– I’m not sure at what point we should just fire everyone in SPD who can’t follow the use of force policies.
– I didn’t even realize Tacoma Link not being free was on the table, but it’s nice to see businesses stepping up.
– Today in Sally Clark is such a problem, Sally Clark is such a problem.
– Missing your bus stop is the worst.
The cheap labor capitalists on the Seattle Times editorial board are at it again:
THE comedian Louis C.K. has a brilliant rant about an airline passenger who bemoans problems with in-flight Internet. As Louis C.K. said, grumping about the airline Wi-Fi ignores the miracle of flight itself. “Everyone on every plane should just constantly be going, ‘Oh my God! Wow!’ You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!”
We should all be impressed that the new generation of editors at this genteel family newspaper are young and hip enough to enjoy foul-mouthed Louis C.K.. Good for them. Though to be fair, from a consumer perspective, the airlines do suck way more than they have to, and as a technology, flying is no more magical than, say, electricity. So this is far from one of the comedian’s more brilliant rants.
Advocates pushing for a $15 minimum-wage are at a similar moment. The Seattle City Council, with backing from Mayor Ed Murray, is racing toward a radical economic policy that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.
Um, it was very thinkable even a year ago. In fact, a year ago, Kshama Sawant was running on a $15 minimum wage as the centerpiece of her insurgent Seattle City Council race at the same time organized labor was running a $15 minimum wage initiative in nearby SeaTac. And both of them won! That’s the very definition of “thinkable.” So I’m not sure why we should use the editors’ year-old paucity of imagination as an argument for watering down the measure now.
Yet Councilmember Kshama Sawant, and some of her allies in labor, are grumping about proposals to make this radical policy slightly more palatable for the business community.
“Grumping?” Really? Are they really equating defending the interests of working people with being grumpy? Maybe if Sawant just took a nap or something she’d stop sulking over efforts to pay teens and immigrants a sub-minimum wage… is that what the editors are implying? Remember: pro-worker = grumpy, pro-business = well rested! Way to infantilize the colored woman on the council, Seattle Times!
At the City Council’s first hearing on Murray’s $15 proposal last week, other council members pondered allowing a sub-minimum wage for 16- and 17-year-olds, as well as allowing a lower wage for a month or two of training.
Huh. How curiously nonspecific. A few paragraphs later the editors claim the sub-minimum wage is “usually defined as 85 percent of the standard wage,” but that’s not what state senate Republicans proposed last session. Their business-backed bill would have paid a training wage of 75 percent of the standard wage for the first 680 hours of work. That’s about four months of full time work. But as I explained at the time, it would pretty much mean that a college student working a part-time job would never earn the standard minimum wage.
Also screwed by a training wage would be every worker in high turnover industries like fast food and chain retail where annual turnover rates range up to 200 percent. With the typical worker getting no more than 30-hours a week, these jobs might never pay the full minimum wage. Which of course, is exactly the point.
The training wage idea is strongly backed by micro-businesses in Seattle’s ethnic minority community to facilitating training of new immigrants with limited English.
Except, the fact is, these ethnic minority owned “micro-businesses” (again, intentionally vague and nonspecific) are almost exclusively hiring immigrants from the same ethnic minority community. They speak the same language. So how exactly does paying them less money “facilitate” anything but poverty?
The teen wage idea acknowledges that employment rates for workers aged 16 to 19 in the Puget Sound have fallen by half since 2000, according to the Brookings Institution.
First, there is no correlation between teen employment and the minimum wage. None. Second, teen employment has fallen dramatically everywhere in the US since 2000, as our ever crappier economy has forced more and more adults into minimum wage jobs. What would the editors prefer—that a 26-year-old single mother lose her job so that her employer can pay a 16-year-old 25 percent less?
In response, Sawant said a lower minimum wage for teens means “condemning those low-wage workers to not having the best start in life.”
Sawant said, “The whole idea of $15 is to go forward. A training wage takes it backward.”
What’s missing from that analysis is this fact: Those earning a training wage would make slightly less than what would be the highest minimum wage of any city in the country.
And what’s missing from the Seattle Times analysis is the fact that the precedent of a training wage in Seattle would be seized upon by Republicans in Olympia (and some cheap-labor Democratic collaborators) as an opportunity to create a training wage statewide, cutting the already stagnant wages of tens of thousands of Washingtonians.
