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In Goldy’s metacommentary piece yesterday on The Seattle Times’ oppposition to funding Metro, he gave them some well deserved shit for pretending to oppose it because of its regressive nature.

Oh no! It’s a “regressive” tax! This from an editorial board that has opposed every single progressive tax (like, you know, on income or estates) that has come before it. What a bunch of fucking concern trolls.

But I think it’s even worse than that: We’ve known something was coming for a while. The Seattle Times ed board hasn’t exactly been leading the charge for a better system. Dow Constantine has been telegraphing since he got into office that he’d do something if the state didn’t act. And in that time The Seattle Times has neither suggested what that something ought to be nor have they pushed the legislature to act to allow King County to have a better system.

Could you imagine how different the debate would be in the state, if the state’s leading — or at least largest — paper had editorial after editorial pushing the legislature to let King County tax ourselves however we want? If they demanded that even if the GOP didn’t pass a complete transit package, that they at least give us a more progressive option?

I’m trying to generate the appropriate outrage at the Seattle Times editorial board for endorsing a “No” vote on King County’s Metro-saving Proposition 1, but then it’s kinda like raging at my dog for killing squirrels. It’s what she does. It’s her nature. And reading this editorial is like watching the editors chase a squirrel.

VOTERS should weigh the regressive tax request embedded in King County Proposition 1 against history.

Oh no! It’s a “regressive” tax! This from an editorial board that has opposed every single progressive tax (like, you know, on income or estates) that has come before it. What a bunch of fucking concern trolls.

The pattern is clear. As in previous rounds of asking taxpayers for more money, Metro sees its shortfall as a revenue problem, rather than thoroughly confronting its well-documented unsustainably high operating costs.

And since the pattern is so “clear” and these unsustainably high operating costs are so “well-documented,” we can presume the editors are about to clearly document them.

Um… no:

Voters also should consider the near future when they face many other ballot requests, from parks to city transportation. Tax fatigue could jeopardize crucial investments such as public prekindergarten.

Yes, please consider the other future tax measures the Seattle Times will endorse “No” on. For the children!

When Washington voters in 1999 approved Initiative 695, it wiped away a vehicle excise tax that gave the King County Metro system about one-third of its revenues.

In response, King County leaders asked voters for a 0.2 percent increase in the county sales tax “to preserve and improve our bus system,” promising 575,000 more hours of bus service, as the 2000 voter pamphlet read. Voters said yes. Over the next six years, they got only 203,000 hours of new bus service.

Yes, voters did approve I-695. But not Seattle and King County voters. We rejected it. Also, the MVET that I-695 wiped away was the most progressive tax in the most regressive tax system in the nation. But I don’t remember the fucking concern trolls at the Seattle Times shedding any tears over that.

In 2006, King County leaders again asked for a 0.1 percent sales tax increase, to fund Rapid Ride expansion. Voters said yes. The promised expansion is behind schedule, and in spots is not the superfast service promised.

And in 2008 the nation plunged into the Great Recession, taking Metro’s sales tax revenue with it.

During this period, driver wages rose significantly, to the point that Metro had the third-highest-paid drivers in the country. In 2008, Metro attracted the scrutiny of the Municipal League of King County, which issued a damning report on the agency’s cost structure. In 2013, it issued a grumpy follow-up report, noting modest improvements but reiterating cost structure concerns.

A) That was six years ago. B) Don’t trust this editorial board’s numbers. Ever. And C) Unionized bus drivers! It burns!

In 2012, after sales-tax revenues crashed because of the Great Recession, Metro got a boost with a temporary $20 car-tab tax.

A temporary fee that only made up a portion of Metro’s shortfall. The rest was met through cost cuts, fare hikes, and using up the last of its cash reserves. Also, this temporary fee was intended to tide us over until the legislature approved a more stable funding source. It never did. So King County is using the only taxing authority it has.

This year, King County leaders are back again. Metro faces a $75 million deficit when that car tab expires. This time, the request is breathtaking, for its size and for the regressive nature of the proposal. A $40 hike in car tabs and another 0.1 percent sales tax increase would yield an estimated $1.6 billion over 10 years. Three-fifths of it goes to Metro, the remainder to roads, bike lanes and road diet programs.

