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Full-time Work, Part-time Pay

Last week the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an excellent series on an often-overlooked failing of our economy: the plight of the working poor. In King and Snohomish Counties (home to Seattle, Bellevue, and Everett), one in five people lives in a household that earns less than twice the federal poverty level. And nearly two-thirds of those households have at least one full-time wage earner.

In a region that honors hard work, it doesn’t seem right that full-time workers are still living on such meager amounts.

Washington’s poverty rate has been steadily marching upward for the last several years. But the federal poverty line is a bad measure because it’s far too low. In the Seattle area, even twice the federal poverty level is often barely enough to scrape by. Worse, many low-wage earners often have tenuous job security and few benefits, compounding the danger of their precarious finances.

These days, being poor in Washington is especially burdensome. To cite just a few examples from the P-I‘s series:

  • Washington’s tax system is highly regressive: "According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy… Washington families living at the federal poverty level pay 17 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, whereas the highest-income families pay 3 percent."
  • The Puget Sound region is expensive: "Seattle-area grocery prices rose 42 percent over the past 12 years, compared with the national average of 36 percent. And in the 1990s, the cost of child care at day care centers in King County jumped 31 percent."
  • And housing is especially expensive: "The average cost of a residential house in King County jumped 116 percent over the past 12 years, from $181,128 to $390,974. In the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett area, the fair-market rent today for a two-bedroom apartment averages $923 a month, an 81 percent increase since 1990."
  • Getting an advanced degree is tougher than ever: "The state’s universities are so crowded that, to name just one example, the University of Washington stopped accepting applications this quarter from community college students hoping to transfer there to finish their bachelor’s degrees."

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Article of the Day

If you read nothing else in the news today, read Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column “No Mullah Left Behind.”

The crux:

"By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit’s automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is – as others have noted – financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote."

Pro Whaling

The great controversy (discussed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) over the Makah tribe’s whaling is rooted, like so many contemporary Indian issues in the Northwest, in the treaties of 1855, now 150 years old.

I side with the Makah. The five or fewer gray whales they intend to hunt each year are from a now healthy population numbering in the tens of thousands. Aside from sentimentalism about marine mammals, I can’t see a single compelling reason to effectively abrogate the Makah’s treaty rights by denying their application to resume the hunt.

The notion that recognizing the Makah’s right to hunt whales will create a precedent for a widespread return to commercial whaling seems preposterous. The Makah are the only group in North American with an explicit right to whale in their treaty. And they have a 1,500 year history of whaling responsibly.

It seems to me that the Makah whaling issue is controversial primarily because it is a wedge: it separates advocates for sustainability from animal rights activists.

What do you think about Makah whaling? I’m curious where blog readers stand.

A Study in Contrasts

So Seattle’s Montlake neighborhood just unveiled a proposal to replace the 520 floating bridge across Lake Washington with a project whose centerpiece, according to the Seattle P-I, would be…

a suspension bridge that would soar from near Interstate 5 over Portage Bay and Montlake and then descend to a new floating bridge on Lake Washington….

Neighborhood residents who overflowed a building at Montlake Park on Wednesday night were enthusiastic about the plan, which one of the creators, Rob Wilkinson, said could be "a signature bridge"—perhaps one designed by the famous designer Santiago Calatrava. He has seen the site and expressed general interest.

There’s more to the plan than that.  Including the pricetag:  $3 billion, or a billion more than the state’s existing plan for replacing the 520 bridge would cost.  City and state transportation officials called the neighborhood’s plans "exciting," and "fascinating."

Compare this with the news from Vancouver, BC:  the province of BC wants to build more highways in greater Vancouver.  But the Vancouver regional government says that the highways are "out of sync" with the metropolitan area’s plans, which favor transit and HOV lanes over expensive new highways.

That’s a real contrast in political cultures:  the government of Washington’s largest city is all fired up about vastly expensive highway projects, and has to petition and cajole state legislators to fund them; while the government of BC’s largest metro area is trying to say no to highway projects that are being foisted on them by the province.

Seems to me that Vancouver, though, is on to something:  after all, the city is frequently ranked among the world’s best places to live, even though (or, more likely, because) it has no freeways running through it.

California Schemin'

Lots of trends start in California.  Some of them are good—like the state’s clean car standards (now under consideration in Washington State) and its  vehicle global Warming law.

