For the life of me I can’t find an obvious way on Comcast’s website to report a downed wire, so if anybody from Comcast reads my blog: hey… you’ve got a wire down in the street on S. Morgan, just East of the intersection with 51st AVE S!
Just thought you’d want to know.
Back in June, when I wrote that mayoral candidate Mike McGinn was having trouble securing endorsements from fellow environmentalists due to his reputation for not working and playing well with others, my post drew passionate rebuttals from McGinn and his supporters. And a few weeks back, when I reported that his fellow environmental leaders were, um, less than enthusiastic about McGinn’s surprising primary victory, I once again heard from McGinn faithful, accusing me of pulling this meme out of my ass.
“[T]he sentiment I heard from many of his fellow environmental leaders was more along the line of ‘oh well, I guess we kinda have to endorse him,’ rather than the outright enthusiasm one might have expected,” I wrote at the time. But, well, I’m man enough to admit my mistakes, for it looks like they didn’t really hafta endorse McGinn after all:
In an affront to environmental poster boy, Sierra Club leader and mayoral candidate Mike McGinn, the King County Conservation Voters have decided not to endorse either candidate in the mayor’s race.
Now, McGinn and his supporters can get all huffy if they want about the works and plays well with others meme, but when the region’s broadest coalition of environmental leaders just can’t bring itself to endorse one of their own — a man with unchallenged environmental credentials — it’s gotta say something about the many toes he’s stepped on (biked over?), if not his political style, doesn’t it?
I’m not saying I want a Mr. Nice Guy in the mayor’s office. It’s just always struck me as ironic that one of the big knocks against Mayor Nickels was his alleged unilateralism, and now we may be on the verge of electing a new mayor with the same bull in a china shop reputation.
Unemployment will almost certainly (be) in double-digits next year — and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey, you can bet there’s another either too discouraged to look for work or working part time who’d rather have a full-time job or else taking home less pay than before (I’m in the last category, now that the University of California has instituted pay cuts). And there’s yet another person who’s more fearful that he or she will be next to lose a job.
Reich goes on to point out the basics of underemployment and the accompanying lack of consumer spending, and lays out in plain English the case for greater stimulative spending. While the debt is worrying, Reich argues that now is no time to worry about the debt and uses the example of Depression-era spending under FDR followed by post-war growth to argue that spending is the correct course to take.
Reich is also pointing out that in bad economic times, we tend to get ugly politics, which is an understatement. If you agree with his points, our country is essentially risking a long period of internal strife because of the overly simplistic views about government spending and debt that dominate our broken discourse.
Even Uncle Alan admitted that the “entire intellectual edifice” that underpinned neo-liberalism was a disaster. One can’t help but conclude that a lot of the recent insanity in politics results from the collapse of an economic belief system that was dominant in the empire for decades, and has yet to be fully discredited in the society at large. (Can you say “Russia?”)
So obviously Reich is arguing for a Keynesian approach.
One of the most entertaining quips by John Maynard Keynes is this bit from The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
To put this in regional terms, we should start building and repairing things like bridges, transit and schools, although I have to admit there would be a certain satisfaction obtained by burying money in crazy places. We could then sit back to watch as the GOP-multi-level marketing machine goes to work. In a short time there would be an entirely new class of bidness guys and gals selling various plans designed to profit from digging for the loot, and many of them would need new cars and furniture.
All of this is to say that I don’t understand why Reich isn’t in the government again. With continued woes in the housing sector, ordinary consumers being hammered by usurious banks and a bleak employment outlook, it’s baffling that the Obama administration hasn’t put Reich into a key post.
I guess it’s because Obama is from Chicago?
Whenever I attempt to highlight the growing danger of the far right’s increasingly violent rhetoric by provocatively pondering the potential impact of liberals openly carrying arms, my friend at the local Newsmax-wannabe site Orbusmax excitedly throws up an above the fold headline, warning about my dangerous, violent rhetoric. Some people just don’t get nuance.
So I wonder if The Orb is equally frightened by the column that appeared yesterday in his beloved Newsmax, which longingly mulled over the “gaining possibility” of a military coup to “resolve the Obama problem”…?
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.
[…] Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.
Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.
Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”
A military coup in defense of the Constitution? Uh-huh.
Still waiting to see that alarmist, above-the-fold headline, Orb.
