, the fasest rate among the nation’s 50 biggest cities. And that’s not all:

Seattle didn’t just surpass other big U.S. cities in 2013. For the second consecutive year, it outpaced its suburbs — and the new census data show this trend is accelerating.

Seattle grew at double the rate of surrounding King County between 2012 and 2013. That is significantly faster than in the previous year’s census estimates, which clocked Seattle’s growth at 25 percent faster than its King County suburbs.

Among all places in Washington with at least 50,000 residents, Seattle had the fastest rate of growth, and was followed by: Sammamish (2.2 percent), Auburn (2 percent), Richland (1.7 percent), and Redmond (1.7 percent).

Clearly, Seattle’s tax-and-spend liberalism is destroying our city and driving people away! Or something. Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn off the WiFi router?

Obviously, I’ve known intuitively after the Oregon ruling that the entire West Coast has marriage equality. But still, it’s really great seeing the map.

The linked post says there’s a lot to do, and of course that’s right. Also, marriage equality isn’t the end all be all of gay rights or of modern civil rights struggles. But as of this week, you can drive from Canada to Mexico in marriage equality states. While the Northeast, Midwest, and Arizona feel like islands of equality, the entire West Coast feels more substantive, even if it’s fewer states than the Northeast.

Pediatric neurosurgeon and accused stalker Monica Wehby easily beat second place Jason Conger 50 percent to 37 percent yesterday in Oregon’s Republican US Senate primary, after voters ran out of time to make an informed decision.

A police report detailing allegations that Wehby repeatedly stalked her ex-boyfriend at his home, entered without his invitation, and harassed his employees, did not emerge until Friday, May 16, the last day in which Oregon voters could be reasonably assured of putting their ballot in the mail and having it arrive by the state’s Tuesday, May 18 received-by deadline.

Wehby will go on to be trounced by Democratic incumbent Senator Jeff Merkley in the November general election.

Every election season our state’s editorial boards chime in with demands to switch Washington’s postmarked-by Election Day ballot deadline to Oregon’s more restrictive received-by deadline. The argument is that forcing voters to return their ballots sooner would result in faster election results. But as I’ve repeatedly explained, it won’t. Our elections departments can’t keep up with the volume of ballots that already arrive during the final couple days of the election. All switching the deadline would do is disenfranchise thousands of additional Washington voters.

But the Wehby incident illustrates another disadvantage to Oregon’s received-by deadline: it effectively shortens the election season by three or four days, leaving many voters unable to respond to late-breaking news like Wehby’s stalking scandal. In Washington, you can drop your ballot off at your neighborhood post office as late as Tuesday afternoon and be reasonably assured that your vote will eventually be counted, but in Oregon you damn well better put your ballot in the mail by Friday, Saturday at the absolute latest. Sure, first class mail sometimes arrives next day when mailed within the same urban center, but sometimes it doesn’t. So you’d be crazy to post your ballot on a Monday.

In practice, Tuesday’s proximity to the weekend essentially moves Oregon’s vote-by-mail Election Day to the previous Friday.

There are many advantages to a vote-by-mail election, not the least of which being the vastly reduced opportunities for voter suppression. But there is no reason to exacerbate the system’s weaknesses in pursuit of maybe reporting election results a tiny bit faster.

– Everyone seems to like Mayor Murray’s choice for police chief.

– Maybe guns in bars might not be such a good idea

– Hey bicyclists, be careful.

– Please jot this down and re-read it the next time you knee-jerkingly and douchily deny you are privileged. Thanks.

– Here are some names of parties that people used this year (Spokesman-Review link).

– Congrats Oregon and Pennsylvania on human dignity.

– I haven’t been watching Cosmos (I’ll probably catch it when it comes out on DVD because I am 1000 years old) but it’s always fun to watch creationists lose their shit.

I am not a reporter and HA is not a news site. Just thought I’d take a moment to make that clear.