But some trends aren’t so good. The latest in the "not so good" category is the national push to let states open up their HOV lanes to hybrid vehicles. California did it a while back, opening up HOV lanes to any hybrid that gets at least 45 mpg. Now federal legislators have introduced a bill to allow all states to do the same thing

As I’ve said before, I think this could be a mistake.

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No Liquid Assets

The federal Natural Resources Conservation Service reports that Washington’s snowpack is "dismal," with little hope for improvement. More than half the snowpack season is past and the state has only 26 percent of its average snow, which in the summer becomes water for fish, farmers, cities, and hydroelectric dams.

Boring Things that Change the World, Exhibit B

The organization of governance in Cascadia is one of those arcane but essential topics that only gets wonks excited and, consequently, rarely gets fixed. Like tax policy and insurance regulation, it’s awesomely important and powerful but very hard to move politically. (My earlier post on boring things that change the world is here.)

A few years ago, I served on a panel that advised the Puget Sound Regional Council on how to advance transportation pricing reforms. The main conclusion: the greater Seattle area needs a better system for governing its transportation. No one is in charge; no one is accountable; nothing gets done. This sets in motion a vicious circle of declining public trust in government, tax revolts, and further inaction.

Greater Portland has Metro, a uniquely powerful three-county, elected governing board for land-use planning, transit and transportation, parks, and solid waste. Greater Vancouver has the Greater Vancouver Regional District and its affiliated transportation agency TransLink, which have powers not too much weaker than Metro’s.

But greater Seattle has only the PSRC, a regional planning body with little power to implement its plans. So I’m encouraged that state senator Ed Murray (D-Seattle) is proposing a stepwise overhaul of transportation governance among the 86 local jurisdictions in the PSRC area. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has the story.

P.S. The classic text on the importance of regional governance and, in particular, regional tax-base sharing to solving contemporary metropolitan problems is Myron Orfield’s Metropolitics. Some of Myron’s research on the Seattle and Portland areas is available here.

Smokin' Mad

This is quite possibly the most important pollution & public health story in Washington so far this year: as the Seattle P-I reports today, Pierce County’s smoking ban has been struck down by the Washington State supreme court.

Let’s be clear about a few things. Smoking kills. Tobacco is the top cause of preventable death in the U.S. And second-hand smoke kills too. So ensuring that public spaces are smoke-free is a good way to improve public health.

Nonetheless, smoking bans are almost always controversial, since they pit one core value—protecting human health—against another—preserving personal liberty. Nobody can *make* me enter a public space that’s filled with smoke, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to take that risk if I want to?

For me, that kind of argument falls down in a couple of ways.  First, kids are often in public places, and they don’t have a much of a say in where they go—so public smoking bans help protect those among us who don’t necessarily have a choice about where they go.

Second, smoking is addictive—more addictive even than heroin.  That means that, for people who are hooked, their ability to "choose" whether to smoke is severely impaired. Having a hard time quitting is not just a matter of "willpower" or "character," but of brain chemistry; addictive behavior is not a subset of choice, but the opposite of choice.  Which is one reason why most people who desperately want to quit smoking have to try many times before they’re successful.

Public health is about creating the kinds of environments in which the easy choices are also the healthy ones.  I’m all for personal choice—and I’d like to the ability to choose to enter a public space without worrying about my health, or my kids’.

The Heat Is On

According to NASA scientists, 2004 was the planet’s fourth warmest year since the 19th century, when record-keeping began. 2002 and 2003 were the second and third warmest, respectively. The reigning champ is still 1998, though some scientists believe that 2005 could be a contender for the title.

Tunnel Vision?

 (This post is part of a series.)

A while back, the Seattle city government decided that it wanted to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct—the seismically vulnerable aerial highway that cuts off the city’s downtown from its waterfront—with a tunnel. But what neither the city, nor anyone else, has decided is how to pay for the tunnel, which the state estimates could cost more than $4 billion.

So far, the city government’s strategy seems to be something like this: the city will cobble together a billion dollars—from city tax coffers, from the Port of Seattle, from potential tolls on the new tunnel, from a real-estate improvement tax, and from wherever else it can scrape together some cash. And then the city will convince someone else–the federal government, the state, King County, and/or neighboring counties—to pick up the tab for the remaining $3+ billion.

My question:  does anyone else think this is just wildly, wildly implausible?   I’d love some responses from someone, to help correct my thinking if I’m wrong.

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