HorsesAss.Org

I don’t necessarily disagree with the general sentiment of the Seattle Times’ recent editorials on higher education and fixing potholes; these both constitute important government services that demand public investment, as the Times appears to recognize. But if the Times’ editors are going to continue editorializing in favor of spending taxpayer dollars, they might want to start rethinking their seemingly knee-jerk opposition to raising them.

For example, in making the case for dedicating more city resources towards pothole repair, the Times correctly points out that in 2006, Seattle voters approved a roads and bridges levy that, amongst other things, promised to “pave and repair Seattle streets.” What the Times fails to recall is that its editorial board advised readers to vote “No” on the $365 million proposition.

Likewise, while the editors rightly insist that “among the many things Washington must do about higher education, none will be as important as returning its investment in the system to a stronger, more robust stage,” they were also among the loudest voices arguing against a high earners income tax that would have restored budget dollars for education, while reducing taxes for 98 percent of Washington households.

The Times editors like to smugly harrumph about “Tax and Spend Liberals” like me, and I don’t deny the label—I think our state currently invests too little in our public and human infrastructure to sustain and grow our economy and improve our quality of life. Disagree with that perspective if you want, but at least give me credit for enunciating how we might pay for my spending priorities, unlike those “Don’t-Tax but Spend Conservatives” at the Seattle Times.

Heads up: I’ll be on KUOW’s The Conversation at around 12:40 this afternoon, giving nightlife promoter (and bar owner) Dave Meinert the business over his misguided proposal to help fill our state budget hole through doubling consumption of alcohol and a tenfold increase in gambling. I’ll post a few relevant stats and links closer to air time.

I’ve had a few phone conversations over the past few days with an old college friend who’s now an attorney in the Miami area. Back in college, he was a Republican, but he’s now utterly terrified of what new Republican Governor Rick Scott is going to do to that state. For those who haven’t followed his illustrious career, Scott is the health care executive who paid a $1.7 billion settlement after his company was found to have been defrauding the government. I can’t even begin to understand how someone like that was able to win a statewide election in any state.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpOUctySD68&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

As much as it might pain me to type this… what Danny Westneat said.

Please join us tonight for the first evening of politics under the influence in 2011 at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We meet at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm. Or join some of us for dinner around 7:00 pm.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 236 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

I got nothing. At least, nothing I feel like writing about at the moment. So talk amongst yourselves.

As I explained yesterday on Slog, the High Tuition/High Financial Aid model proposed by Gov. Gregoire’s higher education task force, doesn’t exactly work if the plan doesn’t guarantee high financial aid, and from what I’ve seen of it, I’m just not confident that this proposal does. What might satisfy me? Well, for one, a philosophical shift in the task force’s objectives:

Along with more money from tuition, the task force’s proposal would lessen the impact to lower- and middle-income families by creating a private financial-aid endowment, with a goal of raising $1 billion in the next decade.

Change “lessen the impact” to “eliminate the impact,” and then back it up with reasonable safeguards, and you might just get my support, along with a enough Democrats in Olympia to make this a reality. Otherwise… piss off.

As the chart at the top of the post illustrates, it is possible to charge sky-high tuition, while keeping a college degree affordable to lower- and middle-income families. This chart compares the net costs at my admittedly pricey alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, to those at a typical public university, and as you can see, once financial aid packages are factored in, Penn can turn out to be just as affordable. In fact, more so, as Penn’s aid comes entirely in the form of grants, meaning its students no longer graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in loans.

That’s the way the High Tuition/High Financial Aid model is supposed to work. Those families that can afford to pay full price do; those who can’t, pay what they can afford. At Penn, students from typical families earning less than $90,000 a year receive grants equal to full tuition and fees; students from families earning less than $40,000 have their room and board covered too.

And it could work that way in Washington state too, if both the money and the commitment is there to move to this model without making a four-year degree less affordable to lower- and middle-income families.

So in the interest of moving this conversation forward, I’d like to suggest that my friends in the legislature consider this very simple but significant amendment to the task force’s proposals: give our four-year universities the freedom to set tuition prices as they see fit, but impose a needs tested cap on the net cost to in-state, lower- and middle-income families.

In the end, I couldn’t care less where the sticker price of a UW degree falls in relation to that at comparable public universities, and neither should should students or lawmakers. All that matters is the net cost of that degree in relation to what the student can afford. And if we as a state can embrace and defend this principle, then the move to tuition flexibility can be a net plus for our higher education system as a whole.

