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The U.S. Census Bureau released its latest numbers this morning, confirming that Washington state is in line to gain a tenth congressional district, starting in 2012.

That’ll be fun. Not only will this create a brand new open seat, likely in a swingy district carved out of Southwest Washington, it will also squeeze the boundaries of the other seven western districts, possibly shifting the red-blue balance here and there.

Unlike most other states, Washington’s got a relatively reasonable redistricting process, led by a bipartisan commission and a fairly strict set of guidelines, so we won’t get the sort of blatantly partisan gerrymandering we’ll surely see elsewhere. That said, it was heartening to see the Senate Dems recently select former Mayor Nickels henchman Tim Ceis as their representative on the commission. Whatever you think about Ceis, he’s about as Machiavellian as they come around these parts, so it’s good to see him part of the mix.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Washington’s population grew 14.1 percent over the past decade, to 6,724,540… well off the blistering 21 percent growth rate between 1990 and 2000.

Given that this is the year that we finally see an income tax initiative on the ballot, it’s hard for me to believe that this could be the worst initiative season ever… but this has gotta be the worst initiative season ever.

I mean, honestly, the way that corporate interests have so totally hijacked our state’s initiative process this year makes Tim Eyman look like Thomas Jefferson.

I’m guessing by the time ballots are cast this November, most voters will know that Initiative 1098 would raise taxes on households earning over $400,000 a year. But what most voters might not realize is that I-1098 will save the vast majority of us money, especially homeowners and small business owners.

For example, I’ll save $173.00 in the first year alone.

How do I know? Well, I ran my income and my annual property tax through the nifty I-1098 calculator created by the Economic Opportunity Institute… a calculator I’ve embedded below for your convenience below. Try it yourself and see how much money you’ll save.

Joshua Green at The Atlantic writes about the impact that marijuana legalization initiatives will have on partisan races:

I have a short piece in the current Atlantic about the marijuana ballot initiatives sweeping the country. (Paul Starobin also has an excellent cover story in National Journal.) But one issue nobody has examined is what effect these initiatives have on candidates’ performance at the polls. Acting on a tip from an Obama official, I found a few Democratic consultants who have become convinced that ballot initiatives legalizing marijuana, like the one Californians will vote on in November, actually help Democrats in the same way that gay marriage bans were supposed to have helped Republicans. They are similarly popular, with medical marijuana having passed in 14 states (and the District of Columbia) where it has appeared on the ballot. In a recent poll, 56 percent of Californians said they favor the upcoming initiative to legalize and tax pot.

The idea that this helps Democrats is based on the demographic profile of who shows up to vote for marijuana initiatives–and wouldn’t show up otherwise. “If you look at who turns out to vote for marijuana,” says Jim Merlino, a consultant in Colorado, which passed initiatives in 2000 and 2006, “they’re generally under 35. And young people tend to vote Democratic.” This influx of new voters, he believes, helps Democrats up and down the ticket.

I think it’s hard to argue with that. Younger people today are voting overwhelmingly for Democrats, so if you have an initiative that motivates more young people to vote, Democrats on the ballot will get a boost. But in California, where Proposition 19 will be voted on this fall, the picture may not be so clear.

The reason is because both Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown, the two Democrats running for statewide offices this year, both came out against the initiative. And they didn’t just check some checkbox somewhere saying that they were against it. They went full-on drug warrior with their public statements.

Boxer’s campaign put out a statement saying that it would lead to an increase in crime, and that law enforcement costs would go up. Just to underscore how ludicrous that statement is, the official ballot argument for Proposition 19 was signed by a former police chief, a former deputy chief, and a former judge.

Jerry Brown put out an even more ridiculous statement in opposition to Proposition 19 saying that it would open the floodgates for Mexican drug cartels. Jon Walker does an excellent job here drawing the parallels to alcohol prohibition and explaining why Brown’s statement makes absolutely no sense.

The recent polling for both Boxer and Brown hasn’t been good. Brown is trailing Meg Whitman in the Governor’s race. And in recent months, Boxer’s favorability numbers have taken a hit and she’s in a dead heat with Carly Fiorina. Her decline probably has a series of factors, but her opposition to the marijuana initiative is likely playing some non-trivial role in it.

I feel confident in saying that for two reasons. One, it’s an issue that puts her in direct opposition to her base (69% of self-described liberals support it according to the latest Survey USA poll). And two, I tend to think that while very few voters consider marijuana to be a major issue, a lot more of them have a strong enough opinion about the issue (and understand it well enough) for it to play into their overall perceptions of how the candidates would deal with issues more pressing, like the economy or health care. Boxer is being painted as an out-of-touch DC insider who caters to government interests. Her position on marijuana just plays right into that stereotype.