Of course they’re back again. The temporary $20 car tab fee expired, and the reserve funds are all used up. Everybody understood it was only a stopgap measure at the time the car tab fee was passed. And the size of the package is no more “breathtaking” than the MVET authority Olympia promised, but refuses to deliver. The two tax packages raise exactly the same amount of revenue, and for exactly the same purposes.

As for the regressive nature of the tax, yes, car tabs and sales tax are more regressive than an MVET, which taxes the value of your car, and thus hits owners of more expensive vehicles harder. But what the fucking concern trolls at the Seattle Times don’t tell you is that is that the package includes a $20 rebate for low-income households, as well as a new low-income fare. And of course, nothing could be more regressive than slashing bus service!

Metro’s defenders cite recent cost-saving reforms in the 2010-2013 contract with the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 587, including a wage freeze the first year and an overall 2.3 percent increase the second year.

In the private sector, that would be called a rational response to an economic crisis. In the public sector, those concessions are deemed justification for a breathtaking new revenue increase.

Though the Municipal League is supporting Proposition 1, it does so “reluctantly,” citing ongoing concerns with cost controls and efficiencies. It urges Metro to do better, including measuring itself against peers.

But: If voters approve Proposition 1, King County would have no incentive to do the hard work of bringing down labor costs that still saddle Metro with the fifth-highest driver costs in the country, behind only Boston, Santa Cruz, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

Let’s be clear, the Seattle Times opposition to Proposition 1 is based solely on its opposition to anything that remotely smells of organized labor. The drivers union is the editors’ squirrel. It doesn’t matter how regressive the taxes in Prop 1 are—if the measure balanced the tax hike by busting the union, the paper would happily wag its tail in approval.

Also, don’t trust the editors’ numbers. They’re almost always wrong.

If voters turn down Proposition 1, King County threatens a round of devastating bus-service cuts, many on popular routes including those carrying students to college. County and Metro leadership should not let that happen.

County leaders are trying not to let this happen. By raising revenue. Because, you know, shit costs money.

The threat ignores other options, including further fare increases and ever tighter control of administrative costs and capital expenses.

And the editors ignore the fact that Metro has been pursuing these options for years. Metro is about to raise fares for the fifth time since 2008—and it already has some of the highest farebox returns in the nation.

Cutting services is not a threat. If Prop 1 fails, service will be cut, just like it was in Pierce and Snohomish counties when they failed to raise new tax revenue.

King County has been negotiating with the drivers union for nine months. Talks are now in mediation. Both sides could earn voters’ trust with quick resolution of a contract that further drops costs.

Jesus. Again with drivers union. Squirrel!

Saying no to Proposition 1 is not a message that transit does not matter. It does. The region, particularly job-dense downtown Seattle, needs reliable bus service. Nor should a no vote be read in Olympia as a sign the state Legislature does not need to pass a transportation package that includes less regressive transit tax options. It does.

No, it’s a message that low taxes matter more than transit. At least to the editors of the Seattle Times.

Vote no on Proposition 1, and send King County government a message that Metro has more work to do on righting its cost structure before asking voters for more revenue.

Actually, all the Seattle Times is doing is sending a message that it is either too stupid to understand that time has run out, or too dishonest honest to admit it. The legislature was supposed to grant Metro MVET authority two sessions ago, but senate Republicans have persistently blocked the bill, you know, just because.

The $20 tab fee expires in June. The reserve funds are empty. Whatever other options may exist cannot be exercised in time to avoid devastating service cuts. Reject Prop 1 and Metro will slash service. That’s not a threat. That’s reality.

But look: squirrel!

Another election, another Pam Roach primary — and possibly general election — challenge.

State Sen. Pam Roach, a guardian of the Republican Party’s right flank in Olympia, is getting a challenge from a fellow Republican.

State Rep. Cathy Dahlquist, R-Enumclaw, announced this week that she will run against Roach. Under Washington’s “top two” primary system, the challenge creates the distinct possibility of a November battle between two Republicans in the 31st District of eastern King County and rural-exurban Pierce County.

