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Way to go Muni League!

High expenses and an outmoded service strategy are hindering King County Metro Transit, asserts a report issued today.

The findings are meant to provoke public debate, as County Council members try to pull Metro from a deep budget hole to prevent cuts in future bus rapid-transit service they promised to voters.

More:

The report urged Metro to scrap its policy that extends 40 percent of new service to the Eastside, 40 percent to the south county and 20 percent to Seattle and Shoreline. The policy was meant to assure suburban taxpayers ample service, but Muni League chairman Brad Meacham calls it “pretty outdated.” Buses should be deployed based on where people travel, the report says.

The 40/40/20 split is an absurd political agreement. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s got nothing to do with running Metro in an efficient way and everything to do with exporting transit dollars from the city to the ‘burbs. If folks in Covington or Duvall or Federal Way want an extra slice of the pie, they should tax themselves to get it.

Nope, Seattle Times Publisher Frank Blethen doesn’t do yoga.  How else to explain this editorial?

YOGA studios ought to be subject to the retail sales tax imposed on all physical-fitness services.

[…] Personal services are a growing segment of the economy, growing much faster than other types of retail trade. Yoga businesses have been in a catchall of services that include motivational speakers. It is time to quantify them and put them in the proper tax code.

So… um… if the sales tax were to be extended to yoga studios, how would this not be one of those dreaded tax increase thingies that the Times so resolutely opposes?

Of course, it would be a tax increase, and an absolutely reasonable one.  As even the Times points out, personal services are becoming an ever larger portion of our post-industrial economy, while retail trade proportionally shrinks.  For that matter, business services (accounting, legal, consulting, etc.) are growing much faster than retail as well.

The result is that our sales tax—WA state government’s largest revenue source—is levied on an ever smaller portion of our economy, year over year, creating a long-term structural deficit that simply cannot keep pace with either economic growth or the lockstep growth in demand for public services.

So in a state that insists on remaining one of the few in the nation to resist an income tax, it’s not just yoga studios to which the sales tax needs to be extended, but most other personal and business services as well.  And if the thought of that ties Frank up in knots, I know a yoga instructor who can help.

UPDATE:
As long as Frank’s paper is lobbying to extend the sales tax to other businesses, we might want to consider eliminating the current sales tax exemption on newspapers.  I’m just sayin’…

Itchy and Scratchy are breaking up at the end of the year.

I doubt anyone can know how much it might help, but the desperation apparent in this move should be obvious. From Bloomberg:

The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve will unveil as soon as today a lending program to shore up the consumer-finance market, using money from the government’s $700 billion rescue, two people familiar with the effort said.

The Treasury and the Fed will help fund new loans packaged into securities for sale to investors, the people said. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who scheduled a press conference for 10 a.m. New York time, said two weeks ago that he wants to spur lending for automobile purchases and college education while also reducing the cost of credit-card debt.

If we really need something like a half trillion dollar (or more) in stimulus spending per year, as learned economists seem to be suggesting everywhere, taking some of the leftover $700 billion and using it to provide cheap loans sounds pretty much like a Band-Aid. Consumer confidence is completely shattered. Hard to see how it improves auto sales much. Maybe people pay off some credit cards and take some classes.

But, it is something. The Fed can’t lower interest rates to any effect, so what the heck.

A while back, I was showing Will the Birds Eye Views of Detroit to show just how run-down that city has become. Large swaths of the city are empty now, blocks and blocks of empty and abandoned lots. The picture below is just one area where there was once a bustling neighborhood, but is now desolate.

Via Obsidian Wings, I found these two posts from Sweet Juniper about what happened to that school in the picture, which was amazingly in operation until 2007.

While we’re on the subject of education (and Seattle Times editorials), here’s another of the Times’ line items which I found curious:

• $926 million — Cancel the Initiative 728 money, or most of it. Officially this is for class-size reduction in the public schools, but the schools have folded it into everyday operations. Cutting I-728 money was done in 2003, when the budget was in a crisis, and has to be done again. That is the danger of budgeting by initiative.

“That is the danger of budgeting by intiative.” Cutting taxes by initiative, apparently, the Times has no problem with that, but spending money, well that’s a no-no… despite the fact that taxing and spending are both part of the budget process.  But again, that’s not my concern for the moment.

No, I just wanted to point out that a $926 million cut comes to over $900 per K-12 student over the course of the biennium, or roughly $450 per student per year.  For a typical elementary school with about 400 kids, that’s about $180,000 out of the annual budget.  How many teachers will need to be cut?  Do they increase class size for all the kids, or do they eliminate art or music or gym or reading tutors… assuming they have any of these left to cut?

And don’t think local school districts can make up these cuts by raising local levies.  In fact, some districts may have to reduce their local levies in response, as state law limits the amount of money raised from local levies to a fixed percentage of the district’s total state and federal funding.

The Times argues that this money was cut before and “has to be done again,” because raising taxes—any taxes—simply isn’t an option.  No doubt tough choices have to be made to respond to these tough economic times, but raising taxes is an awfully tough choice too, and it just doesn’t make sense to automatically eliminate one half of the budget equation when something as important as our children’s education is at risk.

Yesterday the Seattle Times editorial board argued that the Governor and the Legislature should balance the state budget without raising any taxes.  They don’t explain why we shouldn’t raise any taxes, it’s just kinda a given behind all their editorials, which they apparently don’t feel they have to explain.  But that’s not my concern for the moment.

Instead I want to briefly talk about how we fund higher education in Washington state, spurred on by this line item from the Times’ list of possible cuts:

• $600 million — Cut seats in state universities and community colleges. Cut some tuition waivers. Offset some cuts with increased tuition.