Following up on yesterday’s post in which I explain for reporters why population-plus-inflation does not result in a stable revenue stream necessary to maintain government services at constant levels, I thought I’d quickly raise one more question in the minds of the press before they attempt to cover I-1033 in an objective and even-handed manner: what problem, exactly, is I-1033 intended to solve?
It can’t be because Washington is a high tax state. Even by the measurement of the conservative Tax Foundation, the organization whose stats Tim Eyman has long cherry-picked to support his tax cutting initiatives, Washington now ranks 35th in terms of state and local tax burden, and has climbed to 9th on the list of states with the best business tax climate.
And it certainly can’t be because government spending is out of control. Again, according to the Tax Foundation, Washington’s state and local tax burden (the percentage of one’s income one pays in state and local taxes, on average) has steadily dropped over the past 15 years from 10.4% in 1995 to 8.9% in 2008. And as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, per capita state tax revenues, adjusted for inflation, have also sunk to a 15-year low… and that’s before most of the impact of the Great Recession kicked in.
So what exactly is Timmy trying to fix? Certainly not out-of-control government spending. And certainly not potholes.
Perhaps this will teach shady attorneys like Bradley Marshall from screwing with bloggers by threatening us with bogus libel suits:
A unanimous state Supreme Court today disbarred Seattle civil-rights attorney and sports agent Bradley Marshall, concluding that he squeezed clients for fees and bullied others into settlements against their wishes.
The court, in a detailed 51-page opinion, said that Marshall committed numerous ethical and legal violations, any one of which would have justified disbarment. The justices also ordered him to pay $7,500 to each of two clients as restitution.
I’m not saying that Marshall’s libel threat had anything to do with his disbarment, but it certainly did earn him any good karma.
I’ve almost grown numb to the rhetorical depths to which the Republicans have been willing to sink in the healthcare debate (“death panels” and all that), but this latest line of argument from philandering Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) is just plain bizarre.
“Are you aware that if you take out gun accidents and auto accidents, that the United States actually is better than those other countries?” Ensign said. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) had been citing the health care systems of France, Germany, Japan and Canada as more effective, but with lower costs.
Conrad responded that one can bend statistics in all sorts of ways.
“But that doesn’t have anything to do with health care. Auto accidents don’t have anything to do with h–,” Ensign said, cutting himself off. “I mean we’re just a much more mobile society. … We drive our cars a lot more, they do public transportation. So you have to compare health care system with health care system.”
Of course, the basic premise behind Ensign’s argument — that gun and automobile deaths account for the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and other countries — is total bullshit, but he does have a point, if entirely inadvertent. Leaving the thorny gun issue aside, there is no doubt that investing in public transit would reduce associated injuries and deaths from vehicular accidents while improving public health.
Take that, John Niles.
The Seattle Times editorial board argues that keeping King County parks open “require innovative ideas,” and they offer a few innovative ideas of their own:
Park purists must become park pragmatists. The best option is to deed parks to local governments that promise to retain them as open space in perpetuity. Cities have a record managing parks. Cities can assume responsibility as part of annexations, or citizens groups can assume ownership in some cases.
Another Triplett idea with great merit is to deed parks to the library system in exchange for a covenant to retain them as parks, while allowing a library branch to sprout on a small portion of the grounds. The synergy of a library and a park in the same location should be obvious; both spaces would be maintained by the library.
A similar plan to have the housing authority take over some parks offers other benefits. Triplett has gone so far as to suggest partnerships with fire districts.
Huh. Well, as long as the Times is encouraging us to be both pragmatic and innovative, I’ve got a creative idea of my own as to how to keep our parks open: why don’t we just pay for them?
I mean, honestly, all the proposals above succeed in doing is shifting the costs of park maintenance from county government to city and other local governments. Whether the county or a city or a (really?) fire district owns the deed, it doesn’t much change the cost of maintaining a park, and taxpayers still ultimately pick up the bill. The only difference being, rather than all of us helping to pay for all of the parks countywide, each community will only have to pay for its own.
Does this Balkanization of our park system fulfill any civic objective larger than budgetary chicanery? Not really. But it does highlight the screwed up way we hamstring the funding of local services.
