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As we embark on what is likely to be a vicious political war over Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement, I think it important to take a quick a look at the issue that will be at the heart of much of the vitriol coming from both the right and the left: abortion. There is no question that President Bush is being pressured by his patrons in the religious right to appoint a justice who will vote to reverse Roe v. Wade, and so it is instructive to explore the likely, practical impact on American women should their right to choose be denied or narrowly restricted.

Writing in The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy in May of 2003 (“Envisioning Life Without Roe: Lessons Without Borders“), Susan A. Cohen did exactly that, compiling historical data on abortions and maternal mortality for the pre- and post-Roe United States, as well as that for a number of nations with either liberal or restrictive abortion laws. The conclusion is clear:

The American pre-Roe experience, just as that in the developing world today, demonstrates quite clearly that liberal abortion laws do not cause abortion, unintended pregnancy does. Indeed, some of the world’s lowest abortion rates may be found in countries with the most liberal abortion laws, where services are easily available and even subsidized; by contrast, high abortion rates (and, generally, high maternal mortality rates as well) may be observed in countries where the procedure is severely restricted.

As Cohen points out, illegal abortion was quite common in the US prior to the 1973 Roe decision, with as many as 800,000 procedures a year estimated to have taken place during the 1950s and 1960s. While affluent women could travel within the US or overseas to seek safe, legal abortions, poor women, mostly young and minority, often suffered severe health consequences. Even after the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s dramatically reduced abortion-related maternal deaths, maternal mortality rates remained high compared to current levels.

Before and after comparisons like that in the US can be repeated country by country, but perhaps the most striking example is that of Romania, where abortion was legalized in 1957, outlawed in 1966, and legalized again after Ceaucescu’s fall in 1990.

When abortion was against the law in Romania, from
1966 to 1989, abortion-related deaths soared.

Romania’s abortion-related death rate soared after abortion was outlawed in 1966, and plummeted after it was relegalized in 1990. The lesson in Romania and elsewhere is that women will seek abortions whether they are legal or not; restricting access merely makes them less safe. According to the World Health Organization, unsafe abortions are responsible for about 13% of the half million annual deaths worldwide from pregnancy-related causes… in the most restrictive nations of Latin America, the rate is as high as 21%.

Indeed, not only do restrictive abortion laws uniformly increase maternal mortality rates in developed and developing countries alike, some of the nations with the most restrictive abortion laws also have some of the highest abortion rates.

ABORTION LAWS, RATES AND MATERNAL MORTALITY
Country	Abortion rate per 1,000 women, 15-44	Maternal Deaths per 100,000 live births
Where abortion is Broadly Permitted
Australia	22	6
England/Wales	16	10
Finland	10	6
Netherlands	7	10
United States	21	12
Where Abortion is Severely Restricted
Brazil	38	260
Chile	45	33
Colombia	34	120
Dominican Republic	44	110
Mexico	23	65
Peru	52	240
Note: Most recent data available. Sources: Abortion data — AGI, Sharing Responsibility, Appendix Table 4, p. 54; Finer LB and Henshaw SK, Abortion incidence and services in the United States in 2000, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 2003, 35(1):6-15. Maternal mortality rates — United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), The World’s Women 2000: Trends and Statistics, New York: UNSD, 2000/updated 2002.

While the consequences of having an abortion depend on whether it is safe and legal, the cause is universal: unplanned pregnancies. 28% of the 210 million annual pregnancies worldwide are unplanned, and 22% end in abortion. Reducing unwanted pregnancies through wider and more effective use of contraception is the only effective means of reducing abortion rates… making our abortion laws more restrictive will only make abortion less safe.

In the three decades since Roe became law, Americans have forgotten their history and grown complacent about the very real human costs of illegal abortions, allowing the debate to increasingly focus on moral and religious beliefs rather than the public health issue that abortion really is. Abortion foes have successfully struck an emotional chord by illustrating their arguments with images of the undeniable horror of dead and mangled fetuses. Meanwhile, pro-Choice forces have tended to make a more intellectual appeal, arguing a vague and unwritten constitutional right to privacy.