So how is this going to end up? Will the benefits to California’s big ticket Democrats from additional young voter participation due to Proposition 19 be counteracted by both Boxer’s and Brown’s laughable public stances on it? Someone with more time and resources than me could potentially put together some good poll questions to explore that, or to do some statistical analysis from existing polls. But what’s clear is that even if Democratic consultants see the benefit of having marijuana initiatives on the ballot, they apparently still don’t see the benefit of actually endorsing them.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting report in the San Francisco Chronicle about Boxer and her polling woes:

Boxer’s slight numerical lead masks potentially serious problems for the senator, starting with how 52 percent of the respondents hold an unfavorable view of her.

At the same time, her job approval rating is among the lowest that Field has measured for her since she was first elected to the Senate in 1992: 43 percent of registered voters disapprove of her performance while 42 percent approve. Among likely voters, 48 percent disapprove and 42 percent approve.

…

“It’s a reflection of the effectiveness of a Republican strategy to characterize Sen. Boxer as everything that’s wrong with the government,” said Larry Berman, a professor of political science at UC Davis. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., another longtime Democrat facing a tough re-election challenge, faces a similar predicament, Berman said.

As I mentioned above, the job of characterizing Senator Boxer as “everything that’s wrong with the government” becomes a lot easier when Boxer herself takes a position on the marijuana initiative that large numbers of both her base and independents understand as being “something that’s wrong with the government”.

93 loyal readers have now contributed $4,437 to our HA Fund Drive, an average of almost $48 per contribution. Thank you for your generosity. Combined with a $2,500 sponsorship pledge from SEIU 775, and we’re more than a quarter of the way toward our $25,000 target.

Two years ago, the last time I ran a fund drive, I set a $6,000 target over one week, and a flurry of last minute contributions took us over the top. This year I’m putting no time limit on the drive, understanding that some of the institutional checks I’ll need to hit the target just can’t be written at a moment’s notice. But so far, individual contributions are lagging behind the previous fund drive in both number and dollar total.

At the risk of repeating myself, a blog like HA, if done right, just can’t be done on a part time basis. Nobody paid me to cover today’s I-1077 press conference, and nobody will pay me for the extensive coverage of the initiative I’ll surely provide between now and November. So if this kind of coverage is important to you, I urge you to please give today and help keep me blogging.

Driving home from this morning’s I-1077 kickoff, I listened to KUOW’s The Conversation, as the Washington Policy Center’s Paul Guppy raised a familiar trope in opposition to a high-earners income tax, arguing that many high-earners will simply pick up and leave:

“People with high incomes are very mobile, so it’s easy for them to change their residence, to move their income or change their tax status in someway, so I don’t think that the supporters would realize as much revenue from this tax as they expect.”

Uh-huh.

A reporter raised this issue to Bill Gates Sr., who brushed it aside by asking “Where do you go?”… the point being that 43 other states already levy an income tax, so it’s not like I-1077 puts Washington at such a competitive disadvantage. “You could go to Alaska, I guess,” Gates continued, but even that level of dismissiveness takes the question too seriously, for the entire critique is predicated on the bizarre notion that we shouldn’t levy a tax on rich people because a handful of them might go out of their way to avoid paying it.

Guppy’s argument also ignores the fact that one of the advantages of being wealthy is that it enables you to consume and enjoy the finer things in life. For example, nobody forces anybody to spend $50,000 on a Lexus when a $10,000 Hyundai can get you from point A to point B just as well; wealthy folks choose to purchase luxury cars because they can afford them, just like they choose to raise their families in Medina or Mercer Island over, say, White Center or Gold Bar.

Likewise, I don’t expect a family earning a million dollars a year to move to South Dakota to save $30,000 in annual taxes. I mean, what would be the point of being rich?

As Gates explains, Washington is “a great place to live.” And it’s the folks who can best afford to live here who are actually least likely to leave.

I don’t know what’s normal and regular, but it’s a little disturbing this guy could get out on $20,000 bond, according to the AP. The judge ordered that he would have to be under curfew, and Wilson can’t have his precious guns. It’s something, anyhow.

The government that Wilson seems to hate so much is treating him with a remarkable amount of leeway, given that he apparently wished to assassinate a U.S. Senator. I’m going to put my full faith in the professionals who have made it their careers to protect the public, and figure they know what they’re doing.

As McJoan points out over on Daily Kos, much of the conventional wisdom about U.S. Senator Patty Murray’s presumed vulnerability has been driven by Republican pollsters, but according to the latest Research 2000 poll, not so much:

What R2K found? Patty Murray is the most popular Democrat in the state, with (contra Rasmussen) a 52 percent approval, and a 51 percent approval among all-important Independents. Only Obama is more popular with Washingtonians.