It may be an unwelcome burden to some, but Seattle’s $15 minimum wage ordinance is setting an example for the state and the nation. What we do here will surely influence what lawmakers do elsewhere. And that is what Sawant is talking about when she astutely warns that “a training wage takes it backward.”
Under Murray’s proposal, Seattle’s minimum wage would be more than $18 an hour by 2025 — $6 more than what the state minimum wage, which automatically rises with inflation, would be. Even with a subminimum wage — usually defined as 85 percent of the standard wage — teens and trainees would be making more than $15 an hour.
Okay, now the editors are just pulling numbers out of their collective ass, guessing at the training wage discount, mixing 2025 dollars with 2014 dollars in the same paragraph, and willfully inflating the inflation rate for maximum effect. By the same logic, we could just argue for leaving Seattle’s minimum wage law unchanged, because the status quo would have all workers making at least $15 an hour by 2034! Hooray!
The Seattle City Council should allow both. That would not make the council sellouts to business. It would acknowledge that Seattle is about to take off on a flight unfathomable just a year ago.
Again, it’s only “unfathomable” if you are totally out of touch with the will of Seattle voters.
Furthermore, sub-minimum teen and training wages are unacceptable to Sawant and organized labor not because they are “grumpy,” but because it would create a wage-stealing loophole big enough to drive a Walmart delivery truck through. Study after study finds that low-wage workers are routinely cheated, and these sub-minimum wage loopholes are nothing if not a recipe for cheating workers.
And finally, let’s be clear about what this teen and training wage proposal is really about. It’s not about accommodating immigrant-owned micro-businesses. It’s about destroying the delicate compromise worked out by the mayor’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee—a compromise that already takes 11 years to phase all workers in to what would be the equivalent of only $14.50 an hour in today’s dollars. Tack on a subminimum teen and training wage, and that whole deal falls apart.
Which I’m guessing is what the Seattle Times editorial board wants. Because I suppose it’s unthinkable to them that the far less business friendly $15 Now initiative could possibly pass.
– Public Internet is the fight of the future.
– Shorter Commissioner Tom Mielke: We have to keep arresting people for marijuana related crimes because we don’t want additional policing. (h/t on the article)
– Mars Hill is such a problem (h/t)
– Here’s Some Real Talk: ‘If Gay Guys Said the Shit Straight People Say’
How many more people have to die before Washington Post critic Anne Hornaday strikes again?
How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like “Neighbors” and feel, as Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of “sex and fun and pleasure”? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, “It’s not fair”?
Movies may not reflect reality, but they powerfully condition what we desire, expect and feel we deserve from it. The myths that movies have been selling us become even more palpable at a time when spectators become their own auteurs and stars on YouTube, Instagram and Vine. If our cinematic grammar is one of violence, sexual conquest and macho swagger — thanks to male studio executives who green-light projects according to their own pathetic predilections — no one should be surprised when those impulses take luridly literal form in the culture at large.
I mean, if Hornaday can make an argument for blaming Elliot Rodger’s tragic murder spree on “the toxic double helix of insecurity and entitlement that comprises Hollywood’s DNA,” then I can certainly make a go at blaming such tragedies on dangerously complicit commentary that totally ignores the role of, you know, the gun.
Rodger reportedly stabbed to death his two roommates and a guest at his apartment, and then shot to death two women and a man before turning the gun on himself.
I’m not saying that Hornaday doesn’t have any valid points about sexism in Hollywood, and she does at least make a nod to the role of mental illness in this tragedy. But she doesn’t even mention the role of the gun, or the role of our nation’s stupidly dangerous gun culture. And in that sense she helps contribute to the enabling of future such tragedies.
The Seattle Times has a feature on 82-year-old Al Ramey, who’s been driving Metro buses for 61 years, making him the longest tenured transit driver in the nation. Which is great, and all. But this particular section jumped out at me:
At age 82, he continues to drive one daily round-trip on the popular Route 150, connecting Kent, Southcenter, Sodo and downtown Seattle.
The longtime Burien resident officially retired in 2000, and currently receives a $2,795 monthly pension, records say. Ramey says his extra income from part-time driving pays for vacation cruises with his wife.
“And I’m not a sit-at-home guy,” he says.
So, if he’s been driving for 61 years, and he officially retired in 2000, that means he’s getting only $2,795 a month in pension benefits after 47 years of full-time service? That seems curiously out of line with the allegedly sky-high pay and extravagant benefits on which the paper’s editorial board disingenuously pins all of Metro’s financial problems.
