HorsesAss.Org

State Rep. Larry Seaquist (D-Gig Harbor) plans to introduce legislation this coming session, aimed at raising an additional $2 billion a year in education funding by eliminating nonproductive tax preferences exemptions loopholes.

“In my opinion, the cuts on eduction would do disproportionate harm,” Seaquist said.

Rep. Seaquist proposes creating a Commission on Tax Exemptions, an idea I wholeheartedly endorse, but I’d argue that legislators should go even further. The pending cuts in education and healthcare represent an immediate crisis, and thus require immediate action, and so I urge the Legislature to jump start the process by finding the first billion dollars of exemptions on their own, and putting their repeal on the November ballot.

Let voters decide for themselves what they value more: adequately funding K-12 education, or providing special interest tax exemptions to, say, gold bullion dealers and newspaper publishers?

A former Navy captain and commander of the USS Iowa, Rep. Seaquist presumably knows a thing or two about leadership. His colleagues in Olympia would do well to follow his lead on this issue.

Of course, the phrase the Seattle Times’ headline writers are searching for is “Planes, trains and automobiles,” but I guess they just couldn’t resist their pro-car/anti-rail bias, explaining why they left out the latter, while shifting the primary emphasis to “trains.” Yup, that was the top headline on the Times’ home page this morning, even though the article itself mostly focused on delays at airports, while making only a passing reference to yesterday’s story about the shorted-out surface tracks near JFK.

And not worthy of a prominent headline on the Times’ home page this morning…? The news that 2010 tragically saw a 39% jump in police fatalities, to 160 nationwide. The number one cause of death: traffic accidents.

Of course the big story today—big enough to garner a link on the front page of the Seattle Times’ home page—is the startling news that New York City subway trains were stalled for hours in snow drifts:

Passengers have been stuck for several hours on two New York City subway trains stalled in snow drifts near Kennedy Airport.

NYC Transit spokesman Charles Seaton says that snow drifts and ice on the third rail have stalled trains at two stops in Queens, north and south of Kennedy Airport.

So how exactly does a “subway” train get caught in a snow drift? Of course, it doesn’t. The trains run on the surface by the time they get to JFK. And of course, the “third rail” the article mentions is the one that provides power, so our own light rail system with it’s overhead power supply would not stall for the same reasons.

Still, no doubt the Times sought to front-page this tidbit as a warning to those of us here who would champion light rail. Which of course, completely misses the larger picture of how the blizzard is really effecting transportation in NYC:

Christopher Mullen tells NY1 cable TV that he took the subway after he couldn’t get a car service or taxi out of Kennedy on Sunday night.

I’ve lived in NYC during snowstorms, and I can tell you that when the surface streets shut down, the subway is the one part of the transportation system that pretty much runs like normal. But you wouldn’t know that from reading the Seattle Times.

Speaking of change, the internets are abuzz with reports that competitors like RIM and Microsoft thought Apple was literally lying when it unveiled the iPhone back in January of 2007, believing that it was impossible to build a device like that with a usable battery life.

The iPhone “couldn’t do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life,” Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. “Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it.”

Friends who were Microsoft employees at the time were also said to have had a similar reaction.

Ultimately, it wasn’t a lack of ability or resources that held RIM, Microsoft and the others back, giving Apple its opportunity to seize the smartphone market. It was a lack of imagination.

Something our governor and legislators should keep in mind as they head into this very bleak legislative session.

The sentiments expressed in the Seattle Times’ pointless editorial about the new penny design and the old one it replaces, pretty much sums up my sentiment toward our new, electronic media transcending the old, print-based stuff:

In the meantime, listen for the complaints, and then know how beloved the interloping new coin will be to future generations. Change happens.

Yup. Change happens. Time to stop subsidizing the old dying dailies with with special interest tax breaks, and move on.

Last week’s contest was won by ‘Siberian dog’. It was College Place, WA, near Walla Walla.

This week’s is related to a news item from December, good luck!

Leviticus 15:19-20
When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening. Anything she lies on during her period will be unclean, and anything she sits on will be unclean.

Discuss.

To be clear, the Republicans in Congress were willing to shut down the government unless we extended tax cuts to billionaires, even at the cost of $900 billion in additional national debt, but the home mortgage interest deduction…? Well, that they’re not sure our nation can afford.

Merry Republican Christmas.

How is this anything other than a complete contradiction?

Frank Abe, spokesman for Constantine, said the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign has many outlets for exercising free speech, including the purchase of ad space elsewhere.

“It’s been claimed the decision to rescind acceptance of the ad is due to public pressure,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It is not.”

Metro’s policies restrict material that can lead to harm or disrupt public transit, Abe said. “This proposed ad did not originally fit that definition, but now falls within it because of the global firestorm over the ad.”

Our freedom of speech should never conditional upon whether it makes people angry or uncomfortable. That’s why capitulations over a cartoonist’s ability to draw Muhammad are cowardly, and why Metro’s decision not to display these ads is just as cowardly.

Do I even need to explain this one? This chart represents our state’s “welfare” rolls. ‘Nuff said.

