Out of commission, Or, the big story, flying cranes, and deficits

I've been off writing for PubliCola since the beginning of January and have left the Duly Noted url to rot. Today, I'll update you on my afternoon off.

The big story (or I thought so, at least)
Remember the Seattle Public Schools scandal about a month back? You know, $1.8 million in misspent funds through a program - the Regional Small Business Development Program - that was supposed to help minority-run businesses get contracts at SPS. The Seattle Times broke the story. We found it intriguing - specifically, the contractors.

On Friday, I broke the news on a contract between WSDOT and the rogue SPS program:

In response to a public disclosure request, WSDOT revealed that it has contracted out support for disadvantaged and minority businesses through the Regional Small Business Development Program (RSBDP), the Seattle Public Schools division headed up by program manager Silas Potter, the man in charge of the SPS program at the center of the $1.8 million scandal, as first reported by the Seattle Times.

According to quarterly and annual reports on WSDOT’s Support Services for Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBEs), Potter’s RSBDP offered business competitiveness courses to companies with the goal of helping them bid more successfully for WSDOT contracts.

The low level of DBE attendance and the lack of any growth in enrollment at RSBDP classes suggests a similar pattern to that described in the state auditors report on the SPS program.

More:

Money well spent? PubliCola has filed another public disclosure request to find out.

A state auditor’s report on the SPS scandal, first reported by the Seattle Times, revealed that the RSBDP classes were actually attended by the same vendor who was billed as teaching those very courses. The vendors teaching the classes also overbilled for the amount of time spent teaching courses, which often had only a few students.

It's still a developing story. Stay tuned.

What I've been reading
The usual:

Can’t get much clearer than this:

Depending on how you look at it, President Obama is proposing to cut taxes by $2.4 trillion over the next decade, raise them by $700 billion, or raise them by $2.0 trillion.

That’s Donald Marron, president of the Tax Policy Center, and it’s absolutely right.

I keep thinking about this one movie
The Cranes Are Flying. A post-WWII Russian flick, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. One of the best.

Boeing Awarded Tanker Contract!

A Rundown of the Decision Here.

Health care subsidies.... (boring)

KLEIN:

For instance: Among the more mind-blowing facts about the health-care system is that the tax break we give to employer-provided insurance dwarfs the cost of the entire Affordable Care Act -- and, if you want to take the concept a bit further, this means those of us who don't get insurance from our employers are being forced, even mandated, to pay for those of us who are. But this break is largely uncontroversial in American politics, while subsidies to help people who can't afford health insurance are extremely controversial.

SPD FORUM GETS NUTS.

... And yours truly was there to cover it. Fortunately for you - I wrote it on PubliCola, a much wiser platform than the one you currently reside at:

Only one minute into last night’s Stranger-sponsored Police Accountability Forum at City Hall—featuring an eight-person panel that included Mayor Mike McGinn, city council public safety chair Tim Burgess, and Seattle Police Chief John Diaz—people were already shouting. As Diaz responded to the first question—Is there a pattern of police violence against racial minorities in Seattle?—three members of the crowd started shouting—”These were not fucking accidents!”—and had to be removed by security.

Such was the mood of the evening: A mixture of organized protest rally and three-ring circus.

Bookmark it.

Education Reform.

A snippet from my PubliCola piece from this afternoon:

State Sen. Rodney Tom (D-48, Bellevue) and Rep. Eric Pettigrew (D-37, S. Seattle) are pushing education reform legislation backed by the Excellent Schools Now coalition – which includes the Washington State PTA, the League of Education Voters, Washington Alliance of Black School Educators, and the Waiting for Superman crowd at Stand for Children—that would require the upcoming layoffs of 1,500 teachers to be made without regard to seniority and instead be determined by principal evaluations of teachers.

The bills haven’t received a public hearing yet, but already the state teachers union, the Washington Education Association (WEA), is lining up against the proposed reform legislation.

Rich Wood, spokesman for the WEA, spent yesterday in Olympia meeting with legislators. The group’s main complaint is that the bills don’t address the overarching problem: a lack of funding for K-12 education. The Pettigrew-Tom proposal would “undermine our current efforts to improve public education,” Wood says.

The rest, here.

If you're following the session...

Then it's worth reading Undead Olympia, for some added humor.

Supplemental Budget 2011

From my PubliCola piece:

State Representative Ross Hunter (D-48, Medina), Chair of the House Ways & Means Committee, released a plan this afternoon to cut $340 million from the remaining six months of the current biennium. Olympia needs to cut $1.1 billion from the current budget. Even after $588 million in cuts from the December special session, Hunter’s new plan still leaves legislators with a $260 million shortfall for the biennium’s remaining six months.