And at the link, Dahlquist makes good noises about education, including mentioning teacher pay that the GOP often don’t when talking about education. Still, on many issues she’s a pretty standard Republican. She voted against the Reproductive Parity Act and marriage equality. And I couldn’t find any tax increases she supports, so wanting to pay for education is nice, but presumably it means by destroying the rest of the state’s social services. So sure, she’d almost certainly be better than Roach. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear.

– Fort Hood can’t catch a break. Video loads automatically.

– City Hall Starts to Give a Shit About Women’s Pay Equity Again

– I love that Sound Transit has pictures for specific stations, but some of them don’t make a lot of sense (to me). Answer some questions to help them design the pictures for new light rail stations. [h/t]

– Supply and demand is a thing in housing.

– STOPPPPPP YOU’RE HURTING MY FEEEEEELINGS is apparently the new clarion call of the conservative movement. I’m still a little shocked by it.

This Sunday’s New York times had a story about worker owned cooperatives. The main example that they use is in San Francisco, but

If you happen to be looking for your morning coffee near Golden Gate Park and the bright red storefront of the Arizmendi Bakery attracts your attention, congratulations. You have found what the readers of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local alt-weekly, deem the city’s best bakery. But it has another, less obvious, distinction. Of the $3.50 you hand over for a latte (plus $2.75 for the signature sourdough croissant), not one penny ends up in the hands of a faraway investor. Nothing goes to anyone who might be tempted to sell out to a larger bakery chain or shutter the business if its quarterly sales lag.

Instead, your money will go more or less directly to its 20-odd bakers, who each make $24 an hour — more than double the national median wage for bakers. On top of that, they get health insurance, paid vacation and a share of the profits. “It’s not luxury, but I can sort of afford living in San Francisco,” says Edhi Rotandi, a baker at Arizmendi. He works four days a week and spends the other days with his 2-year-old son.

Arizmendi and its five sister bakeries in the Bay Area are worker-owned cooperatives, an age-old business model that has lately attracted renewed interest as a possible antidote to some of our most persistent economic ills. Most co-ops in the U.S. are smaller than Arizmendi, with around a dozen employees, but the largest, Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, has about 2,000. That’s hardly the organizational structure’s upper limit. In fact, Arizmendi was named for a Spanish priest and labor organizer in Basque country, José María Arizmendiarrieta. He founded what eventually became the Mondragon Corporation, now one of the region’s biggest employers, with more than 60,000 members and 14 billion euro in revenue. And it’s still a co-op.

Does anyone know about cooperatives in the Seattle area if people want to support them with their dollars? I was trying to think of any, and I couldn’t. I mean the advantages of capitalism without, you know, creating more capitalists (except their financiers, and I guess customers). If they make a decent coffee with good enough pastries, that’s really all I want out of a coffee shop.

If people know of local worker cooperatives, especially ones that provide good goods and services, please leave a comment.

It’s as if the editors at the Seattle Times live in a world entirely free of context:

The proposal now before the Seattle City Council is to double the existing property-tax levy devoted to parks, to $54 million a year, raising the annual cost for the owner of a $400,000 home from $76 to $168. It is not a backbreaking addition, but it would tighten the squeeze on middle-class families already struggling with Seattle’s cost of living.

And it furthers a trend of jumbo specialty property levies. The annual amount of dedicated “lid-lift levies” jumped over the past decade from $65 million to $146 million. The Families and Education Levy doubled in 2011 and the low-income housing levy jumped 50 percent in 2009.

Yeah, true. But you know what else has jumped over the past decade? The hundreds of millions of regular property tax levy dollars (those that don’t require a public vote) lost to Tim Eyman’s I-747, an initiative soundly defeated within Seattle. I-747 limits regular levy growth to an absurd 1 percent a year. So while voter-approved dedicated lid-lift levies may indeed be $81 million higher than they were a decade ago (if you can trust the Seattle Times editorial board’s numbers), I-747 will cost city coffers as much as $186 million in 2015 alone, the first year the proposed parks levy would take effect!

Is it great policy to move all this funding out of the general fund and into dedicated levies? No. It’s stupid. But thanks to I-747, the only other alternative would be to grow the $267 million parks maintenance backlog the editors already lament.