It’s been a couple months now since I left The Stranger and yet I’m still getting phone calls, text messages, and emails asking me to show up at some press event or another, or badgering me about why I haven’t shown some important issue enough love, and the answer of course is, because it’s not my job. Absent a steady (if meager) paycheck, I’ve been forced to take on some regular contract work that leaves me free to pursue my journalistic passions without conflict or compromise, but which doesn’t leave me much time to do it.

So to be clear, I have not returned to HA as a full time blogger. I will continue to post to HA on a regular basis—mostly political commentary and media criticism—but I simply cannot afford to write for free full time. And since there’s only so much time in the day, my first obligation when divvying up my work schedule has to be to the people who are paying me money.

It sucks, but that’s the way capitalism works, folks.

The five-plus years I spent as a full-time independent blogger were the most gratifying work years of my life (my three-plus years writing at The Stranger a bit less so), and if there are patrons out there willing to subsidize my folly, I would gladly recommit myself to the project. But for the moment, I can’t. And so to all my friends in the broader progressive community who have come to rely on me to cover your issues and events, well, tough nuts. I’ve got bills to pay and deadlines to meet. Welcome to the new HA.

I’d been meaning to comment on Danny Westneat’s recent column suggesting real estate development impact fees as an alternative to the current round of proposed tax increases, and I want to start by thanking Danny for at least attempting to think creatively on the issue. Really. I’m a big fan of using one’s media presence in the service of public brainstorming.

That said, while I’ve got nothing against them in theory, I don’t think impact fees can or should be a big part of the solution here in Seattle.

For example, take Danny’s inspiration: being crowded onto a sweaty No. 8 bus. “By state law impact fees can’t be used directly for transit,” Danny writes. So then, um, what’s the point? Seattle’s transportation benefit district—the same authority Mayor Ed Murray has proposed using to raise vehicle license fees and sales tax in order to buy back Metro bus service cuts—also has the authority to levy impact fees on commercial (nonresidential) development. But that’s not going to add any service hours to Danny’s No. 8 bus.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use this authority to help fund roads and stuff, just that it does nothing to solve our immediate crisis.

Second, the notion of charging residential impact fees (Danny says that Bellevue charges $2,600 per house and $1,300 per apartment unit) would run headlong into Seattle’s efforts to address our city’s growing affordable housing crisis, both by making new housing more expensive, and potentially more scarce. Furthermore, anything that holds back new construction ends up adversely impacting property tax revenue, as new construction is exempt from I-747’s absurd 1 percent cap on regular levy revenue growth, and thus the engine of revenue growth in general.

Third, the logic of impact fees just doesn’t hold in a dense urban center like Seattle the way it does in a sprawling suburb, where new developments on virgin residential land often require the construction of new roads, new sewers, new fire stations, new schools, and so forth. Most residential development here in Seattle consists of in-filling in areas where all of these basic services already exist, so it just doesn’t carry with it the same sort of additional public infrastructure costs as a new suburban subdivision.

But finally—and this is my biggest complaint with Danny’s solution—impact fees do nothing to address the heart of the problem: our refusal to tax the people who can best afford to pay higher taxes. You know, the wealthy!

Implicit in Danny’s column is the acknowledgment that Seattle’s public services and infrastructure are underfunded. He’s not arguing with the need to expand bus service, maintain our parks, or fund universal preschool. He just seems to think that the latest round of proposed taxes are too much for the average taxpayer to bear. That’s debatable, but if you presume that it’s true, simply shoving the burden onto the backs of newcomers isn’t much of a solution. Instead, we should be looking for ways to ask our under-taxed wealthy to pick up more of the cost of maintaining the city in which they prosper. Not just out of fairness, but out the very pragmatic logic that they are the people with the most extra money to spare.

I look forward to Danny joining me in attempting to brainstorm a solution to that vexing problem.

Tuesday is election night, with primaries in Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. There is bound to be some surprises and, with the Idaho gubernatorial GOP primary alone, much entertainment. So please join us tonight for an evening of electoral politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

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 before that for dinner and the early election returns.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state chapter of Drinking Liberally over the next week. The Tri-Cities and Shelton chapters also meet this Tuesday. The Lakewood and South Seattle chapters meet this Wednesday. And on Thursday, the Woodinville and Spokane chapters meet.