The plan makes $216.5 million in cuts and $123.8 in fund transfers. The bill cuts $173.5 million from the Department of Social and Health Services alone, including $71.4 million in reductions to long-term care services, including reductions in home care hours, and $21.9 million in mental health reductions. The plan keeps K-12 funding stable through the biennium, though cuts higher education by $4.5 million.

“We couldn’t save everything, but we really prioritized core services for kids,” Hunter said in a statement.

The rest.

Slow Blogging Coming

Readership has been up a bit lately. Why? The special session perhaps? The real session? People are suddenly concerned about losing their health care? What it is exactly, I don't know. Seems like as good a time as any to slow things down. I'll be writing/reporting/interning over at Publicola.net for a few months. To those who read daily, you can expect some slower posts over the next few months. There will also likely be a lot of re-blogging to illustrate the blog's larger themes. Meanwhile, just go read Publicola.

Thanks for reading.

Monday Reading Jar

It turns out a weekend at home creates lots of opportunity for blogging. The Jar is back, for now.

1.  Open Left talks about regressive tax structures - nationwide, and in Washington (with some graphs I almost forgot about!)

2.  Adjust the state's tax structure and create new revenue. It's easy:

End sales tax exemption on items used in interstate commerce: 

Air, rail, and water transportation companies engaged in interstate or foreign commerce are exempt from sales tax on fuel and other items. U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states may tax such items, and many do. JLARC review in 2008 found no clear purpose for the exemption. (Already taxed in 16+ states.)

3.  Yesterday's post.

4.  How to fix the federal budget deficit? It's easy (Via HowieInSeattle):

5.  As a follow up to Saturday's top five films from 2010, my top album of 2010:

• Robyn, Body Talk.

Revenue Options For Demoralized State Dems

At least someone out there is still seriously proposing raising revenue in the coming legislative session...

Washington's Economic Opportunity Institute has released a document with some revenue options that legislators ought to consider in the looming budget session - where $4.6 billion is set to be cut from social programs, education, higher-education, etc. The second largest item after applying sales tax to gasoline purchases is to "End sales tax exemption on items used in interstate commerce." I've heard that one before:

Air, rail, and water transportation companies engaged in interstate or foreign commerce are exempt from sales tax on fuel and other items. U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states may tax such items, and many do. JLARC review in 2008 found no clear purpose for the exemption. (Already taxed in 16+ states.)

That change could bring in $609 million.

Next up: "Increase hazardous substance tax." It turns out that I-1053, the measure to require a 2/3 vote to increase revenue, was funding by oil and gas companies who didn't want to see the hazardous substance tax increase (so that we can clean up the mess they make). Raising the tax from 0.7% to 2% would bring in $468.3 million. That's a billion dollars in new revenue right there - almost a quarter of the budget shortfall.

These possibilities are largely ignored in the popular discourse today. Though, lets pause for a minute and compare two things in the most simplistic way possible. An option: Cut 66,000 people from the Basic Health Care Plan or raise the hazardous substance tax on multi-billion dollar fuel corporations. That's an easy decision, but not a popular one.

17 senators can hold these increases hostage. Legislators aren't feeling too inclined to pursue these options, or closing corporate loopholes, or zeroing in on tax exemptions. When I sat in on a legislative forum in Bellevue Thursday evening, the mood wasn't much different.

The closet was empty, they said. As EOI showcases, however, it's not.

Because I Feel Like It: An Overdue End Of Year Movie List

Diverting away from usual budget commentary, an end of year list: My Top 5 "New" Movies That I Saw In 2010.  I say "new" because multiple of these movies came out abroad pre-2010 before reaching American theateres this year.

In no particular order (except the first):

A Prophet

I Am Love

Toy Story 3

The Dragon Tattoo Trilogy (1,3,2)

The Town

A Prophet is hands down the best film I've seen in many years. It's extraordinarily difficult to think of a comparable movie that delivered such raw emotional content in recent years while confronting the brutal topic of violence in French prisons.

I slacked on movies this year, admittedly. The real-world left little time to enjoy the oscar-season cinema in Seattle, as I usually do.

In other audio-visual commentary, HBO's The Wire is at the top of my list for Best TV Shows Of All Time. The show's focus on urban drug culture, institutional decay, corruption, and the stagnancy of public safety policy in Baltimore is raw, pristine, TV and ripe viewing for anyone who thinks they understand poverty, drugs, and those stuck in that vicious cycle. 

