Initiative Measure No. 1098 concerns establishing a state income tax and reducing other taxes. The measure would tax “adjusted gross income” above $200,000 (individuals) and $400,000 (joint-filers), reduce state property tax levies, reduce certain business and occupation taxes, and direct any increased revenues to education and health.
This one is another easy one for me. Washington has one of the most regressive tax structures in the country, because it relies heavily on the business and occupation tax, and the sales tax. Both of those taxes make low income folks pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than higher earners. The B&O tax because it gets passed on in prices, though a fair amount of it is non-consumer goods. As people make more money, the marginal sales tax rate with respect to a person’s income falls because consumption falls off at higher incomes. Money moves from consumption to investment. To explain, if you are broke, the next $5 you get will be spent on food (or gas, or whatever). If you made $1,000,000 last year, the next $5 will much more likely be used to buy stocks (or bonds or whatever). The sales tax on the poor person’s $5 is going to be approximately 50¢ where the sales tax on the rich person’s $5 will be close to zero. The choice to not spend is constrained the poorer one is.
We also rely heavily on a property tax, but that also gets passed on to anyone who lives in the state. It’s either direct, or paid out in higher rent. I don’t think property taxes are as regressive as the sales tax, but they are still regressive.
I1098 establishes a high earners income tax for the state, while cutting a portion of property taxes and B&O taxes. Income taxes can sometimes be regressive, but they are easier to structure to avoid it. In this case, it’s very progressive. People who need the next $5 to eat won’t get taxed. People who invest it in stock will. For that reason alone I am for it.
I also think it will help stabilize the state’s revenue somewhat. Not completely, but a bit. Aggregate income is a better gauge of the state’s economic activity than consumption. Consumption can only drop so low, and it can only climb so high. It allows the state to skim off the income in good years for the bad. We currently do that with sales taxes, to some degree.
The only arguments I’ve seen against it are hysterical rantings. The legislature will extend it to other people in 2 years!! Yup. They could. They could establish an income tax and extend it right now. This changes nothing with regard to what the legislature could do. And it changes nothing as far as people’s ability to oppose it. If people are against increasing the tax, and the voters don’t want it, they’ll vote them out. Or have a referendum against the law.
I’ve also seen but I’m not rich even though I made nearly $2,000,000 last year. And even no one I know who makes $200,000 is rich. It’s not fair to MEEEEE! Here’s something to think about: SHUT THE FUCK UP! You are rich. This is not the end of the world. You can better afford this than someone making $20,000. They’ve been sucking it up for years. Now you’ll have to for a bit.
By the way, in case you were wondering, these opinion piece aren’t really intended to convince people. These are polemics which explain my reasoning for voting for them. I fully realize telling a rich person to STFU isn’t going to convince them to vote for this.
Initiative Measure No. 1082 concerns industrial insurance. The measure would authorize employers to purchase private industrial insurance beginning July 1, 2012; direct the legislature to enact conforming legislation by March 1, 2012; and eliminate the worker-paid share of medical-benefit premiums.
My opinion on this one won’t be as long as I-1053. I’m all for having private workman’s comp insurance options, but I don’t think this initiative is the way to do it. My concern is with who wrote this: the Building Industry Association of Washington. The No on I-1082 campaign has a detailed list of the problems they see in the fine print of the initiative. Their take is that the fine print will leave workers on the hook for job related health problems (injuries, occupational illnesses, etc.) for businesses that choose to go this route.
I’m not a lawyer. I can’t parse through all the fine print and compare it to existing law, regulations, and court cases to see where it falls down. I don’t exactly believe the F.U.D. pushed by the no campaign either. I have read the detailed text of the initiative though, and it’s certainly not a clean easy to understand bill. While those issues may not be nefarious, they could be, and I don’t have a good way to tell. If it were the product of negotiation in the legislature, I’d be in favor. But it’s not.
I-1082 is the product of a conservative business organization that’s known for looking out for it’s interests instead of the general public. If you look at the list of organizations endorsing the initiative on the Yes on I-1082 web site, every single one of them is a business interest. Their argument is that if they can get cheaper insurance, they’ll hire more people. I really don’t think that’s the case. They’ll take the difference and put it into their profits (or maybe lower prices if the particular industry is extra competitive). You don’t pay more for one ingredient because you pay less for another. They’ll increase wages only if the demand for labor increases relative to the supply, and this doesn’t change that ratio at all. I just don’t see this as a net win for workers.
So I’ll vote against I-1082. If called on to vote on a version created by the legislature, I’d vote for that.