A reader alerted me to a news story that took place out on the peninsula right before Christmas:

Yellow crime-scene tape surrounded Dr. James Rotchford’s Olympic Pain and Addiction Services medical clinic in Port Townsend’s Uptown District on Tuesday morning, as city police officers assisted state and federal agents in executing a search warrant on the premises.

According to two other articles online, the raids were a result of an investigation by the State Attorney General’s office over Medicaid fraud. The Attorney General’s office provided no details on the warrants, which are sealed for 90 days.

Rotchford’s clinic specializes in treating pain patients and those with addictions to pain medications. Because of the risks of abuse from prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet, doctors like Rotchford are in a risky profession. Even doctors who’ve been cleared by medical organizations of any wrongdoing have found themselves guilty in a court of law, simply for not realizing that the folks they were prescribing to were supplying the black market. As a result, there are precious few doctors willing to go into this field of medicine. And the recent story of Siobhan Reynolds is a frightening indicator of how dangerous it can be merely to defend an accused doctor.

As of now, no charges have been filed against Rotchford and little else is known about why his clinic was raided. My understanding of Medicaid fraud implies that they believe that Rotchford was writing improper prescriptions that were then charged to Medicaid. Someone with some more knowledge of that charge can perhaps let me know if it could possibly mean something else. In the meantime, though, it doesn’t look like we’ll get to see anything related to the search warrant until March.

The difficulty in this issue comes from the balance we need to strike between the treatment of pain and the threat of addiction. Our federal government’s approach to this delicate topic hasn’t been very balanced. Keeping addictive pharmaceuticals under wraps is their only mandate, so there’s little consideration to chronic pain patients who suffer from the downstream effects of that mission.

This imbalance briefly came under scrutiny in December when Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin placed a hold on the nomination of Michele Leonhart to run the DEA. Kohl thought that the restrictions being imposed by the DEA on nursing home personnel were preventing adequate pain management. He lifted the hold after getting assurances from the Department of Justice that they’d work to rewrite the rules.

Reading through the comments on the Port Townsend-based articled I’ve linked, there are strong and conflicting opinions on Rotchford and his clinic, some positive, some negative. It’s not clear yet what’s going on here, but based on the history of the DEA’s conflict with pain doctors, we shouldn’t be surprised to see Rotchford targeted, nor should we be surprised if it turns out that he’s being targeted unfairly.

Anybody expecting bold gestures or a call for shared sacrifice from our state’s civic “leaders” should think again, at least when it comes to funding higher education:

A task force charged with finding stable money to pay for higher education in Washington state has some ideas it wants the Legislature to consider.

At the top of its list announced Monday: Find someone other than state government to pay the bill.

That’s right, the last thing the panel, chaired by Microsoft executive Brad Smith, seems to want to propose is that we should adequately fund our state college and university system by raising adequate tax revenues. Instead, they suggest the state hike tuition, and then raise a new scholarship fund via donations from individuals and corporations.

Uh-huh. I myself have long advocated that the state consider moving to a high-tuition/high-financial-aid model in order to more efficiently target state subsidies at a time of tight budgets, but I’ve become increasingly concerned that we’re on the verge of embracing the former without implementing the latter. And the apparent reluctance of this panel to consider taxes as a legitimate revenue source, well, it only adds to my unease.

Other bold proposals include saving money, by doing more with less:

— Eliminate underused majors and courses.

— Offer more online classes, particularly for large introductory courses.

— Create three-year bachelor degree programs.

— Limit state support for students taking credits beyond what they need to earn a degree.

— Test students on prior learning experiences and give them credit.

— Recognize college work done during high school.

Do any of these six proposals actually make the educational experience at our state colleges and universities any better? No. Of course not. They make it cheaper… and in every sense of the word.

I haven’t yet read the task force’s report, so I don’t mean to entirely dismiss it out of hand, but I’m disappointed by what appears to be a relentlessly free market approach to the problems at hand. Soviet-style controlled economies ultimately failed; I understand that. But there must be something in between that, and pinning the educational aspirations of the children of the working and middle class on the voluntary generosity of wealthy individuals and corporations, right?

Of course there is, and I’m guessing it looks something like the taxpayer funded state college and university system upon which much of the economic gains of the past half century were built.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been posting a bit about budget priorities, pointing out that the decisions we make in Olympia in regard to both taxing and spending, reflect our priorities as a state.