See, unlike things like courts and jails, parks operations are considered a discretionary activity for county government, and thus have no secure hold on any piece of the general fund. And without the statutory authority to create a countywide parks district, this leaves county parks with no regular levy of their own. The county can ask voters to approve special parks levies every few years, but this is never an easy or politically popular task, and it certainly isn’t a sustainable approach to long term budgeting.
That’s where we get all the so-called “innovative” talk of shoving parks off on library and fire districts; they do have their own regular levies, and as they provide popular, quantifiable services, they generally have an easier time than counties passing lid lifts and special levies. It’s not that it makes any particular sense to have a library or fire district maintaining a park, it’s just that some of them have the resources to pay for them, while due to its inflexible revenue structure, the county does not.
So if the Times’ editors really want to get innovative about funding parks, it’s time they look beyond the parks themselves and start focusing on fixing the arcane and inadequate tax system that is forcing these sort of bizarre contortions. As our region has grown in population and wealth, we have naturally demanded more parks and open space, and it’s past time we give the county the means to pay for it.
Supporters of Seattle Port Commission candidates Rob Holland and Max Vekich charge that supporters of his opponent, David Doud, have been reporting every link on the Reform the Port organization’s Facebook page as “abusive,” which results in an automatic removal of the links. “It’s just seventh-grade stuff—it’s not like that’s going to win an election,” Reform the Port supporter Heather Weiner says. Reform the Port is not formally affiliated with either the Vekich or the Holland campaign.
That kinda shit is just plain petty, but unfortunately it’s happening more and more all the time. For example, it’s become a common practice to issue bogus takedown requests to YouTube, sometimes prompting YouTube to pull one’s entire library of videos, with little recourse. (It’s happened to me, which is why I now post to multiple accounts.)
Politics is a contact sport, and that’s okay, but dirty tricks like this threaten to ruin these online services for the rest of us. Shame on Doud and his supporters.
Nothing particularly political about the video; my daughter and I just found it damn funny.
A No on I-1033 campaign staffer recently related to me a conversation he had with a local reporter, who repeatedly challenged him as to what was wrong with population-plus-inflation as a limit on government growth? “He was playing devil’s advocate,” the staffer explained.
Hmm. Maybe. Or maybe not.
This is a really complex issue, further complicated by the fact that population-plus-inflation does indeed sound like a reasonable and intuitive metric for maintaining government services at current levels, as it reduces spending to a simple per capita formula, that is easily adjusted for population and inflation: if we spend x amount of dollars per person in 2009, simply multiply x by the 2010 population, adjust for inflation, and voila… a new budget that reflects a constant level of per capita spending.
Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
In fact, this formula is so obvious and so intuitive, that rather than playing devil’s advocate, I think it a safe bet that the reporter in question was genuinely confused as to why population-plus-inflation, as implemented in I-1033, would steadily and inevitably erode government spending and reduce the level of services provided over time. So as a service to my friends in the media, I thought I’d attempt to explain the issue with a handful of bullet points.
I-1033 uses the wrong inflation index.
One of the core problems with the population-plus-inflation formula is the thorny question of how we measure inflation. I-1033 uses a broad measure, the Implicit Price Deflator (IPD) for the gross domestic product, an index that both ignores regional variations in the inflation rate, and more importantly, dramatic differences between different economic sectors.
As I’ve previously explained the cost of delivering government services rises significantly faster than the general rate of inflation, largely because the kind of highly-trained, labor-intensive services governments tend to provide (doctors, police officers, teachers, etc.) do not benefit from the same sort of productivity gains that technological advances have bestowed on economic sectors such as manufacturing. The more accurate index would be the IPD for State and Local Government Services, which when applied to recent state budgets shows a precipitous decline in spending when contrasted with the Consumer Price Index.
Quite simply, providing a constant level of services per capita requires a constant level of purchasing power. I-1033 doesn’t provide that, and will inevitably result in steadily declining per capita revenues, properly adjusted for inflation.
Different populations require different services…
… And of course, different services carry different costs. For example, an aging population has higher health care costs, while a baby boom would increase the cost of providing public education. The population-plus-inflation formula simply cannot account for the associated costs (or savings) of demographic shifts, as it treats all individuals exactly the same. Likewise, the formula cannot account for changing behavioral patterns within demographically stable populations… for example the unexpected rise in public school enrollment during the current recession, as families sought to cut private tuition costs.
