Goldy

This afternoon I hit a bit of a milestone in my effort to teach myself how to develop iPhone apps, marking the first time I successfully searched my old rhyming dictionary database from within the iPhone simulator, and displayed the results. The core functionality is now, well, functional, and considering where I was a just a couple weeks ago, that feels awfully damn good.

There’s a ton of work still left to do, but I’ve left most of the learning curve behind me. I guess my brain isn’t quite as old as my body.

The other day the Seattle Times singled out House Finance Committee chair Ross Hunter for his willingness to consider raising taxes to ward off some of the most crippling and counterproductive impending budget cuts:

This is a failure of leadership. Hunter, in particular, disappoints us because he was supposed to be a moderate.

That’s right, because in the Times’ Bizarro World lexicon, true “leadership” always consists of defending the status quo, and the status quo around here is last year’s all-cuts budget. And of course a true “moderate” would never consider raising taxes, only cutting them, because moderation never involves looking at both sides of the budget equation.

The Times had no gripe with Hunter and his committee when their primary business was considering and passing innumerable tax breaks and exemptions, but the minute he considers pushing revenue in the other direction, well, that’s a failure of leadership.

I was reminded of the Times’ immoderate attack on Hunter while reading Eliot Spitzer’s latest column in Slate, in which he effectively debunks the popular conservative meme that higher taxes inevitably result in lower GDP. It’s worth a read, especially within the context of our current state budget debate in which the Times and its surrogates in the Republican caucus (or is it the other way around? It’s so easy to get confused…) reflexively argue that raising taxes will inevitably hurt our economy, while totally ignoring the economic, let alone human impact of spending cuts.

But I was particularly struck by the following passage, in which Spitzer lays out a bit of history the 21st Century reader might find rather startling:

Leaders of a century ago invoked justice in remarkable language that is unimaginable today. President Woodrow Wilson called paying taxes “a glorious privilege.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed that “taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt said, “In this time of grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war; no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000.” That $25,000 is the equivalent of $323,208 in today’s dollars. Can you conceive of a modern president suggesting that no American should earn more than $323,000 after taxes? (President George W. Bush went to war twice without once calling for such a common sacrifice to pay for it.) And President Harry Truman in 1948 vetoed a broad-based tax cut, even in the face of an expected and eventual congressional override, and then asked for a tax increase following his upset victory.

On the subject of leadership, I hate to give Ross Hunter the pleasure of lumping him in there, no matter how momentary or tangentially, with the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., but… well… you know…

Regardless, just like there are two sides to the budget equation, there are two sides to the question of whether in an economic downturn like ours, tax increases are more damaging than spending cuts, so in the interest of an informed public debate, I really wish the Times would stop operating on the assumption that their side of the argument is a given.

Yesterday I griped about the Seattle Times myopic focus on the revenue side of the state budget equation, while providing very little coverage of the steep spending cuts in virtually every state agency and program:

You wouldn’t know it from reading the Times, because that doesn’t fit in with their lazy waste/fraud/abuse meme. No, the Times never writes about the thousands of state employees who have lost their jobs — further depressing our local economy — because they’re too busy expressing outrage that the remaining state employees still enjoy the same kind of health care benefits newspaper employeesused to enjoy as recently as a decade ago.

And today, as if on cue, the Times initial coverage of the just released Senate budget proposal focuses exclusively on tax increases.

If all you read was the Times, you might not remember that the legislature and governor addressed last year’s record revenue shortfall with a dramatic, all cuts budget, and you might think that the Senate is looking to close this year’s additional $2.7 billion gap entirely on the back of taxpayers. No, you’d have no idea that the Senate budget proposal includes another $838 million in additional cuts.

I’m just sayin’…

Rereading my previous post, I realize I never clearly enunciated what it is that bothers me so much about the Seattle Times’ editorial bent. It’s just that they make the notion of running government on less money sound so easy. In fact, not just easy, but downright obvious. I guess that explains why they feel no need to explain how to do it.

Once again, take for example DNR’s Natural Heritage Program. Faced with declining revenues and no stomach for tax increases, the governor and the legislature cut DNR funding about 22 percent from the previous biennium to the current. About two-thirds of DNR’s budget comes from royalties generated from timber, grazing, farming etc. on the public lands it manages, but declining commodity prices have meant declining revenues there too. Altogether, DNR’s budget has shrunk from $325 million in the 07-09 biennium, down to $267 million for 09-11.