I’m not necessarily opposed to some kind of pension reform this legislative session; truth is, I haven’t really studied the issue closely enough to have formed an educated opinion one way or the other. But I do have an opinion on the rhetoric used by the Seattle Times editorial board to close their argument in favor of reform, an opinion I can pretty much sum up in two words: fuck you.

State employee benefits come out of the pockets of the average citizen. That person does not have a plan with annual pension increases and has no chance of ever having such a thing. The average citizen will support Gregoire’s proposal.

The Times, who constantly calls for bipartisanship, and who rails against class warfare (in the form of raising taxes on the wealthy) once again promotes its economic race toward the bottom by attempting to turn working people against each other, rather than against the corporate and political elites who have had their boots on the throats of the middle class for most of the past few decades. It is the same argument the editors use in favor of slashing the wages and benefits of public employees—you don’t get it, so why should they?—a mean-spirited appeal to society’s lesser angels, and the antithesis of the guiding principles of the labor movement that led to astonishing gains in workplace conditions, personal income and standard of living for nearly all Americans throughout the first three quarters of the twentieth century.

To be clear, what the Times calls “pay increases for beneficiaries” is nothing more than cost of living increases of the kind enjoyed by Social Security recipients. And no doubt when the Times eventually argues for eliminating that too, they will make a similar argument to the younger workers paying into the system to support the current retirees: “You won’t collect this benefit,” the editors will argue, “so why should they?”

Until eventually, nobody has much of anything, but for the lucky few who remain at the top.

– Goldy beat me to it on the Pat Robertson news. It’s hard to understand how Robertson could have a more enlightened position on this than our state legislature, who’ve failed for several years in a row to decriminalize marijuana.

– Speaking of state marijuana laws, I was putting together a state-by-state progress report when I noticed that Russ Belville has already put together this handy chart on state medical marijuana laws. More info and charts from Russ here.

– Here in Washington, Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles has released a draft of her medical marijuana bill that would finally legalize dispensaries and provide arrest protection for patients. The bill can be read here.

– The ACLU of Washington continues to fight for a medical marijuana patient who was fired from her job solely for failing a pre-employment screening, even though she didn’t use her medicine at work and was fully able to do her job.

– Dominic Holden writes about the medical marijuana industry in King County that’s now starting to come out of the shadows.

– If any of you have driven on I-5 north of Tacoma, you’ve probably seen this billboard, which Sensible Washington intends to have up all year as they once again push to have an initiative on the November ballot.

I wasn’t going to post this particular graph as it should be pretty damn obvious from the previous post that full-time equivalent (FTE) state employees couldn’t possibly be growing out of whack, what with state government steadily shrinking as a percentage of the economy, and employee compensation representing the largest chunk of government outlays. But the question was raised in the previous thread, along with the word “bloated,” so, well, here it is.

Again, I know the Republicans and their surrogates in the media keep pounding home the point that state and local government spending is out of control, but that doesn’t make it true.

Yesterday I posted a couple graphs showing how Washington state has chosen to devote an increasingly larger portion of our economy toward imprisoning our citizens, at the same time we’re devoting an ever smaller portion toward educating them. I leave it to you to judge the wisdom of such spending priorities.

Today’s graph is also about priorities, in that it shows that when push comes to shove over the past fifteen years, our lawmakers have consistently chosen to keep taxes low. Indeed, between 1994 and 2001 WA’s rank in state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income dropped from 11th nationwide to 32nd. And WA has remained below the national average since 2000; it stood at 30th in 2008.

It is true that revenues briefly rebounded between 2003 and 2007, but this was not due to legislative action. Rather, easy consumer credit and a booming housing market spurred consumer spending, resulting in a surge in taxes relative to personal income in this heavily sales tax dependent state. But even this bump in revenue—and subsequent bump in spending, largely to fund the class size and teachers pay initiatives—left both spending and revenue near the bottom end of the fifteen year average.

Republicans and their surrogates on the editorial boards insist that our current budget crisis is the result of profligate government spending, but this simply isn’t true. With consumer spending having collapsed in advance of incomes, and recovering at a much slower pace, combined state and local government in the next biennium will consume a smaller portion of our state economy than at any time in the past three decades, and a substantially smaller portion than it did just fifteen years ago.

So as the Governor and the Legislature prepare to make all those tough budget choices—largely consisting of slashing spending on education and health care—remember… this is their choice. There are two sides to a budget, revenue and spending, and how we balance the two depends on our priorities.

Washington has chosen to become and remain a low tax state, come hell or high water, and with all the negative impact this lack of public investment will bring on future economic growth… not to mention the inevitable immediate suffering of the poor, the sick and the young.

So, what do Lee and the Rev. Pat Robertson have in common? They both oppose the criminalization of marijuana:

“I’m not exactly for the use of drugs, don’t get me wrong, but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, that kinda thing it’s just, it’s costing us a fortune and it’s ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths and come out as hardened criminals. That’s not a good thing.”

I don’t know if Robertson’s support helps or hurts the cause with rational people, but rational people aren’t generally writing these laws, so I’d call this development a net plus.