Consider this ironic Catch-22: if our current K-12 education reforms succeed in raising both graduation rates and the rate of college attendance, it would inevitably increase demand for slots in our heavily subsidized state college and university system. Quite simply, a well educated student becomes even more expensive to educate, a reality that I-1033 and its strict per capita cap, doesn’t anticipate. Lacking the ability to raise per capita spending to accommodate the increased demand its own policies helped to create, the state would be forced to either deny these students a higher education, or shift money from elsewhere… perhaps even K-12 budgets.
Growth in personal income is the measure that best tracks growth in demand for public services.
As explained in the Gates Commission report, and numerous other scholarly works on the subject, the economic number that most closely tracks growth in demand for government services is growth in total personal income, that is, total economic growth. This is because (and perhaps counter to popular misconceptions) the majority of state and local government services are commodities, and we tend to increase our per capita consumption of commodities as our income grows. Roads, sewers, schools, courts, public safety, libraries, parks, public health… these and other government services are all things we consume more of the wealthier our society gets, and thus personal income, not population-plus-inflation, is the best measure for tracking growth in demand for these services. It also is the best means of accounting for regional differences in the inflation rate, as wealthier states tend to have higher costs of living.
This is why comparative studies of government revenue, spending and debt always focus on government spending, revenue and debt as a percentage of the GDP. Government spending as a percentage of personal income not only broadly measures the ability of government to meet the demand for public services, it also measures the ability of the economy to afford the government services provided. In this context, population-plus-inflation is virtually meaningless.
Colorado.
Yeah, sure, nobody in our state media has written at greater length or greater depth on tax structure and revenue issues than I have over the past few years, but still, I’m just some foul-mouthed blogger, so why should you believe me?
Well, don’t. Just look to Colorado where the experiment with TABOR has proven to be a complete and total fucking disaster. Population-plus-inflation simply does not provide government the revenue necessary to maintain a constant level of services. It didn’t in Colorado, and it won’t here. That’s a fact.
Population-plus-inflation also doesn’t provide government the flexibility necessary to respond to the changing wants and needs of its citizenry, but that’s a topic for another post.
Congratulations to Jenny Durkan on her US Senate confirmation as the new US Attorney for Western Washington. Now that she’s the law, I guess I better keep my nose clean.
If Mike McGinn wins his race for Seattle mayor, he will no doubt credit much of his success to his firm stance against the Big Bore tunnel, and the latest Survey USA poll shows McGinn may be picking up momentum. But if he ends up losing the race to T-Mobile exec Joe Mallahan, I think it may be fair to argue that that is exactly the issue that did McGinn in.
It’s no secret that since the primary Mallahan has enjoyed broad, if somewhat tepid endorsements from business, labor and other organizations firmly grounded in the mainstream of the Seattle establishment, as well as many of Mayor Greg Nickels’ former supporters. If there was a Democratic political machine in Seattle (and there most definitely isn’t), the sound you’d be hearing right now would be its rusty old gears grinding into place behind Mallahan.
Why? Well, although the political insiders I’ve talked to all lament Mallahan’s lackluster and uninspiring campaign, and openly question whether he’s really prepared to be an effective mayor, they all point to the tunnel as the single issue driving them into the Mallahan camp. Oh, they don’t all love the tunnel, and most are quick to criticize its financing, but the establishment consensus is “enough is enough” on our near decade-long thumb-sucking over replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct. As much as they fear Mallahan may prove an ineffective mayor, they equally fear that McGinn may prove quite competent, if only in his promise to block the tunnel project.
Of course it’s not as simple as that. Many business types argue that the tunnel is in fact the best and least disruptive choice for both maintaining mobility through the downtown and redeveloping the waterfront, while some of the labor-types view the tunnel purely in terms of jobs, jobs, jobs. But if McGinn wanted to make the tunnel the number one issue in this race, he’s certainly succeeded… at least with the bulk of Mallahan supporters.
Despite his lack of political experience (or even, you know, voting), Mallahan has now clearly been cast as the establishment candidate, while McGinn is making the most of his role as the populist outsider. And while being a populist isn’t a bad thing to be in a Seattle election, I wonder if McGinn may have overestimated the breadth and depth of popular opposition to the tunnel, while underestimating the obstacle establishment money and endorsements could prove to his mayoral ambitions?
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