What’s more, she handily beats the leading conventional-wisdom contenders Rossi and Rep. Dave Reichert (WA-08).

Patty Murray (D)   52
Dino Rossi (R)     41

Patty Murray (D)   51
Dave Reichert (R)  43

While Republican pollsters and consultants have made an awful lot of money over the past 18 years underestimating Murray, Republican challengers haven’t done nearly so well, with the diminutive Democrat ending the the political careers of three sitting Republican congress-critters in a row. I suppose Dino Rossi or Dave Reichert might be dumb/arrogant enough to take a shot at Murray and hope for a Big Red Wave, but if I were them I’d wait to see a little more post-health-care-vote polling before counting on a right-wing surge to sweep them into the Senate.

Though as a liberal blogger, I gotta admit that a Rossi, Reichert or Susan Hutchison candidacy would make for an awful lot of fodder and fun.

The Republican mantra is that the real problem with the state budget is that state employees simply make too much and enjoy far too generous benefits. If we could just get rid of those damn public employee unions, we could balance our state budget merely by slashing the health care benefits and reducing the pay of state workers.

That’s the type of “fiscal conservatism” we’ve come to expect from Republicans. You know, like Republican state Attorney General Rob McKenna:

Total bonus payments within the Attorney General’s office exceeded those of any other state agency. Of the $1.9 million awarded as bonuses to state employees during FY 2009, nearly one-third – $599,000 – went to members of the McKenna’s staff (McKenna has been Attorney General since 2005).

The AG’s office awarded larger than average bonuses. While the average performance award for a state employee was $204, members of the AG’s office were awarded bonuses averaging $664 with 55 staffers getting bonuses of $3,000 each.

Bonuses were widespread. The AG’s office awarded a total of 901 bonuses to its staff of 1321 staffers, including 55 awards of $3,000 each.

Most awards were given during the economic downturn. In fall 2008, Governor Gregoire advised agencies to withhold performance recognition awards, and most agencies complied. However, the AG awarded the vast majority of his awards in February 2009, just as the Legislature was making draconian spending cuts to education and public health programs in an effort to balance the state budget.

Do as I say, not as I do, and all that.

As I explained the other day, one of the impacts of I-1033 would be to reduce regular property tax levies in many taxing districts to, well,  zero, and as Danny Westneat astutely points out in today’s Seattle Times, this would only make our already regressive tax structure even more regressive, amounting to little more than a giant tax break for the rich.

• Eventually give the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, up to a $571,000 break on the $1 million in annual property taxes he pays on his Medina mansion.

• Slash the taxes on billionaire Paul Allen’s waterfront home, on Mercer Island, by up to $150,000.

• Over time eliminate $1.7 million of the annual property taxes that Bellevue mogul Kemper Freeman pays on just one of his malls, Bellevue Square.

Not that this should surprise anyone, as the net effect of all of Tim Eyman’s tax-cutting initiatives has always been to favor the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class. Take Timmy’s hallmark I-695, which essentially eliminated car tabs, which, imperfect as they were, at the time constituted our only truly progressive tax on the books. Households with expensive, fancy cars (like Eyman’s) saved thousands of dollars, while those driving junkers actually saw their car tabs go up. Meanwhile, ferry riders saw fares rise and service decline, while rural cities and counties saw the sales tax equalization payments they once relied upon virtually disappear, resulting in loss of essential services, and in some cases, insolvency and unincorporation.

Likewise, Eyman’s I-747 has had an equally devastating impact, particularly on rural and poorer communities, and especially those without the rash of new construction that somewhat buoyed tax rolls here in King County until the recent housing market collapse. Limit your local fire district’s revenue growth to one-percent a year, and you could end up saving tens of dollars annually on your property tax bill, but see your Public Protection District rating drop a couple notches in the process, and your homeowner’s insurance might double or even triple. That’s the sort of hidden tax on working families that Eyman’s rhetoric hides.

According to Eyman’s favorite source, the Tax Foundation, Washington state and local taxes have steadily fallen over the past fifteen years, from 10.4% of personal income in 1994 to 8.9% in 2008, and yet given what support there is for I-1033, many Washingtonians obviously don’t feel the cuts. Why? Because for the most part, they haven’t received them. Not because legislators and other elected officials have ignored the mandate’s of Eyman’s initiatives (to the contrary, they’ve slavishly obeyed the measures, even when they were thrown out by the courts), but because under Eyman’s pro-wealthy tax policies, Washington’s tax structure has grown even more regressive.