With 209 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.

Seattle City Council members Nick Licata and Kshama Sawant announced today a plan that would avert scheduled bus service cuts within Seattle through increases in the commercial parking tax and the employer head tax. You know, just like I had suggested.

“I have asked our policy staff to research exactly how much revenue could be raised through these means, and to begin drafting legislation to introduce to the City Council,” said Licata in a prepared statement.

Unlike Mayor Ed Murray’s proposed vehicle license fee and sales tax package, or the competing property tax proposal, hikes in the commercial parking tax and the employer head tax could be passed councilmanically without having to be put to voters. The council could pass these tax increases now, in time to avert the first round of Metro cuts that are scheduled for September. The other packages couldn’t go to voters before November, well after the first round of cuts are implemented.

Also unlike the other proposed taxes and fees, the commercial parking tax and the employer head tax aren’t particularly regressive. So that’s a big plus in their favor.

While only Licata and Sawant have put their names on this proposal, a birdie tells me that at least one or two other council members have expressed interest. So there is a real shot at preventing in-city bus cuts entirely instead of just preventing them from getting any worse.

Last fall I walked into the McDonald’s on Madison Street in Seattle to order myself a metaphor. The point was to demonstrate how incredibly cheap fast food is by historical standards, and how little impact a $15 an hour minimum wage would really have on fast food prices.

I estimated that even if the entire cost of raising the minimum wage to $15 was passed on to consumers (and it wouldn’t be), menu prices would rise by only 20 percent, tops. Probably closer to 16 percent. Maybe as little as 10 percent.

And considering that, adjusted for inflation, the same 15 cents that bought you a McDonald’s hamburger back in 1948 buys you a $1.49 double cheeseburger today, it’s hard to argue that consumers can’t afford to pay a little bit more for their burgers.

Friday I walked into that exact same McDonald’s and paid $1.69 for the exact same double cheeseburger, a 13.5 percent price hike in less than six months. And yet for all the warnings from the industry that higher prices would drive away customers, it was business as usual at the Madison Street McDonald’s.

The fact is, restaurants and other businesses implement price hikes like these all the time, for various reasons, and nobody notices! In the worst case scenario for franchise owners under the proposed minimum wage ordinance, their labor costs would rise by no more than 18 percent a year over three years, before being indexed to inflation. But labor only accounts for a third of their costs. Pass all of that along to consumers (and again, they won’t), and you are looking at just a 6 percent annual price hike—less than half the rise in double cheeseburger prices just since December.

To put that in perspective—using the industry’s same minimum-wage-hikes-equals-higher-prices math in reverse—if all of the gains from a 13.5 percent price hike were passed on to employees in the form of higher wages, Madison Street McDonald’s workers would be making about $13.35 an hour today! Just from charging the equivalent of 20 cents more for a double cheeseburger! A price hike that customers apparently accepted with a shrug, if they noticed at all!

So let’s not pretend that fast food franchisees can’t afford to cover the cost of raising the minimum wage to $15 over three years, when they routinely pass on to consumers similar cost increases all the time.

– On Friday I had a breezy piece on the filing deadline. Joel Connelly has more info.

– Spitting, Stalking, Rape Threats: How Gun Extremists Target Women

– I’m excited about a possibility of a coal free state of Washington (Columbian link).

– You know the GOP are extreme on immigration when their leadership won’t even let the ENLIST Act come up for a vote.

– Rep. Matt Manweller’s plan to put a surcharge on one concert venue only to pay for medical bills seems maybe not as thought out as he would like.

– In Which I Cross All Limits To Acceptable Human Law

– Anyone enjoying museum week?

Last week’s contest was a tough one, it went unsolved as of Saturday morning. It was Rosario, Argentina.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere in the state of Hawaii, good luck!