But if Roe is overturned and Congress or the States narrowly restrict access to legal abortion, the public health calamity will be very real and very bloody. Thousands of young women will die of sepsis from botched, back-alley abortions. That is the undeniable conclusion from studying the impact of abortion laws at home and abroad. And that is the emotional, rhetorical appeal supporters of Roe must make if we are to educate our fellow Americans as to what is really at stake.

It is time to fight horror with horror.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

I will be there, and I invite you all to join me for a beer or two.

Can Rove spin himself out of trouble? (“Photo” courtesy Democratic Underground)

When you’re dealing with a spinmeister like Karl Rove, reading between the lines is the only place you’ll find any useful information. And that’s exactly what Lawrence O’Donnell does in his latest Plame/Rove update on The Huffington Post.

Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, finally admitted that his client did indeed talk to Time Magazine’s Matt Cooper, prior to Robert Novak blowing Valerie Plame’s cover. But O’Donnell focuses on the words with which Luskin chose to defend Rove’s actions.

Luskin then launched what sounds like an I-did-not-inhale defense. He told Newsweek that his client “never knowingly disclosed classified information.” Knowingly. That is the most important word Luskin said in what has now become his public version of the Rove defense.

Not coincidentally, the word ‘knowing’ is the most important word in the controlling statute ( U.S. Code: Title 50: Section 421). To violate the law, Rove had to tell Cooper about a covert agent ” knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States.”

So, Rove’s defense now hangs on one word

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Seattle Monorail Project Board Chair Tom Weeks, and Executive Director Joel Horn, have resigned:

TO: Seattle Monorail Project Board of Directors
FROM: Tom Weeks and Joel Horn
DATE: July 4, 2005

Effective immediately, we are stepping down from our positions as Chairman of the Board and Executive Director with the Seattle Monorail Project.

Two weeks ago today, Seattle Monorail Project staff delivered to the Board a fixed-price contract to build the 14-mile Green Line along the voter-approved route from Ballard through Downtown to West Seattle. The proposed agreement to design, build, operate and maintain the Monorail is within voter-approved funding limits.

The agreement, however, was overshadowed by the interest costs of the finance plan. Though we tried to explain the complex, long-term financing proposal, and called for apples-to-apples comparisons with other major regional transportation projects, the Board and the people of Seattle have made it clear that the proposed financing plan will not work and that a better plan must be developed.

We take full responsibility for the current situation and feel that it is in the best interest of the Project to step down.

I’m a pretty cynical guy, and part of my role as a political blogger is to be pretty damn cynical. But I have to say I’ve been somewhat disturbed by the way some journalists, pundits, talk-radio hosts and other bloggers have cynically personalized their attacks on the Monorail by attacking the SMP staff and board.

There was no scandal, no corruption, and no grand deception. By all accounts the SMP staff and board are stand-up citizens, who have worked hard to achieve an ambitious vision. Yes, they have failed… but there is no shame in that.

From the beginning Joel Horn said that if they could not deliver on the promises made to voters, then they would not build the Monorail. Saddled with a revenue source that fell way short of projections, it has proven impossible to propose an acceptable financing plan to build the promised system. The SMP and their allies on the Seattle City Council could have arrogantly pressed on with constructing the Monorail despite public opposition to a half-century or more of car tabs. That they have responded to public criticism by pausing the project, and potentially killing it, should be an opportunity not to personally attack SMP board members and staff, but rather to celebrate a process that works.

By stepping down, Horn not only proves himself a man of word, but he also demonstrates his continued dedication to the vision.

The Monorail began as a grass-roots effort to provide Seattle with an environmentally sustainable mass transit system that would get people out of their cars. The public embraced the Monorail. The citizens of Seattle voted four times to support it. People still want the Monorail, but they want a better financing plan to pay for it.

We want what’s best for Seattle and we firmly believe that we owe it to our children, our grandchildren and the environment to build the Monorail

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On this, the United States’ 229th birthday, I would like to honor the document that has made our nation the greatest economic, military and political power in the history of man, by proposing the following Constitutional amendment:

Neither Congress nor the States shall propose any Constitutional amendment that desecrates the Constitution of the United States by proposing a dumb-fuck, stupid-ass Constitutional amendment that runs contrary to the inviolable principles embodied in the Bill of Rights.

I call this the “Constitution Desecration Amendment.”

