HorsesAss.Org

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.

– Revisiting public financing for local elections

– I join Seattlish in being proud of Mount Si High

– It is all too common for sports media to find themselves reporting on sexual assault cases, most often when an athlete is alleged to be the perpetrator of the crime. While sexual assault is a problem throughout U.S. society — nearly 20 percent of women will be assaulted in their lifetimes — it often seems to garner the most attention when a sports star is involved.

– I like the idea of tech companies being able to disclose NSA surveillance. Go Suzan DelBene.

– Congrats to Ron Sims on the new job chairing the Washington Health Benefit Exchange (Spokesman Review link).

– Portables are gross.

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.

Now that SeaTac has and Seattle will likely have $15 minimum wages, we ought to look at what that means for the Port. Since the lawsuit is still underway in SeaTac, maybe there won’t be a gaping hole. But for now, it looks likely that jobs at SeaTac Airport and Port of Seattle facilities in Seattle won’t be covered by the minimum wage laws.

Presuming that the previous ruling gets upheld, I see a couple ways to protect the quality of those jobs. First the state could change the law to make it so that state sponsored port authorities have to apply all local minimum wage laws. I’m not a lawyer, and I haven’t read the lower court verdict, but I assume this could be done legislatively. That would be a bit of a stretch if the state Senate is still controlled by Republicans, but if it requires a constitutional amendment that’ll pretty much be off the table. So that means the Port, I guess. Elections are on odd numbered years, but pressure can be put on the members now (click on the individual pictures to email them).

Of course, the market will take care of some of this. Alaska Airlines have already raised their wages (not to $15) in response to the initiative in SeaTac.

Well, as prospective employees flocked to apply for $15-an-hour jobs, Alaska Airlines raised wages for its contract employees inside the airport to $12 an hour. Clearly, in order to attract and retain the best workers in the area, Alaska Airlines had to sweeten the pot, even saying the new wages “more accurately reflect the local market.” Some of the raises were as high as 28%, showing how a rising wage tide can lift all boats, rather than the right-wing idea that jobs can only be created when wages are depressed.

Still and all, if the two most important cities for the Port Of Seattle raise their minimum wage. The port ought to follow suit, at least in those cities, and preferably throughout their jurisdiction.

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.

– 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.