That is the context in which all these lid-lift levies have gone to the ballot. And unless we debate the parks district proposal within that context, it’s not really an honest debate at all.

Sometimes a question can be as revealing as the answer.

In between sessions at yesterday’s Income Inequality Symposium, I was drawn into a discussion with fellow attendees about the “total compensation” minimum wage that some in the business community are still pushing. Under total compensation, an employer’s obligation to pay a minimum of $15 an hour could be met by a combination of cash wages, tips, and the cost of providing certain benefits. For example, I explained, $10.50 an hour in cash wages, plus $2.50 an hour in tips, plus $2 an hour in benefits would amount to a legal $15 an hour wage.

So if an employer were to offer a matching 401K contribution up to a maximum of one percent of an employee’s salary, I was asked, what would be the maximum benefit a minimum wage worker could receive? Would it be $0.15 an hour—one percent of the putative $15 an hour minimum wage? Would it be, using the example above, $0.105 an hour—one percent of the employee’s cash wages? Or would it be some more difficult to calculate number?

It took me a moment to wrap my mind around the question, but the answer I arrived at surprised even me. It doesn’t matter on which figure the employer chooses to calculate the maximum 401K match: under total compensation a matching 401K contribution is worth absolutely nothing to a minimum wage employee. Zero. Bupkes. Zilch.

And the same is true of the value of every other benefit.

Think about it. If you are earning a $15 total compensation minimum wage, and your employer generously matches your 401K contribution up to one percent of that higher number, you would receive $0.15 an hour in additional benefits. But that higher benefit could then be used to reduce the wage portion of your compensation by an equal amount. The benefit ends up costing the employer nothing, and the net result is that the “matching” contribution comes directly out of the employee’s paycheck. The employer gives with one hand and takes away with the other.

Likewise for other benefits like health insurance premiums and “paid” vacation days, the cost of which may also be used to decrease the wage component of your total compensation by an equal and offsetting amount. It’s as if minimum wage employees were purchasing these benefits through paycheck deductions; the employer bears none of the costs.

Some business owners argue that without total compensation they will be forced to eliminate benefits in order to shave costs. That may or may not be true. But from the minimum wage employee’s perspective, total compensation virtually guarantees the equivalent outcome. For when a benefit is transformed into a line item to be deducted from your take-home pay, it becomes nothing more than just another monthly expense. “Benefits” are no longer additive to one’s total compensation—eliminate them and your cash wages go up by a corresponding amount.

Of course, the caveat holds that all this analysis is only true of full-time employees. Lacking the cost of benefits to subtract from total compensation, low-wage part-timers and temporary workers could see their effective wage floor rise substantially.

But as a policy for raising the incomes of all low-wage workers, total compensation fails to deliver on its promise, while (for reasons I’ve explained previously) eroding the effective wage floor over time. A $15 total compensation minimum wage simply does not guarantee a $15 minimum wage. And to insist otherwise would be a lie.

– So, yeah. More on World Vision.

– On year anniversary of devastating DUI, community rallies in call for ‘vision zero’

– Five Reasons Contraceptive Coverage Is Essential

– Glad to see that Oregonians care about climate change. Hopefully that will lead to real action.

– Olympia has ducks

– If you’re interested in the memorial service for Jim Compton, it’s Saturday at Town Hall 10:00 to Noon.

– Getting ORCA Cards to people who need reduced fares is a bit of a problem, so one more way is good. If Metro is going to have a reduced rate the next time it increases the fare, I hope that they have that figured out.

– “This case is about much more than contraception. It is about the principles of liberty that animate our Constitution.” Indeed! Which is why the IWF’s arguments should be rejected.

– Well, I’m sure if we let McMorris Rodgers get away with using public money for her campaigns (Seattle Times link), she won’t do it again.

– Let people play soccer in a hijab, for goodness sake.

– From Hans in the comments, this certainly helps explain trolls.

Huh. I’ve got this nagging feeling that there’s something missing from the Seattle Times editorial board’s list of things we need to do to attract and retain corporate headquarters:

Support and fund education for students ages 3 to 23. Raise the quality of and reduce inequity of access to pre-K, K-12 and higher education. Protect and enhance the area’s vaunted quality of life and make strategic investments in transportation. Continue to promote a civic culture that values innovation, diversity and tolerance.