I know the wording may still be a little rough around the edges, so any suggested tweaking will be duly considered. In the meanwhile, I’m taking the rest of the day off to celebrate a nation so free, that I have the right to burn its flag… if I so choose.

It is great to be an American.

Nobody uses pop culture as a springboard for political analysis quite like the New York Times’ Frank Rich. In today’s column, Rich compares President Bush’s Fort Bragg speech unfavorably to Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds.” Both were intended to whip up fear in their audience… but only Spielberg succeeds.

Both Mr. Bush’s critics and loyalists at times misunderstand where his failure leaves America now. The left frets too much that the public just doesn’t get it – that it is bamboozled by the administration and won’t see the light until it digests the Downing Street memo. But even if they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for John Kerry, most Americans do get it. A majority of the country view the Iraq war as “not worth it” and going badly. They intuitively sense that as USA Today calculated on Friday, there have been more U.S. military deaths (roughly a third more) in the year since Iraq got its sovereignty than in the year before. Last week an ABC News/Washington Post survey also found that a majority now believe that the administration “intentionally misled” us into a war – or, in the words of the Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration “fixed” the intelligence to gin up the mission.

Meanwhile, the war’s die-hard supporters, now in the minority, keep clinging to the hope that some speech or Rovian stunt or happy political development in the furtherance of democratic Iraqi self-government can turn public opinion around. Dream on. The most illuminating of all the recent poll numbers was released by the Pew Research Center on June 13: the number of Americans who say that “people they know are becoming less involved emotionally” with news of the war has risen from 26 percent in May 2004 to 44 percent now. Like the war or not, Americans who do not have a relative or neighbor in the fight are simply tuning Iraq out.

The president has no one to blame but himself. The color-coded terror alerts, the repeated John Ashcroft press conferences announcing imminent Armageddon during election season, the endless exploitation of 9/11 have all taken their numbing toll. Fear itself is the emotional card Mr. Bush chose to overplay, and when he plays it now, he is the boy who cried wolf. That’s why a film director engaging in utter fantasy can arouse more anxiety about a possible attack on America than our actual commander in chief hitting us with the supposed truth.

Rich outline’s Bush’s failures — both in rhetoric and in policy — and concludes that the Republicans could be facing a tough mid-term election.

Iraq may not be Vietnam, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the current war’s unpopularity now matches the Gallup findings during the Vietnam tipping point, the summer of 1968. As the prospect of midterm elections pumps more and more genuine fear into the hearts of Republicans up for re-election, it’s the Bush presidency, not the insurgency, that will be in its last throes. Is the commander in chief so isolated in his bubble that he does not realize this? G.W.B., phone home.

Read the whole thing.

Lawrence O’Donnell, who broke the news that Karl Rove was at least one source of the Valerie Plame leak, has posted an update on The Huffington Post, defending his allegations from comments by Rove’s attorney.

On Friday, I broke the story that the e-mails that Time turned over to the prosecutor that day reveal that Karl Rove is the source Matt Cooper is protecting. That provoked Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, to interrupt his holiday weekend to do a little defense work with Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times. On Saturday, Luskin decided to reveal that Rove did have at least one conversation with Cooper, but Luskin told the Times he would not “characterize the substance of the conversation.”

Luskin claimed that the prosecutor “asked us not to talk about what Karl has had to say.” This is highly unlikely. Prosecutors have absolutely no control over what witnesses say when they leave the grand jury room. Rove can tell us word-for-word what he said to the grand jury and would if he thought it would help him. And notice that Luskin just did reveal part of Rove’s grand jury testimony, the fact that he had a conversation with Cooper. Rove would not let me get one day of traction on this story if he could stop me. If what I have reported is not true, if Karl Rove is not Matt Cooper’s source, Rove could prove that instantly by telling us what he told the grand jury. Nothing prevents him from doing that, except a good lawyer who is trying to keep him out of jail.

It will be interesting to see if Rove can spin himself out of prison.

In an interview with the AP’s David Ammons, commercial real estate broker salesman Dino Rossi once again claims that he’s not bitter over his narrow loss in the governor’s race, and his monumental defeat in court.

The loss and frustrating appeal were painful, but he’s not bitter, he said.

“Probably the only ‘fair’ the Rossi family is going to get this year is the state fair at Puyallup,” he said with a laugh.