Surely, $2,795 a month isn’t too much to ask in return for a half-century of driving a bus. Doesn’t sound extravagant to me.
(And as to the inevitable comments in the thread about double-dipping or something, Metro couldn’t operate its peak service without part-time drivers. If it’s not Ramey behind the wheel, it’ll be somebody else.)
IF public policy were based just on what we know works, universal pre-kindergarten education would already be the law of the land. The public duty to educate children would not, magically, kick in at age 5 for kindergarten. High-quality preschool would be a foundation for school readiness, leveling academic disparities across race and income lines.
But such a utopia is not to be found. The Washington Legislature is moving, slowly, in that direction; Congress, less so. Cities have begun to redefine the public duty to the tiniest of students. That is why the City of Seattle’s proposal for a universal, high-quality preschool experiment seems promising.
At the risk of sounding ungracious, my own complaint with the Seattle Times editorial board on universal preschool is that they didn’t take the lead on it sooner. For all their strong words in favor of charter schools, increased testing, and other so called “reforms,” high quality early learning is the only educational reform absolutely proven to work. If the editorial board had focused more on improving education and less on busting the teachers unions, perhaps Seattle might have moved toward universal preschool a couple years sooner.
Seattle City Council members are being lobbied hard by a group of immigrant and minority small business owners—mostly Asian—fighting to weaken the city’s proposed $15 minimum wage ordinance. So I just thought I’d take a moment to drill down to the core of their argument and remind council members that there is nothing particularly noble nor rational about defending the rights of immigrant business owners to pay poverty wages to immigrant workers.
And that’s basically what these immigrant business owners are demanding.
I suppose somewhere in the ID there might be a white suburban teenager busing tables or washing dishes or stocking shelves, but we all know that’s not the workforce we’re talking about here. Whereas minimum wage workers in general are disproportionately people of color, minimum wage workers at immigrant owned small businesses are almost entirely so. Thus any concession we make to immigrant business owners largely comes at the expense of their immigrant workers.
Yes, I know, this is a nation that was largely built on the backs of cheap immigrant (and slave) labor. And many of these immigrant business owners worked crappy, poverty-wage jobs themselves when they first came to this country. They were exploited when they first arrived, and now it’s their turn to do the exploiting. It’s the American way. Hooray!
But that doesn’t make it right.
Besides, the same economic arguments that apply to other businesses apply to immigrant owned ones as well. The personal stories of the owners may be more compelling than that of the guys my ex-colleagues at The Stranger have pimped for, but the economics are no different. Some immigrant owned businesses might struggle to pay their workers $15 an hour. Some might lay off workers. Some might move out of the city. Some might close up shop. But most will figure out a way to adjust and to thrive. Because that’s the American way too.
After the defeat of Prop 1, Eli Sanders wondered why suburban voters like light rail, but not buses.
Seattle is surrounded by a ring of voters who appear to hate the idea of funding buses. But in 2008, voters in that same suburban ring voted in favor of funding light rail. (Take the suburban city of Kent, for example. Only 27.2 percent of its voters wanted to save Metro bus service this year. But in 2008, returns showed 50.8 percent of Kent voters in favor of funding light rail.)
These were different measures, of course, but that’s very much the point. There was something in this year’s proposal — whether it be car tabs [to fix roads and fund bus service], the focus on bus transit, or Metro Transit itself — that alienated suburban voters. The result was a marked decline of support that cannot simply be attributed to anti-transit sentiments.
So what was it? The influence of the Prop-1-bashing Seattle Times on suburban voters? The weirdness of an April election? Something about the winsomeness of trains that buses just can’t match? Theories?
As a suburban voter (and a long-time Metro rider and supporter), I wish I had a better answer to this question. I was frustrated to see Prop 1 go down, but I wasn’t all that surprised. The roads near my house were littered with signs saying ‘No $60 car tabs’.
Part of the problem is certainly that trains are seen as a more efficient mode of transit than buses. But I also had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that Metro was bluffing about the need to cancel routes, and won’t actually cancel them. They cited the Seattle Times, but I’m not even sure the Times went quite that far down the rabbit hole (or maybe it did, I honestly don’t read their shit anymore). So maybe it’s not as much a negative view of buses as it is a negative view of Metro itself.