Is this an accident or an oversight or an unintended consequence? Hardly. Eyman could have targeted our highly regressive sales tax, or even unit-based “sin taxes” like alcohol and tobacco, the most regressive sort of tax of all. But instead he’s focused entirely on those tax cuts that would benefit the wealthy the most, all the while spewing his familiar faux-populist rhetoric about defending the average taxpayer.

It is ironic that if I-1033 is to pass, it can only do so with the overwhelming support of those it will harm the most. But then, that’s been the way of all of Eyman’s initiatives.

During remarks last year before the Washington Policy Center, a conservative think tank funded by wealthy, right-wing donors, King County Exec wannabe Susan Hutchison took a moment to plug their Policy Guide for Washington State, a collection of policy proposals for key areas of government.

“I’d like to put in a plug for a book that you have on your tables. It’s called the Policy Guide for Washington State and it’s published by the Washington Policy Center. Let me tell you about this book. I have read it cover to cover and it is one of the most extraordinary pieces of work about Washington State and the policies that make our government run. It hits on 10 different subjects from health care, education, transportation, tax policy and others. But let me tell you, folks… if you started this book tomorrow morning and read it through you would be smarter by dinnertime tomorrow night. This book makes you smart. So I highly recommend that you take it and that you read it.”

So… what exactly are these “smart” ideas that have Hutchison so excited?

On transportation…

Manipulating transportation policies to force a particular behavior coerces people into abandoning their individual liberties in favor of a socialistic benefit where supposedly a greater collective good is created.

[…] Reduce spending on costly, ineffective fixed-route mass transit. Policymakers should change spending priorities that heavily favor mass transit systems despite chronically low ridership. Riders of these expensive systems, like light rail and the Sounder Commuter Train, are being heavily subsidized by automobile commuters, yet research shows that fixed rail does nothing to reduce traffic congestion.

[…] The problem is that transportation spending is based on other agendas rather than congestion relief. As a result, the cost of bringing goods to market rises and consumers end up paying more for products.

Sound Transit’s East Link proposal is a good example. Reconfiguring the center lanes across Interstate 90 (I-90) for light rail, as agency officials propose, would not only fail to reduce traffic congestion, it would, according to the state Department of Transportation, worsen traffic congestion by 25 percent.

On the environment…

Proclamations about the risks from climate change have been revised again and again, always downward, and other information has been shown to be more about politics than science.

[…] Eliminate the mandated “green” building standards for public buildings…

On science…

Even when the science is accurate, it does not indicate that the problem ought to be addressed or that particular policies should be followed.

On I-1033…

Adopt a constitutional amendment to limit the growth of spending to inflation and population growth.

[…]

Colorado’s spending limit, in contrast, was enacted as part of the constitution and has proved much more effective at protecting citizens from aggressive state spending. Passed by the people in 1992, Colorado’s Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR) limits the amount of tax revenue the state can keep each year to the sum of inflation plus population growth.

That’s right, in enthusiastically embracing Washington Policy Center’s recommendations (and in giving them over $100,000 from the foundation she ran), Hutchison was for I-1033 before she was against it, only worse, as the Policy Guide calls for the population-plus-inflation limit to be cemented in the state constitution, just like Colorado’s disastrous TABOR measure.

Hutchison can talk all she wants about being a moderate nonpartisan, but these are the policies she’s endorsed, these are the policies she’s helped fund, and these are the policies we must assume she’d pursue. If Hutchison wins in November, right-wingers will hail it as a huge victory, because she is one of them.  But her only path to victory is to hide this fact from voters.

Tim Eyman accuses I-1033 opponents of spinning scare-stories around the initiative’s potential impact, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the measure would unravel funding for state services and infrastructure when we only need look to Colorado. There a similar TABOR initiative pegged revenues to population-plus-inflation back in 1992, and the results have been devastating.

Joining Washington state educators at yesterday’s No on I-1033 press conference (you know, the one that Timmy so rudely crashed) was Colorado Education Association President Beverly Ingle, who explained how TABOR has eroded education funding, both at the K-12 and state university level. And, as I explained yesterday, as state education funding shrinks, so will local funding, despite Eyman’s uninformed and insincere assurances.

This isn’t rocket science. I-1033 will shrink the size of state and local government, and quite dramatically. That’s Tim’s goal. And by shrinking government I mean it will reduce the quality and breadth of government services, and defer crucial infrastructure investments.

So, if what you think we need to do is spend less money on education, I-1033 is for you. Because that’s exactly its intended result.

Or if you hate children, and don’t want to properly educate them, I guess you’d want to vote Yes on I-1033.