You wouldn’t know it from reading the Times op-ed page, but DNR, like other state agencies, has responded to substantial cuts in revenue by substantially cutting spending. In addition to attrition and hiring freezes and stuff like that, DNR has gone through three rounds of honest to God layoffs, shedding 114 full-time employees — you know, warm bodies… real live people — or roughly 9 percent of the department’s current workforce. And these weren’t for the most part Olympia bureaucrats; these layoffs occurred in small towns throughout the state, where losing just a half dozen jobs or so can be a real blow to the local economy.

A tough revenue forecast makes for tough decisions, and one of the tough decisions DNR made was to stretch its limited resources by offsetting part of the cost of the Natural Heritage Program with user fees from the timber companies, developers, and government agencies who use it. I suppose DNR could have reprioritized, leaving NHP’s funding intact (and services fee-free) at the expense of other programs and services, but you know, for every NHP there’s… well… there’s another NHP. Are the cuts going to come at the expense fighting forest fires? Regulating clear cuts on steep slopes? Barring a new revenue source, the cuts are going to have to come from somewhere.

And all the cutting and slashing that’s been going on at DNR has been going on at nearly every other state agency as well. You wouldn’t know it from reading the Times, because that doesn’t fit in with their lazy waste/fraud/abuse meme. No, the Times never writes about the thousands of state employees who have lost their jobs — further depressing our local economy — because they’re too busy expressing outrage that the remaining state employees still enjoy the same kind of health care benefits newspaper employees used to enjoy as recently as a decade ago.

For the most part, the Times doesn’t really want government to be smaller, they want it to be cheaper… or it least, if they do want a substantially smaller state government in terms of the scope of services it provides and infrastructure in which it invests, the Times doesn’t have the balls to say so. Instead, they just harp on the government’s refusal/inability to cut costs, all the while ignoring the huge cuts that have already taken place, and the very real impact these cuts have produced.

Which just strikes me as lazy.

Righties like to accuse liberals like me of being tax and spend Democrats, and I suppose, to some extent I am.

See, as a liberal, I believe in using government to improve our collective quality of life by providing services and investing in infrastructure. But, I also believe that we need to pay for these services and investments by responsibly raising the necessary revenue… you know… we need to raise enough taxes to pay for what we spend.

In that sense, “tax and spend” is both liberal, and fiscally conservative.

The Seattle Times, on the other hand, appears to be embracing a less responsible  philosophy of government, one which I have dubbed “no-tax and spend.” Like your run of the mill politician, the Times ed board is much more enamored of cutting taxes than it is of cutting services. For example, it’s latest rant against a bill that would allow the Department of Natural Resources to charge timber companies, developers and others a reasonable fee for accessing valuable data that collects.

The other bad bill, Senate Bill 6747, would allow the state Department of Natural Resources to charge exorbitant fees to citizens for access to the agency’s Natural Heritage Program, which includes a database of species and ecosystems that are a priority for conservation. The costs could be as high as $6,000 for an annual subscription or $100 per request plus a $75/hour charge.

Money throughout state agencies is tight, but charging hefty fees for information intended to be public is an irresponsible solution. If the DNR imposes such fees, expect more agencies to follow suit with public-request-killing fees.

Of course, the Times is either befuddled or befuddling or both, as this bill has nothing to do with public records requests, and does not authorize similar fees from other agencies. What it does do is allow DNR to continue the Natural Heritage Program by offsetting crippling budget cuts with a fee comparable to that being charged for a similar program in neighboring Oregon.

NHP has already seen a more than 50% cut in its biennial budget, from $1.38 million to $585,000, and further cuts would jeopardize an additional $240,000 in federal matching grants. The proposed fees would not cover the full cost of running the program, but it would stabilize funding enough to keep it going at current levels.

The Times and I both acknowledge that the NHP provides a valuable service, the difference is how we propose to pay for it. Personally, I’d prefer an adequate and fair broad-based tax system that provides sufficient and sustainable revenues to pay for services like the NHP, without resorting to user fees. But barring that, I’m not philosophically opposed to offsetting part of the cost of the program by charging timber companies, developers and other users the going rate for such services.