It took me a couple of takes before I got the, um… “joke.” Translation: “it’s not fair!” Gees… what a whiner.

In ending his futile contest, Rossi said that he would not appeal Judge Bridges decision, because he did not believe he could get a fair hearing from a “liberal” State Supreme court. He did not back down from this statement.

“Six of the nine justices are liberals — one used to work for Gregoire (in the Attorney General’s Office), so the likelihood of them actually overturning an outcome they liked would be slim to none.

“I don’t pull back” from any of his criticism.

That’s right… according to Rossi, “liberal” justices are simply incapable of basing their rulings on the law… they just decide cases based on who they want to win.

Asshole.

Trashing the integrity of our state’s highest court is not exactly the kind of positive leadership Rossi promised he would bring to the governor’s office. His comments are also very revealing about what he and his ilk believe the true role of the court should be.

“Obviously, it’s very disappointing, but to waste a bunch of time and energy being angry about something you can’t control doesn’t make any sense to me.”

And the thing he’s angry about not controlling… is the State Supreme Court. You see, Republicans expect their judges to always rule according to the party line, and so they expect the same from Democrats. That’s why there’s so much anger from the right at Justice Kennedy for staying true to his conservative, federalist principles rather than consistently siding with the RNC platform.

But the truth is, most justices base their rulings on the law, not their preferred outcome, as can be seen in the state Supremes’ recent decision in favor of the Seattle Times, despite their stated preference that Seattle remain a two-newspaper town.

Rossi didn’t appeal the election contest decision because there was nothing to appeal… Judge Bridges’ ruling was based on the evidence, not the law, and the Supremes almost never reject a lower court’s evidentiary findings. To blame his loss on a “liberal” Supreme Court is not only childish, it shows a lack of respect for the voters who put these justices on the bench.

Makes me think he’d have been just as poor a governor as he is a poor loser.

Last night on the McLaughlin Group, MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell said that information handed over to the grand jury by Time Magazine would show that Bush-brain Karl Rove was reporter Matt Cooper’s source in the Valerie Plame case:

“What we’re going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper’s e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury–the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is.

“I know I’m going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of…for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine’s going to do with the grand jury.”

If true, we’re looking at a possible perjury charge for a high-ranking White House official. The special prosecutor in the case has interviewed Rove, Bush, Cheney and others to testify before the grand jury.

Of course, this does not necessarily tell us that Rove was the original source for conservative columnist Robert Novak’s outing of Plame, a CIA official… or if it was, who gave Rove the information. Novak claimed it was a “high-ranking White House official” and all indications so far point towards Cheney’s office, or even the Vice President himself.

It may be that Cheney’s chief of state, “Scooter” Libby takes the fall, but depending on how this all plays out, perhaps Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement won’t be the only controversial confirmation hearing the Senate faces over the coming year.

(Thanks to reader Christine G for tipping me off in the open thread.)

UPDATE:
It looks like the finger is pointing at Rove, and the story is about to be blown wide open. Writing on the Huffington Post, Lawrence O’Donnell elaborates:

I revealed in yesterday’s taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine’s emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper’s source. I have known this for months but didn’t want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.

McLaughlin is seen in some markets on Friday night, so some websites have picked it up, including Drudge, but I don’t expect it to have much impact because McLaughlin is not considered a news show and it will be pre-empted in the big markets on Sunday because of tennis.

Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an ‘It’s Rove!’ story and will probably break it tomorrow.

And as Jeralyn Merritt points out on TalkLeft, the issue is no longer just about who the Plame leaker was… Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald has previously stated that he already knows the identity of Miller and Cooper’s source.

The investigation has moved from one involving the identity of the White House official to one involving perjury — i.e., a cover-up. The source may have been questioned in front of the grand jury and lied.

Knowing the identity of the source is not enough for a perjury conviction. There must be two witnesses to the perjurious statement. Telephone records would not be enough, because they only provide the number dialed, not the identity of the person speaking. Matthew Cooper’s and Judith Miller’s e-mails and notes may provide that corroboration.

The plot thickens.

And looking at some of the recent threads, this open thread is desperately needed. So use it.