A few of my friends have asked if I planned to write about my opinions on the upcoming election, particularly regarding the initiatives on the ballot. I love spouting off my opinion, so here I go! Of course, I want to point out to my 3 or 4 readers that none of what I write is particularly original. You can probably find much better argumentation elsewhere on the internet.
Initiative 1053 concerns tax and fee increases imposed by state government. The measure would restate existing statutory requirements that legislative actions raising taxes must be approved by two-thirds legislative majorities or receive voter approval, and that new or increased fees require majority legislative approval.
This is a Tim Eyman measure. That alone almost tells you how I will vote on it. The only Eyman measure I’ve ever voted for was the one that instituted performance audits.
Several previous Eyman measures passed that duplicate what this measure does. But the state legislature has suspended the rules instituted by those initiatives in order to pass budgets. How does that work? According to the Washington state constitution, Article II, Section 1(c), after two years the legislature may do what it wants with any initiative. During the two years, changing an initiative requires a 2/3 vote of the legislature. It’s been more than two years, so they suspended it. This initiative basically unsuspends it for another two years. (The legislature did not overturn the law, just suspended it.)
Well, as you can guess, this royally pissed off the Eyman crowd, and that’s why they have this initiative.
My view is that a supermajority should only be required for extra-ordinary circumstances, things that don’t happen too often: changing the state constitution, declaring war, suspending civil rights, expelling a legislator. A supermajority means that a minority of people can prevent action. That’s appropriate to prevent civil rights from being abrogated. It’s appropriate to keep a power from being unchecked. But for mundane things, it’s inappropriate to require a consensus. It checks power too much. We already have mundane checks on power for mundane things: voting out legislators, separate bodies of the legislature, gubernatorial vetoes, the court system, referendum, and probably lots more that I haven’t thought of.
There’s nothing more mundane for the legislature about running government than determining the budget, taxes, and spending. Holding the running of the government hostage to a minority is bad business. As much as I object to funding abstinence only sex education, for instance, I don’t think a liberal minority should hold that up. (Luckily, that doesn’t seem to be the case recently.) I have the option of voting for a different candidate, for collecting petitions on a referendum, or having a sympathetic governor veto it (or line-item veto it).
I have another philosophical problem with this initiative, like the previous versions of it: it attacks a made up problem. Washington state does not have out of control taxation. I-1053 proponents would have you believe that the legislature can’t prioritize and so it just increases taxes to fund everything it wants. But that’s not the case. The Great Recession reduced the state’s revenues by billions. From I-1053 proponents, you’d think the legislature’s response was to raise taxes and fund all previous programs. We faced a reduction of revenue to the tune of about $2.8 billion for the current budget. The legislature raised about $780 million in taxes. The state received another $1.4 billion from other sources, such as the federal government and the rainy day fund. It cut about $714 million from the budget. I certainly think people can legitimately argue that there should have been more cuts. What is ludicrous is the idea that government just taxes and spends.
The approach is wrong. Don’t just say the legislature has it’s priorities wrong. Tell them exactly how it’s wrong. Get signatures on an initiative that eliminates programs you think are wasteful. (Initiatives can’t actually budget though. That does make things more difficult for this method.) I almost never see people who say the state taxes too much actually propose specific programs that should be cut. They instead rail about wasteful spending. But they never want to do the hard work of finding the wasteful spending. That’s the legislature’s job, according to them. Which it is, but it is also their job as citizens, voters, and human beings to give the legislature guidance. The few times I see suggestions of actual cuts, they are unrealistic for various reasons. Eliminating welfare completely. Or the cuts don’t come close to adding up to what’s needed to cut spending by the amount they want.
The reality is that the state tax burden is declining. That’s the evidence from the conservative Tax Foundation. In 1994, the state had an effective tax rate of 10.4% ranking it 17th among states. In 2008, the effective rate was 8.4%, ranking us 35th. Those numbers include both state and local taxes. At the state level only, the number of employees dropped over 4% from 2008 to 2009. Over the longer term, the state hasn’t exactly grown hugely in employees. According to the U.S. Census, the state had 133,000 employees in 1997, 149,000 in 2002, and 153,000 in 2007. That’s about a 15% growth in employees over 10 years, and before recent cutbacks. Over that same time period, the state’s population grew 13.6%. State government got a little but larger than our population would indicate, but not by much. Wages and salaries for state employees over that time went from $307 million per month in 1997, to $411 million in 2002 and $504 million in 2007. That seems like a huge increase, until you adjust for inflation. That $307 million in 1997 is worth $397 million in 2007, and the $411 million from 2002 is $473 million in 2007. Inflation adjusted, that’s a 26% increase from 1997 to 2007, but only a 6% increase from 2002. Compare that to the 6.5% increase in population from 2002 to 2007. Our gross state product (a measure of the size of the economy) grew 34% from 1997 to 2007. In other words, the state government isn’t growing like metastasized cancer. It’s grown, but not in uncontrollable ways. It’s growth our current tools for managing our government already can deal with.