According to new census figures, 730,000 Washingtonians lived in poverty in 2008, 11.3 percent of the population. And those are 2008 numbers; no doubt the poverty rate will rise along with the unemployment rate in 2009.

Of course, the poverty rate is much higher in rural counties — you know, Republican country — which I guess should be alarming to those on the right who insist that poverty comes from laziness and making bad moral choices.

Assuming his numbers can be trusted (and that’s a huge assumption), Tim Eyman has apparently turned in enough signatures to qualify Initiative 1033 for the November ballot, his most vindictive, dangerous and mean-spirited initiative yet.

I-1033 is a “TABOR” initiative, one of many, similarly constructed spending-cap measures that have been peddled in the initiative states nationwide, and have been funded by a shadowy network of ultra-wealthy, right-wing extremists. Thus, unlike most of Eyman’s initiatives, don’t be surprised to see a fair amount of out of state money flooding into Washington to fund the “Yes” campaign.

The Washington State Budget and Policy Center has a great analysis of I-1033 and its consequences, and I encourage you to watch their slideshow, but don’t think it an exaggeration to summarize the measure as the end of Washington state government as we know it.

I-1033 caps government spending at the previous year’s spending, plus population growth and inflation, and while that may appear to be a formula for fiscal stability, it is in fact entirely and intentionally the opposite.

As I’ve previously explained, Implicit Price Deflator (IPD) for Personal Consumption Expenditures, the inflation index I-1033 uses, comes nowhere close to measuring the rising costs of providing government services. For example, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, the cost to consumers of durable goods has plummeted 14 percent since 2000, while the cost of consumer services has risen 29 percent.  Over that same period of time the IPD (generally accepted to be the most accurate measure of inflation) has risen 21.6% for Personal Consumption Expenditures as a whole, but over 42% for State and Local Government.

So why has the inflation rate for state and local government services risen at nearly twice the rate as that for consumer expenditures?  According to a report compiled by the Washington D.C. based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, it mostly comes down to productivity:

Proponents of TABOR-type tax and expenditure limits sometimes contend that a growth formula based on population plus inflation would be adequate to maintain public services at a roughly constant level. But researchers long have recognized that the services provided in the public sector, such as education, health care, and law enforcement, tend to rise in cost faster than many other goods and services in the economy in general. This analysis was first put forward by economist William Baumol, who pointed out that technology and productivity gains may make goods cheaper to produce, but the services that government provides are different. Baumol said public services typically rely heavily on well-trained professionals — teachers, police officers, doctors and nurses, and so on — and technology gains do not make these services cheaper to provide. It may take far fewer workers to build an automobile than it did 30 years ago, but it still takes one teacher to lead a classroom of children. (In fact, as education has become increasingly important, the trend is toward more teachers per pupil, not fewer.) Doctors generally still see patients one by one, and nursing care remains labor intensive despite technology.

Even in a stable economy, population plus inflation just can’t keep up with the rising costs of providing government services, resulting in government spending power dropping year after year after year (as is already happening in WA state under our current unfair and inadequate tax system these past fifteen years). But of course, our economy is not stable, and here is where I-1033’s true destructiveness comes into play.

I-1033 would limit annual spending to that of the previous year adjusted for population growth plus IPD, which means that during every economic downturn, the base level of spending from which future increases are calculated will be ratcheted down to the lowest revenue point, creating an ever widening gap between projected spending increases, and those actually allowed under I-1033.

Of course, Eyman chooses the trough of our worst economy since the Great Depression on which to base future revenue increases, but even if he hadn’t, the inevitable result would still be a dramatically smaller government, and in short time. For example, had I-1033 been implemented in 1995, revenues during our current, already squeezed biennium, would have been $6 billion lower than they are now.

How much is $6 billion? That’s the current state budget for higher education, natural resources, public health, early learning, corrections and the Basic Health plan… combined!

Like I said, it’s not an exaggeration to describe I-1033 as the end of state government as we know it. In fact, the consequences would be so unbelievably dramatic that there is almost a sense of complacency amongst the opposition—we simply can’t believe that the majority of voters could be so stupid as to pass such an incredibly irresponsible measure.

But it’s ignorance, not stupidity that frightens me.

If I-1033 draws in national money from the usual pro-TABOR suspects, this could be an awfully tough fight. The TABOR camp has spent years honing their rhetoric and talking points, and Eyman has been dutifully aping their instructions since filing. It’s going to take a lot of voter education to defeat this measure, and with the weakened state of our local media, and the generally timid demeanor of our political leaders, I’m not entirely confident that we’re properly prepared to defend against this latest assault on our quality of life.