And this is without the Downing Street Memo getting broad MSM coverage:

President Bush’s televised address to the nation produced no noticeable bounce in his approval numbers, with his job approval rating slipping a point from a week ago, to 43%, in the latest Zogby International poll. And, in a sign of continuing polarization, more than two-in-five voters (42%) say they would favor impeachment proceedings if it is found the President misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.

Here in the West, 52% of those surveyed supported impeachment.

Now all we need to do is seize control of Congress so that President Bush can get the justice he deserves for betraying the trust of the American people.

UPDATE:
And just to pre-empt some of the holier-than-thou righty whining I’m sure to get in the comment thread… if it’s okay to impeach a president for lying about a blowjob, why shouldn’t we be talking about impeaching a president for dragging us into a war on a lie?

Bush gets to appoint a Supreme Court justice:

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court and a key swing vote on issues such as abortion and the death penalty, said Friday she is retiring.

O’Connor has been the swing vote on many of the Court’s most contentious issues, not the least being abortion, and as such Bush has the opportunity to swing the court sharply to the right. If Bush lives up to his own character, expect an uncompromising nominee that will ignite a war in the Senate that could change the character of the institution for a generation. I cannot overstate my pessimism. Really… I think our national politics could descend into violence.

On a local note, I suppose Dino Rossi is going to have a tough time ducking the abortion issue in 2008 once Roe v. Wade is overturned and abortion is thrown back to the states.

[NWPT55]The process worked.

The Seattle P-I reports that the Seattle Monorail Project board has voted to reject the controversial financing plan, sending the project back to the drawing board, and likely requiring another public vote before any revised plan could be implemented.

An ad-hoc committee of the monorail board will try to determine how to salvage the project. Exactly what they would do is unclear, but officials said everything is on the table, including trying to come up with a new way to finance the monorail.

Mayor Greg Nickels said the board had “done the right thing.”

“Before the monorail can move forward, the board must ensure that the financial plan and technical design are sound and have the public’s full confidence. The committee’s decision to reject the most recent financing proposal takes us in that direction,” the mayor said in a statement.

You know what? The process worked.

The board should be commended for making a responsible, if painful decision, and the public should be encouraged that the SMP heard their concerns and reacted appropriately.

My guess is, however, that not all the commentary you read will be quite so magnanimous. There are essentially two kinds of Monorail critics: those of us who recognize the need for public transit systems like the Monorail, but demand that our tax dollars be spent more wisely… and those who are simply out for blood. As to the latter, on some other blog there is this guy who fancies himself a “shark”, and in his political feeding frenzy he’s calling for the state Legislature to take this as an opportunity to dissolve the Monorail agency.

If you’re a shark, then eat me.

There is a difference between liberals like me and the nattering naysayers on the other side. I believe that government by the people, for the people, of the people can make this world a better place. They don’t. Thus I see the the board’s decision as a bold example of good governance, while they see it merely as an opportunity for political gainsaying.

But there is no scandal, there is no outrage… there is merely a dedicated group of citizen activists who attempted to build a transit system from the ground up… and failed. To their credit, they recognized their failure, and have decided to step back and evaluate their options, despite the fact that common wisdom says such a move would be political suicide.

Four times the Monorail has been put before voters, and four times it has passed. Perhaps we will see a fifth vote, only this time with detailed plans in place and fixed-price contracts in hand. Or perhaps the board’s decision has killed the Monorail for good.

I voted against the Monorail because I simply did not think it was worth the money. But despite this latest setback, I’m kinda still hoping the SMP eventually proves me wrong.

[NWPT54]So where does Dino Rossi stand on the “No New Gas Tax” initiative?

I asked Kirby Wilbur that question this morning, because I believe it is at the heart of one of the more disturbing and dishonest rhetorical themes of the I-912 campaign. (You can listen to the clip here.) Long before Judge Bridges handed down his stinging rebuke of Rossi’s frivolous election contest law suit, both John and Kirby were busy harvesting anger over the disputed election in an effort to whip up public support for their initiative. Listen to the callers and comment threads on conservative talk radio and the right-wing blogs, and this theme is repeated again and again… that repealing the transportation package and the gas tax hike that pays for it is intended to “send a message” to Democrats in the Legislature and the Governor’s Mansion.