The Times, on the other hand, would prefer to pay for programs like the NHP by pulling wads of money out of a leprechaun’s ass. Or something like that.

Yeah sure, the Times has enunciated a few cost-saving proposals, most of which involve fucking the state employee unions, but in general there has been a remarkable disconnect on its op-ed page between its reflexive support for popular government services, and its knee-jerk opposition to the taxes and fees necessary to pay for them. As the Times points out, the state isn’t the federal goverment… “it cannot print money or borrow from China.” So something has to give.

When it comes to the NHP, I say “tax and spend,” whereas the Times simply says “spend.” You figure out for yourself which one of us is being more fiscally responsible.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been taking some time recently to teach myself how to program the iPhone, and while I can’t say I’ve completely wrapped my mind around Cocoa Touch and the Xcode IDE yet, I can say that I’ve made a ton of progress. I may not always be sure why it works, but I’m at the point where I can reliably build functional UI without banging my head against the wall, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got a good enough grasp of Core Data to build the innards as well. Not that this terminology means anything to most of you, but oddly enough, it means something to me now. I guess I’m a geek.

So my status hasn’t changed. Expect fits of light posting as I continue to obsess on teaching myself how to build a functional app.

Mark 11:20
The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it.

Discuss.

At the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft’s chief research and technology officer made a rather startling proposal for dealing with the security issues plaguing the online world: a sorta driver’s license for the Internet.

What Mundie is proposing is to impose authentication. He draws an analogy to automobile use. If you want to drive a car, you have to have a license (not to mention an inspection, insurance, etc). If you do something bad with that car, like break a law, there is the chance that you will lose your license and be prevented from driving in the future. In other words, there is a legal and social process for imposing discipline. Mundie imagines three tiers of Internet ID: one for people, one for machines and one for programs (which often act as proxies for the other two).

Now, there are, of course, a number of obstacles to making such a scheme be reality. Even here in the mountains of Switzerland I can hear the worldwide scream go up: “But we’re entitled to anonymity on the Internet!” Really? Are you? Why do you think that?

What a great idea, I mean, if you’re the government of Iran or China, seeking to track dissidents and discourage public discourse. And I suppose it might be an intriguing proposition to a company like Microsoft, which would be in a great position to profit off the creation and administration of such a government mandated authentication system.

But I honestly can’t think of anything more antithetical to the American spirit.

Anonymity — or at least, pseudonymity — holds a long and cherished place in American history, dating back well before our nation’s founding. Benjamin Franklin honed his skills as a journalist writing under a number of pseudonyms, and Thomas Paine’s highly influential and historically revered Common Sense was originally published anonymously in 1776. And then of course there are the Federalist Papers, which were published under the pseudonym Publius, though authored by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.

I mean, if anonymity is good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me.

Yeah sure, there are those who abuse the privilege, as evidenced by the sewer that is my comment thread, but Democracy is a messy thing, especially the nearly inviolable right to free speech that guarantees it.

Yet listening to Ross Reynolds and David Brewster — two journalists — discuss Mundie’s proposal on KUOW yesterday, I was struck by how… well… how damn credulous they sounded. A revocable license to post content on the Internet should be a facially ridiculous and offensive proposal to anybody who cares about the First Amendment, and yet Brewster refused to dismiss it as the absurdity it is, while Reynolds kept coming back to the point that maybe it should be required if you accept money online?

Really? Your right to free speech ends the minute you accept payment for it?

My guess is that Mundie and Reynolds/Brewster were focusing on two different issues. Despite the ungenerous headline, I’ll be generous enough to assume that Mundie is merely attempting to address the technical security issues that plague the Internet, to which end I would suggest that Microsoft focus on producing better software, rather than shifting the security burden to the enduser. Reynolds and Brewster on the other hand, seemed to start from the premise that anonymity poses some sort of threat to the world of words and ideas in which they make their living.

Again… really? Do anonymous writers really pose that big a threat? KUOW and Crosscut are free to require registration before allowing a commenter to post; hell, I keep threatening to move to some sort of registration system as a remedy for HA’s chronic troll infestation. But a government issued Internet license? That’s fascism.

What I think we really see here with the type of conversation we heard yesterday on KUOW, and in similar lamentations throughout our news and opinion industry, are the traditional media gatekeepers expressing their discomfort with the way the Internet hasn’t just enabled the rabble to crash through their gates, but has torn these gates from their hinges entirely.