Either way, as a suburbanite who relies on the 102 bus to get to my job downtown, I have one thing to say to Seattle with respect to preserving the regional character of the Metro system.
Save your routes and don’t worry about us.
I know that I might be fucked if things continue in that direction and Metro starts to de-emphasize suburban routes, but seriously, it would be hilarious to watch traffic go to levels of shit previous thought unimaginable as all of us bus commuters get back in our cars. Let’s bring it on! Carmageddon!
According to the latest census estimates, Seattle’s population grew by 2.8 percent last year, the fasest rate among the nation’s 50 biggest cities. And that’s not all:
Seattle didn’t just surpass other big U.S. cities in 2013. For the second consecutive year, it outpaced its suburbs — and the new census data show this trend is accelerating.
Seattle grew at double the rate of surrounding King County between 2012 and 2013. That is significantly faster than in the previous year’s census estimates, which clocked Seattle’s growth at 25 percent faster than its King County suburbs.
Among all places in Washington with at least 50,000 residents, Seattle had the fastest rate of growth, and was followed by: Sammamish (2.2 percent), Auburn (2 percent), Richland (1.7 percent), and Redmond (1.7 percent).
Clearly, Seattle’s tax-and-spend liberalism is destroying our city and driving people away! Or something. Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn off the WiFi router?
I’d been meaning to comment on Danny Westneat’s recent column suggesting real estate development impact fees as an alternative to the current round of proposed tax increases, and I want to start by thanking Danny for at least attempting to think creatively on the issue. Really. I’m a big fan of using one’s media presence in the service of public brainstorming.
That said, while I’ve got nothing against them in theory, I don’t think impact fees can or should be a big part of the solution here in Seattle.
For example, take Danny’s inspiration: being crowded onto a sweaty No. 8 bus. “By state law impact fees can’t be used directly for transit,” Danny writes. So then, um, what’s the point? Seattle’s transportation benefit district—the same authority Mayor Ed Murray has proposed using to raise vehicle license fees and sales tax in order to buy back Metro bus service cuts—also has the authority to levy impact fees on commercial (nonresidential) development. But that’s not going to add any service hours to Danny’s No. 8 bus.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t use this authority to help fund roads and stuff, just that it does nothing to solve our immediate crisis.
Second, the notion of charging residential impact fees (Danny says that Bellevue charges $2,600 per house and $1,300 per apartment unit) would run headlong into Seattle’s efforts to address our city’s growing affordable housing crisis, both by making new housing more expensive, and potentially more scarce. Furthermore, anything that holds back new construction ends up adversely impacting property tax revenue, as new construction is exempt from I-747’s absurd 1 percent cap on regular levy revenue growth, and thus the engine of revenue growth in general.
Third, the logic of impact fees just doesn’t hold in a dense urban center like Seattle the way it does in a sprawling suburb, where new developments on virgin residential land often require the construction of new roads, new sewers, new fire stations, new schools, and so forth. Most residential development here in Seattle consists of in-filling in areas where all of these basic services already exist, so it just doesn’t carry with it the same sort of additional public infrastructure costs as a new suburban subdivision.
But finally—and this is my biggest complaint with Danny’s solution—impact fees do nothing to address the heart of the problem: our refusal to tax the people who can best afford to pay higher taxes. You know, the wealthy!
Implicit in Danny’s column is the acknowledgment that Seattle’s public services and infrastructure are underfunded. He’s not arguing with the need to expand bus service, maintain our parks, or fund universal preschool. He just seems to think that the latest round of proposed taxes are too much for the average taxpayer to bear. That’s debatable, but if you presume that it’s true, simply shoving the burden onto the backs of newcomers isn’t much of a solution. Instead, we should be looking for ways to ask our under-taxed wealthy to pick up more of the cost of maintaining the city in which they prosper. Not just out of fairness, but out the very pragmatic logic that they are the people with the most extra money to spare.
I look forward to Danny joining me in attempting to brainstorm a solution to that vexing problem.
Seattle City Council members Nick Licata and Kshama Sawant announced today a plan that would avert scheduled bus service cuts within Seattle through increases in the commercial parking tax and the employer head tax. You know, just like I had suggested.
“I have asked our policy staff to research exactly how much revenue could be raised through these means, and to begin drafting legislation to introduce to the City Council,” said Licata in a prepared statement.