To sum up, philosophically I-1053 is the wrong approach. Practically, I-1053 tries solve a problem that doesn’t exist to the level it’s proponents claim it does. That’s even if you think growing spending is a problem at all. I don’t. I think the legislature is already doing a halfway decent job at overall budgeting.
Data was pulled from generally reliable sources but percentages and other calculations when not explicitly supplied were done on the back of a napkin. Go dig up the data yourself if you don’t trust my numbers.
Stop the cuts / Photo by Tom Wills used under CC BY-NC license
Photo by Fibonacci Blue used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
By now, most of my friends know that a judge in struck down California’s Proposition 8. Being the obsessive person that I am, I downloaded a copy of Vaughn Walker’s decision on Proposition 8. Here’s a couple of thoughts I have on it. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer, so my speculation is probably suspect.
First, he laid out a lot of facts in the record to support his conclusions. And his legal reasoning based on those facts is detailed and methodical. The analyses I’ve seen online say that going to make it harder to overturn.
However, the Proposition 8 proponents were fairly negligent in putting on their case. They called two experts who were not qualified. I wonder how much precedential weight other courts will give the case when people challenge similar laws in other states because of this. Will they allow bigots in other states to put on a better case or will they give weight to the essentially unopposed facts and conclusions from this decision? If this were a death penalty case, the proponents would have a great case for ineffective assistance of counsel. I personally believe the scientific evidence offered in the case by marriage equality folks is pretty unassailable, but their opponents barely tried.
One of the facts that was a pretty important part of this case was the fact that California does not discriminate based on sexual orientation in adoption and child fostering. With or without Proposition 8, California viewed gay parents as equal to straight parents. That was one of a couple of facts underlying his decision that are specific to California.
That’s important because it totally undercut one of the reasons the Prop 8 proponents gave as a compelling government interest in banning gay marriage. They claimed the state had a compelling government interest to ensure that that children are raised by biological parents of opposite sexes. Since Prop 8 did nothing to change how gay parents would be treated, that could not be a compelling government interest behind Prop 8.
So, that makes me wonder if states that have been more intransigent in their deleterious treatment of homosexuals might have an easier time getting their gay marriage bans upheld. In other words, the might get away with claiming a compelling government interest in ensuring children have biological parents raising them.
Then again, an appeals court might give a fairly broad-based reason for upholding the decision that makes that reasoning moot.
The facts not specific to California could carry over to other cases unless other folks are allowed to put on a case that challenges the established facts in this case. I’m not really sure if other courts would just assume these facts are uncontroverted, or what. Things like studies that show no difference in child outcomes for gay parents versus straight parents when other family status items like class or cohabitation status are controlled for. Or that studies of gays and lesbians as a group show they do not have political power (used to support the designation of sexual orientation as a suspect class and justify strict scrutiny). At what point in the life of this issue as a legal controversy do those become dicta?
Anyhow, it’s a really good decision. Much better than the Washington State Supreme Court decision on gay marriage a couple of years ago. And I say that not because I like Walker’s conclusion better (though I do), but because it’s much more thoroughly reasoned.
Yesterday, The Stranger published an in-depth piece about the things that could go wrong with the proposed deep-bore tunnel downtown that would replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Stranger’s reporting has gone downhill since Josh Feit left a few years ago, but this one is pretty good muck-raking yellow journalism. I urge you to read it if you live around here.
I’m not particularly invested with whether we replace the viaduct with a tunnel, another viaduct, or with a surface option. I don’t think having unshadowed access to the downtown waterfront is key to Seattle’s future. I wouldn’t mind it, but whatever. I do care about a couple of things though. First, the current viaduct is unsafe and should come down.
Second, I don’t think it should be Seattle’s responsibility to pay for the replacement. And that’s where things seems to have gone off the rails in the last year. As it stands right now, if anything big goes wrong with the tunnel construction (and if you read The Stranger article, much could), there’s no money to pay for fixing the problems. The state has said it will try to find a way to make Seattle residents pay for it, on the theory that we’re the ones who really want the tunnel. The Seattle City Council (or at least a couple of them, Tim Burgess and Richard Conlin) say we won’t have to pay, but all they offer is some trust us, we’ll make sure we don’t have to pay statements. In the meantime, the City Council wants to move ahead and sign contracts without dealing with the issue of what to do with cost overruns up front.