Of course, with unemployment rising, we’re already seeing a spike in demand, particularly at our state’s community colleges, as students of all ages seek the training and retraining necessary to compete for jobs in our rapidly changing economy, so the last thing you want to do during an economic downturn is to cut seats and raise tuition, thus denying unemployed and underemployed workers the opportunity to better their job prospects.  But then, education comprises by far the largest chunk of our state budget, so it’s hard to imagine pulling education cuts entirely off the table.

There is another solution though, that I’ve written about before, that could absorb some of these cuts in the short term, while allowing for an expansion of seats in the future, without costing taxpayers a dime:  dramatically raise tuition near market rates, while broadly expanding our state’s financial aid system.

Essentially, under our current system, every college student in the state is heavily subsidized, whether they need the subsidy or not.  This broad, per student subsidy lowers tuition rates for all, but still leaves college unaffordable for many potential applicants.  But perhaps worse, it strains our college and university system’s resources, leaving it unable to expand the number of seats available to meet existing demand.

But if we were to shift a larger portion of the state subsidy toward financial aid, while allowing tuition rates to rise, those students who can afford to pay the full cost of their education will do so, leaving more state resources to fund the education of those students who cannot.

When we talk about budget cuts, in education or elsewhere, we are talking about rationing.  Right now, with our broad, per student subsidy, we ration access to education.  Under a high tuition/high financial aid model we can maintain and expand access to higher education while rationing the state subsidy.

Hiking tuition is never popular, but then nothing about the upcoming budget is going to be popular.  So why not take advantage of this crisis to put higher education funding on a solid footing for the future?

I felt a little like Rip Van Winkle this morning, watching President-elect Barack Obama’s news conference, as he not only appeared awfully damn presidential, he pretty much sounded like he was already president.

Has anybody ever seen a cabinet take form this quickly, or a presidential administration seize control of the public and policy debate so soon after an election?  I suppose extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, but the fact the transition team has been able to act this swiftly is encouraging in itself.

Pam Roach blogs.  Who knew?

With Obama comes the changing of the guard.

The word is that democrat Congressman Adam Smith (WA-9) will be stepping up to a spot in the Obama administration. That leaves his congressional seat up for grabs. But, no grabs here.

State Senator Tracy Eide (D-Federal Way) may just have a lock on Adam Smith’s seat. Republicans will have to fight for it after Eide gets the appointment.

Huh.  For a woman who wants to run for King County Elections Director, you’d think she might want to avoid showing off her total ignorance of, you know, elections.  Vacant house seats aren’t filled by appointment; they’re filled by special election.  It says so in the Constitution.

The magical mystical free market, also known as taxpayers, should stimulate house builders to the tune of $250 billion. Or so sayeth the national house builders.

Or Else! Because nothing causes plummeting prices to stabilize faster than an even greater oversupply.

For $250 billion we could probably build a giant domed mini-world, kind of like The Truman Show, and populate it with auto executives, house building executives, financial sector criminals and castoffs from the Cato Institute, creating a nice little Bubble Land where they can build and build and build while celebrating how great laissez-faire capitalism is. They can create innovative derivative securities to sell one another while smirking about the stupid liberals to their heart’s content.

It’ll be a completely false and fantastic world, but not much different from the one they currently inhabit.

… Neither particularly likes homework.

The Young Turks discuss the tie between the Bengals and Eagles last week and how bizarre it was that Donovan McNabb was unaware that there are ties in the NFL:

Jason Whitlock tries to defend McNabb here, but I just can’t. I’m as big a Donovan McNabb fan as anyone, but that was a shockingly dumb admission – not just that he didn’t know there were ties, but to be so unembarrassed by that lack of knowledge that he admitted it on camera. How do you play in a professional sports league for so long and not know something like that? Has he never looked at the standings of the league and seen the ‘T’ next to the ‘W’ and ‘L’?

If it wasn’t for this, it would be the dumbest thing I’ve heard all season.

What are you doing to help the economy this weekend? I purchased a 472-pack of toilet tissue, meaning the unit price per square is .00002 cents. If you only use one ply, it’s half that! But I will not spare a square, no matter what.

Meanwhile, go read Robert Reich if you wish. Sounds like some actual grownups may be in charge come Jan. 20.

Not to belabor Goldy’s earlier point, but the stupid idea that the netroots will come unglued when competent people take charge is, well, stupid. We’ll express differences of opinion at times but instead of trying to get brain dead people to come back to life via an act of Congress, we’ll simply state our case and work to elect people who we think will do a good job. It’s called democracy.

Deal, old media and Old Democrats. The netroots isn’t any one thing, it isn’t any one person and it sure in the hell ain’t going away.

Please list in comments how many bits of soap you can squeeze together to make new bits of soap, and how one might take one cranberry and make it multiply a hundred times before Thanksgiving to make “Magical Paulson Cranberry Sauce.”

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa, who just barely beat out Toby Nixon. The correct answer was Southport, Queensland, Australia.

Here’s this week’s contest. I think you’ll have to be quick to win this one…good luck!

A headline from today’s NY Post:  “Barack Obama doesn’t fear the enraged, impotent Netroots.”

Yeah, well, whatever.

If that’s the sort of self-soothing that makes the old media and political establishment feel better about their own declining fortunes, they’re free to hide their heads in that particular hole, but personally, I don’t feel all that enraged or impotent.  In fact, I’m still a bit amazed at how far we have come in such a short amount of time… and daunted by how far we have yet to go.

This movement we’re part of will take a decade or two to reach full fruition, and we are a lot more patient and pragmatic than most outside observers give us credit for.