Unlike Mayor Ed Murray’s proposed vehicle license fee and sales tax package, or the competing property tax proposal, hikes in the commercial parking tax and the employer head tax could be passed councilmanically without having to be put to voters. The council could pass these tax increases now, in time to avert the first round of Metro cuts that are scheduled for September. The other packages couldn’t go to voters before November, well after the first round of cuts are implemented.
Also unlike the other proposed taxes and fees, the commercial parking tax and the employer head tax aren’t particularly regressive. So that’s a big plus in their favor.
While only Licata and Sawant have put their names on this proposal, a birdie tells me that at least one or two other council members have expressed interest. So there is a real shot at preventing in-city bus cuts entirely instead of just preventing them from getting any worse.
– I’m assuming we won’t see any opinion pieces from Senator Pearson complaining that people breaking the law to get their way on steelhead release are bullies. [h/t to Roger in the comments]
– Congrats to Idaho couples and activists.
– The Clackamas County Clerk is sure a decent person doing her job well, so stop saying that she isn’t.
– Recess Shrinks At Seattle Schools; Poor Schools Fare Worst
– Here are some South Sound sports.
Goddamn liberal Seattle and its goddamn job-killing liberal policies!
April’s jobless rate of 6.1 percent was down from 6.3 percent a month earlier.
Joblessness in the Seattle metro area, which includes Bellevue and Everett, also declined two-tenths of a percentage point in April, to 5.0 percent.
As usual, Seattle accounted for most of the state’s job growth, with 7,100 of the 7,700 total coming from King and Snohomish counties alone.
No wonder the rest of the state hates us: our high taxes are stealing their jobs!
Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat gets it half right when it comes to special levies:
If you’re feeling fatigue at all this, council members say: Blame Tim Eyman. The property-tax cap inspired by Eyman forces the city into paying for services “a la carte,” one special request at a time. They said constantly asking for more money creates a perception that taxes are high, but they remain about average for a big city.
“The reason we keep going back to this well is because of Tim Eyman,” Burgess said.
Except other local cities have figured out how to survive under Eyman’s boot heel without being in a perpetual state of need or crisis. Bellevue, for instance, has only one special levy, a parks tax that passed six years ago.
Um, so here’s the thing, Danny: We’re not Bellevue. Or Renton. Or Issaquah. Or Zillah for that matter. We’re Seattle. Which means we have different values and different needs than other cities. I don’t expect Snoqualmie, for example to feel it necessary to raise taxes to buy back in-city bus routes. But then, Snoqualmie’s not nearly as transit dependent as Seattle is. So if they don’t want to pay extra to preserve Metro, that’s up to them. But Seattle is different.
Do you think other cities are magically spending money more efficiently than Seattle? No, they’re just making the political decision to provide fewer public services. Should Seattle reject universal preschool simply because none of our neighboring cities pay for it?
The point to remember, and it’s one I’ve emphasized repeatedly, is that none of these special levies and transportation benefit districts would have been necessary without Eyman’s initiatives. The whole purpose of these initiatives was to force the funding of public services to a la carte public votes. And with the sole exception of universal preschool, all of the levies we’re being asked to approve are to preserve existing services, not create new ones.
Seattle is not a high tax city. Never has been. So rather than comparing ourselves to how other King County cities tax themselves (none of which compare to Seattle in any way), we should be focusing on what we need, what we want, and what we can afford.
By all accounts Mayor Ed Murray is expected to ask the city council to send to the ballot a measure to buy back in-city Metro bus service cuts via a $60 car tab fee and tenth of a cent hike in the sales tax. Sound familiar? That’s the exact same tax that was rejected by King County voters last month in the form of Proposition 1, because it’s the exact same taxing authority also granted to the city via a transportation benefit district.
Call it Proposition 1.1.
I suppose this funding option is as good as any other, especially considering that Prop 1 passed here in Seattle. Even better, it’s Ed’s idea rather than Ben’s, so that means Prop 1.1 will enjoy Ed’s enthusiastic support. Which is fine. I don’t really care who gets the credit for things as long as good things get done. And buying back Metro bus service cuts is a good thing.
That said, I just can’t help but feeling a little wistful over the fact that just couple years ago Seattle voters rejected a similar car tab measure targeted toward expanding transit service—precious taxing authority we’ll now be using merely to preserve transit service. That’s not much of a step forward. Also, it is of course a shame that suburban and exurban Metro riders will be totally dicked over by these cuts. But what are we to do? Suffer in sympathy?
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!