So what? Stuff’s gotta be paid for right? I’m generally in favor of levies and taxes for needed things. However, Seattle already has a huge deficit, according to the 2010 Seattle adopted budget. We have revenue of $3.4 billion ($1.2 billion from property taxes) and expenses of $3.8 billion. We’re already trying to figure out how to make up that $400 million. A lot is coming from other resources. Cost overruns on the tunnel could easily double our deficit. In other words, if something goes wrong big time (and that often happens), we’re either going to see significant property tax increases, or we end up with an unfinished and useless tunnel, no viaduct, and the state has spent a buttload of money that we don’t get back. The third option is to spread the cost increases across the state, but that’s not the way the law reads right now.
If you live in Seattle, it behooves you to let the City Council know now that you’d prefer cost overruns be planned for now. Richard Conlin and Tim Burgess are probably the two council people who need opposing feedback the most. Or, if you’d prefer to cross your fingers, you can just not do anything.
I follow a lot more feminist blogs than your average clueless male, or at least I think I do. I am more often than not in agreement with the feminists who post there. But sometimes I disagree. Of course.
Anyhow, I just had an epiphany.
All of these feminists are smart, sun-blinding smart. They would easily shred 90% of anyone in debate. There may be 1% or 2% who would edge them out, but no more. And then only if those folks brought their A game.
The neologism making the rounds this winter is snowpocalypse referring to the big snowstorm that hit the east coast. The Lede a blog at the New York Times, attempted to track down the origins of the word snowpocalypse. They tracked it back to Seattle last year, and a few other places in 2007 and 2006.
But they didn’t really find the origins.
Someone on the Seattle Livejournal Community wants that community given credit for Snowpocalypse. And they certainly have a case for popularizing it during last year’s snow storm, though the Stranger’s Slog and other popular local blogs had a lot to do with it. But the term goes further back than that.
But they are wrong. Searching even further back I found a post by sea_colleen at Seattle Metblogs that used the term Snowpocalypse a couple weeks before DCist did. I didn’t use Google to find that. I knew it where it was because the origins of the term have come up before, and I know the term had currency in one Seattle group before 2005.
Seattle Metblogs sea_colleen is Leenerella on Livejournal, and she was an active participant on the old Seattle Gothic message boards, hosted on ezboard. The word was used there a lot in the 2002 to 2004 time frame to refer to the local media’s hyperbolic coverage of various snow events. They’d imply that the city would shut down, but then we’d get ¼ inch of snow and life would go on. If we did get any snow, King 5 would send Danger Jim Forman outside to report from the most blustery location he could find.
I don’t know who first used the term on Seattle Gothic. I don’t know where they stole it from or if that person coined it herself. But the folks there have a better claim than the other pretenders.
Sadly, little remains of that message board. The moderators pruned message threads, particularly little content ones like Snowpocalypse!. Ezboard moved it from server to server, and lost oodles of discussion threads in various crashes. Versions of it were hosted by members both before and after it was on Ezboard. Ezboard became Yuku and some archives are there. The Wayback Machine has a few posts archived.
Edited to add: Found a couple other references from Sea-Gothers that pre-date DCist’s claim. Here’s Prince of Happiness, another Sea-Gother, using snowpocalypse in December 2005 as well. And a snapshot from the Wayback machine of forum topics on Seattle Gothic from January 2005, one of which is SNOWPOCALYPSE 2005!!1ONE!!!ELEVEN!1!!.
So I’m reading Nariman Behravesh’s Spin-Free Economics (which isn’t). In particular, I’m reading the section on immigration. Behravesh is decidedly pro-immigration. I tend to be middle of the road here, neither falling in with the conservative camp railing against immigrants stealing jobs, nor with the liberal camp that bemoans the poor treatment we give illegal immigrants. Put it another way, I don’t have enough information really to come to any really good opinions about immigration.
I guess the way I’ve been trending in my political thought in the last few years is towards a sort of free-market liberalism. In other words, finding market based solutions for problems that the country faces. I still favor government intervention, but in such a way as to align that intervention with how people naturally behave. I don’t believe markets are magic. Any serious look at the economics of health insurance shows there’s a huge disincentive to that market working properly. But using the free market can have huge benefits. Carbon taxes or an auction based cap and trade system for reducing greenhouse gases, for instance.
Back to the immigration thing. Our current immigration policy essentially allows large numbers of low-skilled immigrants and very few high skilled immigrants. While there’s lots and lots of bloviating about illegal immigrants, there’s very little that’s done about it in comparison to the number of people that are illegally here, though what’s done is fairly harsh. Illegal immigration is largely composed of low skilled immigrants.