And yes, the inevitable result of this new technology is that there is an awful lot of crap on the Internet. In fact, it’s mostly crap. But to suggest that the credibility of ones words should be so closely tied to the identity of the author, displays both a lack of trust in intelligence and judgment of the reader, and a remarkable disregard for the inherent value of the words themselves.

I don’t write anonymously, but if I did, what would be the difference? Let the unsigned editorialists at the daily newspapers hide behind the presumed credibility of their mastheads; as for me, I’m proud to simply let my writing speak for itself.

Faced with a choice of protecting the interests of oil refineries, and protecting the interests of 40,000 children on Basic Health, I’ll go with the oil refinery every time.

When the state Democratic leadership called the cops on organized labor last year in a ham-fisted effort to get out of voting on the Workers Privacy Act, they sent a couple of strong messages to employers statewide.

First, by killing legislation that would have prevented employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings (or religious meetings, for that matter), and by doing so in such a high profile fashion, the Democratic leadership tacitly endorsed exactly the kind of coercive practices the bill sought to ban. Second, if the Democratic leadership, of all people, were willing to so casually throw organized labor under the bus — one of their most loyal constituencies — well, it was only time before employers started following their lead.

And that’s apparently what is happening with the Korean Women’s Association in their contract negotiations with home health care workers represented by SEIU 775NW.

The video above shows KWA Executive Director Peter Ansara bashing the union at a mandatory meeting held Feb. 1, 2010. “They’re not going to bat for you,” Ansara tells the assembled SEIU members “… but your dues just went up a buck.” Ansara goes on to accuse the union of “not standing up for you,” while KWA Board Chair Sul Ja Warnick reminisces fondly about the pre-union days. All this at a meeting billed as workers’ compensation training, and paid for with Medicaid funds.

So what’s KWA’s beef with SEIU? After years of enjoying a model labor-management relationship with SEIU, KWA has suddenly decided to play hardball. While none of the other eight home healthcare agencies SEIU bargains with in Washington state are seeking cuts in wages or benefits, KWA is demanding substantial concessions from workers whose starting salary is only $10/hour.

Since 2006, all of the state’s home healthcare agencies have covered the full cost of their workers’ compensation premiums, but KWA is demanding that its workers now pay 30 cents an hour, amounting to a 3 percent reduction in take-home pay. KWA is also alone in seeking to eliminate the 45 cents per mile reimbursement for workers driving between clients, during the workday, using their own vehicles… a tremendous potential hardship for such low wage workers, especially those working in more rural communities. And finally, while all agencies receive 10 cents a worker hour from the state to pay for training programs, KWA wants to only spend 5 cents an hour, and keep the other nickel for itself.

And if SEIU won’t budge, then apparently it has to be busted, or at least so seems the philosophy of Ansara, who took over the reins at KWA just before the agency assumed its new, anti-union posture.

“The caregiving business… is really from a business perspective, a numbers game,” Ansara told the assembled workers, though of course, it really is not. The caregiving business should be about providing compassionate, quality care. Indeed, Ansara’s statement reveals exactly the kind of attitude that inevitably leads to the sort of abuses recently documented by the Seattle Times.

But as long as we’re talking about numbers, it’s important to point out that while KWA pays workers $10/hour, it receives a $17.46/hour in Medicaid reimbursement from the state. The other home healthcare agencies are managing to get by on the same gross margins without demanding concessions from their already low-wage workers. Why can’t KWA?

I dunno. Perhapas Ansara is just a prick. Or perhaps KWA is particularly poorly managed. Or perhaps, KWA got the message loud and clear from Democrats in Olympia that it’s open season on labor.

What I do know is that I wouldn’t want my loved ones taken care of by a home healthcare agency that shows so little respect and empathy for its own workers.

In covering a Teabagger party in Asotin, the TV newscaster leads off by saying “They say it’s all about traditional values…” — and what exactly are traditional Teabagger values?

“How many of you have watched the movie Lonesome Dove? What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd? … He got hung. And that’s what I want to do with Patty Murray.”

To which, of course, the crowd laughs and applauds. Yup, nothin’ riles up the spirit of a patriotic American more than a good ol’ fashioned hangin’ of a U.S. Senator.