Problem is, this wasn’t simply a Democratic bill… its details were extensively negotiated with the Republican leadership, a number of whom personally voted for the bill, along with many of their caucus colleagues. This was a bill that simply could not pass without GOP support and complicity. Indeed, no less a vicious, partisan hack than GOPolitburo Chair Chris Vance himself defended the bill in an email reply to an angry rank-and-file Republican:

In this state, the gas tax is 100% dedicated to state highways. Many Republicans, therefore, have supported increased gas taxes on the theory that they are user fees and are needed to make crucial transportation improvements vital to our economy.

• The Transportation section of our platform does not include language opposing increased gas taxes.
• The Senate bill includes a performance audit of the DOT, which we strongly support.
• Roughly 1/3 of the Republican members of the Senate voted in favor of this bill.
• In 2002, the delegates to the State Convention voted to keep the WSRP neutral on Referendum 51, the proposal to raise transportation taxes.

Why would the Republican leadership support an increase in the gas tax? Because this package is about safety, because it is about competitiveness, and because it is the consensus of our state’s business leaders that without it, our transportation woes will get a helluva lot worse before they start getting any better. Take a gander at the businesses, business groups and chambers of commerce supporting the No on I-912 campaign, and then answer me this: what do Boeing, Microsoft, Washington Mutual, and Weyerhaeuser know about our state’s transportation infrastructure that John and Kirby don’t?

The Republican leadership supported this bill not out of hypocrisy or political dealmaking, but because they are genuinely pro-business and pro-growth, and because their allies in the business community convinced them that it was in the best interest of the state’s economy. The Republican leadership supported this bill because our state’s “competitiveness” was at stake, a loaded word that candidate Rossi wore thin during stump speeches throughout his campaign. So at a time when the anti-tax true believers are parading the Martyrdom of Saint Dino as an icon of their gas tax repeal initiative, isn’t it time Rossi himself came down from the Sammamish Plateau and took a public stance on this issue?

I have been assured by those who know and admire Rossi, that he is a straight talker who can be taken at his word, and so I can only assume that his refusal to openly support I-912, means that he does not support it. We have $250 billion worth of critical transportation infrastructure that is slowly being frittered away due to deferred maintenance, and it is hard to imagine how a “Governor” Rossi could live up to his promise to make WA state more competitive without having signed some sort of gas tax increase into law. His silence on this issue seems to me to be a clear indicator that he has no alternative to offer.

Of course, I could be wrong.

There is no question that Rossi is a candidate for governor in 2008, so if he is indeed a straight talker, and if he in fact supports repealing the gas tax increase, then we should expect him to come straight with voters regarding his break with the Republican leadership, and explain how he would address these needs differently than Governor Gregoire. That is the least we should expect from a wannabe “agent of change.”

As for John, Kirby and the rest of the “No New Gas Tax” campaign, I would hope that they would actually ask Rossi for his support, before implying his endorsement.

[NWPT54]Since 1940, Washington state’s gas tax has risen more than fivefold, from 5 cents a gallon to 28 cents a gallon… and yet, adjusted for inflation, the per-gallon value of the tax has actually fallen almost in half. Indeed, even when the recently enacted 9.5 cent a gallon increase is fully implemented in 2009, the effective tax rate in real dollars will still be below historically average levels.

The chart above tracks the gas tax from 1940 though 2009. The orange line represents the nominal gas tax in actual dollars (well… cents.) The blue line represents the gas tax adjusted to 2005 dollars, using the Gross Domestic Product Deflator historical data included in the US budget. (The GDP Deflator is estimated for 2004 through 2009.)

Because the gas tax is levied as a fixed dollar-value per gallon, rather than as a percentage of the sale price, the value of the tax is gradually eaten away by inflation unless the tax is periodically increased… which is exactly what the Legislature has routinely done since the tax was first implemented in 1921. Indeed, one of the reasons the recent round of tax hikes seems so shocking, is that the Legislature failed to raise the tax from 1991 through 2002, allowing real revenues per gallon to fall near an all-time low. It is no wonder that during that time, maintainance was deferred, and our transportation infrastructure was allowed to slip into its current state of gradual decay.

If we want to have a real debate about the transportation bill and the initiative to repeal it, then we’re going to have to start with some real numbers.