Pick Your Own Losers

Washington's League of Education Voters has put together a useful budget site which allows the user to check off cuts to make up the $4.6 billion shortfall. You can opt to "eliminate National Board bonuses for teachers" serving in low-income schools, "end automatic pension increases for retired teachers,""eliminate the Basic Health Plan," and a host of other options.

If anything, this puzzle provides context to the enormity of the decisions facing legislators over the next few months. It's no laughing matter. Check it.

"Public sector workers now earn 11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector"

Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor on President Clinton, wrote an editorial in the Huffington Post today. It's not a bad analysis of conservative tirades against public workers. Title: "The Shameful Attack on Public Employees." Shameful indeed.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It's far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public's work -- sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees -- to call them "faceless bureaucrats" and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican's Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that's too big.

The kicker:

The Republican trick is to compare apples with oranges -- the average wage of public employees with the average wage of all private-sector employees. But only 23 percent of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48 percent of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be -- all need at least four years of college.

Compare apples to apples and and you'd see that over the last fifteen years the pay of public sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education. Public sector workers now earn 11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector, and local workers 12 percent less. (Even if you include health and retirement benefits, government employees still earn less than their private-sector counterparts with similar educations.)

I would point out that the areas where public sector workers do make more than their private sector counterparts are in those occupations where a college degree is not required. For those jobs, it's fair that workers receive a higher pay check from the state rather than face exploitation in the private sector.

A Broken "Social Contract"

State Rep. Reuven Carlyle over at his superbly honest and thoughtful blog:

Publicola hosted a Seattle legislator forum where we discussed tough issues in a friendly, genuine settling and outlined our thoughts about the 2011 legislative session. I received a particularly direct and thoughtful question from a public school teacher named “Eric” who argued that Olympia has increased workload without salary increases, withheld cost of living adjustments, and instituted new work requirements that consume time without incremental compensation.

My answer, likely unsatisfactory to Eric, was that teachers are part of the fabric of public employees who have to recognize that the people of our state are feeling a sense of anxiety about the social contract that once existed between public employees and citizens. In essence, figuratively, it used to be that public employees received lower salaries and benefits in exchange for the promise of lifetime employment. That social contract has been broken by years of campaign politics. We now find ourselves living in a world where most people don’t have pensions or sufficient salaries or job security, to say nothing of automatic cost of living adjustments for pensions or salaries.

[...] Today teachers have the job protections, benefits and work rules of a trade yet become agitated at best when legislators don’t consider them professionals with regard to control over curriculum, standards, measurement, accountability, results and other outcomes. Understandably, teachers want what everyone wants–the best benefits of both sides of the coin. Full bargained benefits including tenure, payment for any extra time at work, and other such work rules, but the control and responsibilities of a professional service provider.

The emphasis is my own. 

More Anti-Union, Anti-Public Employee Nonsense...From a Democrat

Adam Vogt, a Washington native, identifies as a Democrat and writes for Crosscut.com. Yesterday, he published an editorial of sorts - void of fact, of course - on his anti-union views. Unfortunately, the piece read like Tim Pawlenty's recent anti-union/anti-public sector op-eds published in the Wall Street Journal.

Let's take a look:

It all started back in high school when I took a part-time job bagging groceries. When I received my first paycheck, my jaw dropped. Between union dues, the largest culprit, and FICA taxes, my paltry wage of $5.50 per hour fell to about $3.50 for each 60 minutes of labor. Thus began my skepticism of unions.

Little does he know, that this year the grocery worker union helped to preserve health care benefits for 25,000 thousands workers in the Puget Sound region. Vogt was only in high school then and probably wasn't too concerned about his health care benefits. I'm betting a 40-year old lifetime employee of QFC may feel a bit different about the union and its bargaining power. He continues:

But government employees have it pretty good these days: high wages, extensive benefits, the near-impossibility of being fired, to name just a few pluses they enjoy. As a current federal employee, I have a hard time listening to my coworkers complain about a two-year pay freeze that isn’t really a freeze at all? Again, in this economy I’m just happy to have a job!

With more news coming out each day about devastating budget challenges at the federal, state and local level, it’s time for public employees and their union benefactors to make some concessions.

Yet government workers are currently making concessions, willingly and unwillingly. A 3% cut in pay this year for state workers in Washington... Higher monthly premiums... Unpaid days off... Jobs lost. In fact, look how the workforce has dwindled...

Decline in Washington State Employees

Still angry? Check out the comments, here.