I’ve already made the personal sacrifice of slashing my employees’ benefits, now so should the governor.

From Gov. Chris Gregoire’s new tax proposal:

Excise Tax on Carbonated Beverages
Carbonated beverages are a discretionary purchase. Their consumption leads to growing public health issues, including childhood obesity and diabetes. Through an excise tax of 5 cents per 12 ounces, this proposal would raise $93.6 million this biennium.

Or, you know, we could just build some more sidewalks. That’s what Gov. Blethen would do.

(And in case you’re wondering about the headline… um, here.)

I’ve been too preoccupied to conduct my usual fisking of Seattle Times editorials in recent days, but that hasn’t made them any less worthy of mockery.

Temporarily increase the King County sales tax to maintain police, jails and courts? “Enough is enough,” the Times proclaims. “This page does not have a detailed, prescriptive answer to King County’s whole problem,” Frank Blethen’s crack editorialists admit, but that doesn’t stop them from insisting that criminal justice services — which account for over 70 percent of the county’s general fund — must be maintained at current levels, in the face of dramatically declining revenues, but with no tax increases. I guess that’s what passes for bold leadership down at Fairview Fanny.

And the Times consistently pushes its no-tax/yes-spend prescription on a number of other issues. We hear little argument from the Times that the state isn’t underfunding basic education, yet they maintain their virulent opposition to the sort of revenue hikes or tax restructuring necessary to pay for it. And just today their editorial page lauds First Lady Michelle Obama for her soft approach to childhood obesity that doesn’t include government mandates or taxes.

What is most appealing about the first lady’s approach is it is neither heavy-handed nor naive. The federal government will not become the food police but will instead encourage sensible initiatives such as added sidewalks to spur walking and exercise.

And how will we pay for these sidewalks and public service campaigns and whatnot? Certainly not by taxing sweetened beverages, the number one source of calories in the average American diet. The Times acknowledges that “obesity contributes to the nation’s soaring health-care bill,” but a targeted tax aimed at reducing consumption of empty calories while providing a revenue source to help pay for obesity’s growing consequences, well, that would be “heavy-handed.” And worst of all, it would be, you know, a tax.

So how would the Times editors balance their own conflicting demands for more government services and lower taxes? Well, despite their refusal to put forth “prescriptive answers,” I suppose we might tease a few hints as to how they might run state government, by examining how they have run their own business, and imagining how very different Washington state might look today had Frank Blethen been governor over much of the past decade, with his editorial board holding the reins of the legislative leadership.

Buoyed upon the economic euphoria of the previous bubble, the first thing Gov. Blethen would have done upon taking office in early 2001, would be to purchase the state of Maine, and at a highly inflated price, only to sell it at a total loss a decade later after pumping millions of dollars into subsidizing his acquisition’s own growing deficits. Then, with hundreds of millions of dollars of highly leveraged debt coming due at the same time revenues started their precipitous tumble, Gov. Blethen would fight vociferously to drive neighboring Oregon out of business in the hope of attracting a substantial portion of its loyal taxpayers.

But none of this would be enough to balance the books. Wages would have to be cut, benefits slashed, jobs eliminated and unions busted… because it was organized labor, after all, who was really responsible for that whole Maine fiasco. And, just like the Times has managed to maintain the breadth, depth and quality of their news coverage while closing bureaus and dramatically shrinking their newsroom, so too our state government, under Gov. Blethen’s deft leadership, would be able to maintain, or even increase critical public services and infrastructure, while substantially decreasing both salaries and staff. I mean, just imagine how much better DMV would function if they had fewer offices and less staff servicing the same number of customers… and at lower wages to boot. All we need to do is make government operate more like a business!

As for schools, despite the worsening revenue crisis, we could trust Gov. Blethen to finally cut class sizes… by, you know, physically cutting classroom sizes, the same way the Times has cut the width of its newsprint by 15% in recent years. Just crowd those desks a little closer; the kids will never know the difference.

You get the point. Frank Blethen has done such a remarkable job guiding his proud family newspaper from perpetual prosperity to the verge of bankruptcy, that if there is anybody who we should turn to for advice on how to fix what ails state and local government, it is he and his fellow economic wunderkind on the Times editorial board.

I’m just sayin’.

UPDATE:
Carl points out that he kinda had this idea first.