Oh. Yeah, that’s right. They forgot to mention the money it takes to pay for all these great things.

It doesn’t take much courage to argue for expanded funding of pre-K, K-12, higher education, transportation, and other public investments that improve our collective quality of life. I do it all the time. But what’s consistently missing from the editorial page of our state’s paper of record is support for raising the taxes necessary to pay for these things. It’s as if there is only one side to the financial ledger—the spending side—and it would be absolutely crazy to even mention the topic of revenue.

I mean, if attracting corporate headquarters provides the strange logic you need to put you over the top in support of universal preschool, fine by me. Whatever floats your pre-K boat. But then what’s so wrong about taxing the incomes of highly paid executives in order to help pay for all the public investments that draw them to the region? Washington does have the most regressive tax structure in the nation, after all.

Without the mention of revenue, the editorial comes off as scolding the rest of us for stingily refusing to invest in the things corporate executives refuse to pay for. Weird.

– I usually like it when national and international orgs mention Washington, but boo to having disasters bad enough for that in Snohomish County.

– What would you like to see from the next SDOT director?

– The video above shows the strange procedure that takes place on Sunday mornings in Father Nary’s church in Carnot. The Muslim refugee families clear out of the sanctuary so that area Christians — many of whom may share the anti-Muslim sentiment of the “Christian” Anti-Balaka militias — can come to celebrate Mass.

– Don’t turn off Twitter, national leaders.

– Purity culture needs to be exposed for everything that it is, everything it teaches, and everything that it does to the women and men growing up in it. I understand the you have GOT to be kidding me reaction, but this is not something that can be so easily dismissed.

– They are taking a lot of handouts in the financial districts of various cities.

Since he’s been back Goldy has, rightly, taken The Seattle Times’ editorial board to task for all sorts of nonsense. It’s a target rich environment, and it’s the largest paper in the state. But there are other editorial boards spewing other nonsense. And I think it does the Trib a disservice not to mention things like this.

Governor should veto overreaching drone bill

No, he should sign it into law.

Precious little got done in Olympia this past session on some truly important, much-needed issues, from transportation funding to teacher evaluations.

We’re $2 Billion short on McCleary, and the state only managed to pass a tiny addition to that in the supplemental budget, but teacher evaluations is the education thing they’re pissed off about? That isn’t even the main thrust of the piece, and I agree with them that the session was pretty well wasted. But holy shit. Anyway:

But somehow legislators found time to pass House Bill 2789, an overreaching mishmash of several measures. It would regulate drone use by state and local agencies in a way that could have unforeseen effects on public access to government documents.

All regulation “could have unforeseen effects.” That’s why we have a process to repeal laws. If this is too restrictive, future legislatures can revisit it. I realize this legislature is pretty dysfunctional, but it doesn’t have to be that way in the future. But the idea that law enforcement, or other government agencies, should have a blank check with this type of surveillance until we have the perfect plan seems unhelpful.

The issues at stake are too complicated to address without more study, and Gov. Jay Inslee should veto HB 2789. What’s needed is a task force composed of stakeholders to recommend a clear and more comprehensive proposal that would address all future uses of drones, from private to regulatory and law enforcement.

Governor Inslee could sign the law into place and then we could still have that task force. But it would be coming from a place where our rights not to be watched by state and local governments is the default position. I mean unless you think the drone issue requires immediate action.

It’s not as if this is an issue requiring immediate action. State and local governments have no plans in the near future to use drones, but this highly restrictive bill threatens their ability to someday take advantage of an important emerging technology.

So, OK. There’s more, it’s mostly just a list of stuff the government could theoretically do with drones. If local governments want to do that in the future, I’m sure future legislators will take it up, task force or no task force.

King County voters will soon receive their ballots for an April 22 special election in which they will be asked to approve or reject Proposition 1, a $130 million hike in local car tabs and sales tax. At stake is an additional $50 million a year desperately needed to maintain county and city roads, along with the $80 million a year Metro needs to stave off a devastatingly regressive 17 percent cut in bus service. So of course the Seattle Times chooses to kick off its coverage of this very important issue with a front page article featuring the views of the one organization opposing Prop 1!