For example, if lawmakers choose to cut yet another couple billion dollars from K-12 education while refusing to even consider the repeal of nonproductive, special interest tax exemptions, well, that reflects our priorities. If the state continues to slash funding and raise tuition at our community colleges and four-year universities at the same time businesses claim they can’t find enough qualified workers in the midst of near record-high unemployment, well, that reflects our priorities too.

And of course, the fact that our state and local governments have steadily shrunk themselves over the past couple decades both as a percentage of the total economy and in the number of FTEs compared to population, that sure as hell reflects our priorities, as does the fact that nationwide, Washington now ranks 45th in spending on K-12 education, but 14th in spending on corrections.

But unfortunately, when I write about stuff like this, I’m mostly ignored. Oh, call out the Seattle Times editorial board for licking Rob McKenna’s balls, and that might earn me a link from some self-anointed arbiter of journalistic integrity, but spend a little time and effort exploring the conventional “government must learn to live within its means” narrative, and refuting it with actual, you know, numbers, well that just elicits a collective yawn from our political press corps. I guess, because, I’m just some foul-mouthed local blogger (as opposed to a real journalist like Joni Balter), so you can just ignore my math, even when it’s lifted directly from the OFM. And… I sometimes use the word “fuck.”

Well, okay then… if you won’t pay attention to little ol’ me, perhaps you’ll listen to State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, a trained economist, who on the Senate Dems blog writes about how we pride ourselves on being one of the top states in the nation in terms of quality of life, but how we’re increasingly at the bottom of the pack in terms of our willingness to pay for it:

In Washington, we want to be among the top quarter of states in public services, but we’re in the lower-half in amount paid in state and local taxes. In fact, we’re lagging far behind the same mid-West states like North Dakota and Minnesota that Lake Wobegon is meant to poke fun at.

We may laugh at the gap between what people from Lake Wobegon think of themselves and reality, but if Washington levied the same amount of state and local taxes per $1000 of personal income that North Dakota levies – North Dakota –  we’d have 29 percent more revenue than we have today. That’s more than $9 billion, which would more than cover our current revenue shortfall, and then some…

In Washington, we have a bigger Lake Wobegon gap than Lake Wobegon does. We’re in the third year of significant recessionary impacts on our state budget. And for the third year in a row, we hear loud talk about making Washington live within its means by cutting state spending to match diminished revenues.

The truth is, state spending compared to personal income has been declining for a decade. And all this talk about “living within our means” masks another important truth: We can’t keep cutting spending without downgrading the public services mentioned above. And if we keep downgrading these same services, we can’t expect to maintain our quality of life, much less improve it.

Both Sen. Brown and I are making the same basic assertion, and we’re making it based not on ideology, but on math. We cannot continue to shrink government, the services it provides and the human and infrastructure investments it makes, while continuing to maintain the quality of life Washingtonians have come to expect.

Republicans and their ball-lickers on the editorial boards would have you believe that we have no choice but to make do with tax revenues that continue to fall even as the economy recovers, but the reality is, thanks in part to the public investment of prior generations, we are a wealthy state that can afford to do more… particularly the wealthiest amongst us. Whether we choose to, well, that reflects our priorities.

I’m watching the Seahawk’s game, and I’m wondering… why the hell would anybody patronize one of those bars in the Miller Lite commercials with those bitchy, emasculating, female bartenders?

As for the game itself, I’d much prefer my Eagles play either one of these teams than the Green Bay Packers.

UPDATE:
Seahawks win! And get to host the Saints next week. It would be fun to see the the Seahawks face the Eagles, but that would require the former getting past the Saints and the Falcons, and the latter getting past the Packers and the Bears. Not a likely scenario.

Last week’s contest was won by John McKay. The correct location was the building in Panama City, Florida where a gunman fired at members of the local school board.

Here’s the week’s, just a random location. Good luck!

Deuteronomy 23:12-14
Set up a place outside the camp to be used as a toilet area. And make sure that you have a small shovel in your equipment. When you go out to the toilet area, use the shovel to dig a hole. Then, after you relieve yourself, bury the waste in the hole. You must keep your camp clean of filthy and disgusting things. The LORD is always present in your camp, ready to rescue you and give you victory over your enemies. But if he sees something disgusting in your camp, he may turn around and leave.

Discuss.

This year I resolve to write a shit-ton of posts, have a better election, and, alas, help my daughter grow another year closer toward adulthood.