High skilled immigrants, like doctors and economists and journalists and programmers, is very limited. Illegal immigration for these kinds of people is much lower. Legal immigration is also limited. But if we put high skilled employees in direct competition with people who are willing to work for less, the benefits to the average American would be much greater than low skilled immigrants. Bringing in one doctor who is willing to work for 10% less than American doctors will help the average American far more than 10 additional minimum wage landscapers.
So how to do that? The thought that occurred to me as I was reading was an auction. Set the number of people allowed to enter the country legally at a fairly high, but limited number, say 250,000 or 300,000 per year. Then auction off those slots. Use the money to help fund job training for those displaced, and for additional safety net protections that conservatives complain about. I.e., they complain about immigrants using welfare. Well, use these visa auctions to fund welfare for immigrants.
The economics of it would favor high skilled immigration, but not cut off low skilled immigration if the number allowed in is set high enough.
At the same time, I would drastically reduce the paperwork necessary to immigrate this way.
Obviously, I can’t have been the first person to think of this. On returning home, a quick search brought up some academic papers relating to the idea. And something on the Becker-Posner Blog, which I generally avoid because Richard Posner is annoyingly a hack in areas outside his expertise. But nothing I could find that was written for a non-economist that discusses both pros and cons.
Remember in 2002 when the U.S. went to war with Iraq because the U.S. government said Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, and then it turned out that Iraq wasn’t? Me too.
Because of that I’ve been skeptical about U.S. government claims about Iran‘s nuclear program for the last couple of years. Having a Democratic President hasn’t lessened my skepticism. Here’s an example.
In an A.P. story on Iran’s obligations to the I.A.E.A. this morning, Iran claims it revealed it’s new secret nuclear facility early. According to them, they don’t need to reveal anything about it until 6 months prior to it going operational. According to the I.A.E.A., the additional protocols to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty require disclosure as soon as Iran started planning. Iran claims they aren’t party to those additional protocols (they voluntarily followed them for a couple of years) anymore, and Mohamed El Baradei (the head of the I.A.E.A.) claims that Iran can’t back out of them.
What are these additional protocols to the N.N.P.T.? Follow that link to read them. What I find interesting is that the I.A.E.A.’s own web site says that the agreement with Iran on those protocols was never in force. And the additional protocols document itself explicitly refers to the date the protocols come into force in the section on when a state has to disclose a facility. It does not refer to the ratification date or the date the I.A.E.A. approves the protocols with that state.
So who’s right? I don’t know. But it’s certainly much more ambiguous than the U.S. government and the I.A.E.A. claim. And my own personal idea of open and forthcoming requires much more than following the legal requirements.
some Black Caucus members said that Wilson’s outburst is but the latest in a long string of ugly events rooted in racism, such as last week’s flap over Obama addressing the nation’s schoolchildren …
I agree that there’s a large element of racism behind the anger and attacks on Barack Obama, but I don’t think the anger or attacks would disappear if racism wasn’t present (magically). A vocal and more-or-less-in-charge-of-the-party section of the Republican party would proffer idiotic baseless attacks that in previous generations would be laughed as paranoid delusions no matter which Democrat was President. And the media would be a primary legitimizer of those attacks no matter who was President.
Remember Bill Clinton? He was accused of murdering Vince Foster, running drugs, raping women, and having the Arkansas State Patrol kill opponents.
How about Al Gore? He got branded as a liar and an environmental lunatic. Of course, he turned out to be right on the money for his concerns about global warming. Every major case of his lies weren’t things he said. They were things Republicans and journalists said he said, but when quotes were checked he hadn’t said them.
Just a little over four years ago John Kerry helped coin the term Swift-Boating as it’s first subject. The so-called fringe right turned John Kerry’s war service from one of honor and valor to one of lying and cowardice. Their claims were all false.
And now Barack Obama gets the beat-down from the right wing. Racism is changing the substance of their attacks, and perhaps the number of them. But since 1994’s Contract With America, the trend has been towards a Republican party dominated by right wing lunatics with little grasp of the truth. Had we elected Hillary Clinton these attacks would have been anti-woman in nature, rather than racially focused. Even if we elected someone like Dennis Kucinich, we were bound to get crazy falsehoods.
The simple fact is that those who control the Republican party are by and large people who don’t believe anyone but the far right has a legitimate claim to power. And they will believe whatever it takes to confirm their view of the world.
But they are also racists.
Why sensible people remain Republicans I do not understand.