An early face-to-face over King County’s proposed car-tab-and-sales-tax measure to fund transit and roads took place in front of one of the few organizations opposing the measure, the pro-highway Eastside Transportation Association (ETA).

… [ETA member Dick] Paylor and audience members complained about how Metro King County Transit is managed, voiced concerns about seeing some virtually empty buses on some routes and suggested having bus passengers themselves pick up a larger share of the service’s costs.

“The problem isn’t on the revenue side, it’s on the expense-control side,” said Paylor, arguing that Metro is operating under a “broken financial model.”

Jesus. ETA is just a who’s-who of old, pro-roads white guys (like the bitterly anti-transit Jim Horn), while the Yes side is a coalition of business, labor, transportation, environmental, and social service groups that enjoys endorsements from 19 mayors. So this is the equivalent of kicking off your climate change coverage by talking to the owners of a coal-fired power plant!

And of course, Paylor is totally wrong. The remaining problem is almost entirely on the revenue side of the equation. Through 2014, Metro will collect $1.2 billion less in sales tax revenue than previously projected, thanks to the Great Recession. Meanwhile, through a series of cuts, efficiencies, and fare hikes, Metro has lowered expenses or increased revenue by $148 million a year—$798 million from 2009 to 2013 alone. The only way for Metro to balance its budget without raising additional tax revenue would be to cut service and raise fares. Which, let’s be honest, is exactly what ETA advocates.

But wait… the stoopid doesn’t stop there. For the Seattle Times insists on citing Paylor citing the Washington Policy Center, a right-wing “think” tank best known for climate-change denial and its close ties to the stand-your-ground promoting ALEC:

Citing data from the conservative Washington Policy Center, Paylor said that from 2000 to 2012, Metro’s operating costs increased 83 percent, while the inflation rate over that span was 33 percent.

Uh-huh. And you know what else has increased over the past decade? Everything!

King County’s population has grown by 16 percent since 2000, while Metro’s service hours have grown 4 percent since 2008 alone, despite a 2 percent reduction in service from its least efficient routes. Costs for providing Metro’s paratransit services—federally mandated under the Americans with Disabilities Act—have grown by 25 percent since 2008, while security costs have grown by 80 percent, due to fare enforcement, increased policing, and enhanced tunnel security. To offset its revenue shortfall Metro shifted capital funds to operations, delaying the purchase of new buses that would have been less expensive to operate and maintain. Meanwhile, pension contributions—at a rate set by the state legislature—have increased by more the 40 percent.

And on and on and on. I won’t even bother fact checking the Washington Policy Center, because only an idiot or a liar would pit the CPI against Metro’s operating costs over a 12-year span and presume that there was any meaningful contextual relationship between the two numbers.

And yet there it is, totally unchallenged, in black and white on the front page of the Seattle Times. Next stop no doubt: a credulous citation on the paper’s anti-tax editorial page.

“As bus ridership rises, battle over funding measure heats up,” the Seattle Times headline reads in the teach-the-controversy tradition of climate deniers and Intelligent Design bamboozlers. Except there is no battle. It’s every other transportation stake-holder in the county versus the anti-transit ETA. And, I suppose, the Seattle Times.

– Like we should be protecting parking lots from the evil expansion of multistory housing.

– Someone will be president after Obama, and I wish I shared Oliver’s optimism that it won’t be any of these people.

– The pay gap for women working at King County is much better than the City of Seattle. More work needs to be done on the pay gap by race.

– Maybe not having the CRC was good for Oregon?

– A Stillborn Child, A Charge of Murder and the Disputed Case Law on ‘Fetal Harm’ [h/t]

– Why is there nutrition info for unpopped popcorn?

Who could have predicted?

An experiment in bipartisanship that began with so much promise a year ago totally crumbled in the final hours of this year’s legislative session.

I don’t know a single Olympia press corps veteran who believed that Rodney Tom’s faux-bipartisan senate Majority Coalition Caucus held any promise of delivering results, while I don’t know a single daily newspaper editorial board that didn’t.

These people really need to get out more.