March 2010

This Side of Paradise

Submitted by Bill Lyne on 03/23/2010

So if you’d called your bookie a month ago and said, I’ve got a thousand bucks that says the United States Congress will pass sweeping health care reform before the Washington State Legislature will pass a supplemental state budget, you probably could have gotten pretty good odds.

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Unlike their big brothers and sisters in D.C., the Republicans in Olympia aren’t doing parliamentary somersaults or calling anyone baby killers, they’re mostly just waiting to go home. This is all about Democrats in all their diversity—the blue-greens, the road kills, the legislators in swing districts, and most of all leadership. The official story is that this standoff is about sales tax, but those in the know seem to think it boils down to a staring match between the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader.

Here at the blog, we’re feeling a little bit like Republicans, relegated to the sidelines and living the life of a bargaining chip. The proposed cuts to state university operating budgets in the house, senate, and governor’s proposals are bad, badder, and worse, respectively, but the worst could be yet to come. That’s what happened to us last year, when the 11:59 deal-making of the reconciliation budget ended up cutting us more than either the house or the senate proposals.

In Monday’s paper, we got a roundabout reminder of why that possibility means a dimmer future. The Seattle Times took a break from its daily blaming of state employees for everything wrong in the state of Washington and ran an Op-Ed piece from Department of Commerce Director Rogers Weed. Mr. Weed set out to smack down Idaho Governor Butch Otter and set him straight on how much better our state is for business than his. He cites our “skilled work force” as one of the primary reasons why businesses should choose Washington, and then goes on to give the misleading impression that we grow that work force at home:

We invest in our people because companies need great talent to innovate and grow. Washington has more adults with at least 12 years of education (over 30 percent with bachelor’s degrees) than any Western state and ranks sixth among all states.

Mr. Weed should count himself lucky that he didn’t get struck by lightning for using the words “invest,” “Washington,” and “education” in the same paragraph. We have a lot of educated people in this state, but most of them were educated somewhere else. Washington ranks 48th in four-year college participation rates and 3rd in the importation of people with college degrees. Washington ranks 45th in the nation in K-12 funding and 48th in higher ed funding. We yap a lot in this state about the value of education, paramount duty, blah, blah, but when we look up at the reality of the funding scoreboard, it’s painfully clear that we don’t even come close to walking that talk.

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What separates Washington from Idaho is what Mr. Weed calls an “enviable quality of life,” which boils down to a beautiful and temperate west side and the Pacific Ocean. If Washington were where Idaho is and we invested as little in “our people” as we do now, we’d make Idaho look like this side of paradise.

The $18,000 dollars that the state is spending each day to fund the special legislative session would pay for three plus years of tuition at Western Washington University. And the most depressing thing is that we’re spending that tuition money on the short strokes. We’re paying for pissing matches and arguments over tenths of percents instead of discussions of how to permanently right the ship. As wrong-headed as much of the “reform” and “footprint of government” talk can be, at least it’s trying to take on something big.

Washington ranks 35th in the nation in total taxes as a percentage of personal income and at the same time we have the most regressive tax structure in the country, taxing poor people at more than 5 times the rate of rich people. We’re a low tax state that dumps most of the burden on low-income people. Neither of those problems will be fixed in this special legislative session.

But imagine what we could do if we just started taxing the right people and just bumped our tax base up to say, 30th in the nation. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to invest in so many people educated in other states.

UFWS Letter to Speaker Chopp

Submitted by Bill Lyne on 03/17/2010

Dear Speaker Chopp,

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We are the leaders of the United Faculty of Washington State. We represent 2200 faculty and educate 31,000 students at Washington’s Regional Comprehensive Universities.

We write to you knowing that you are working hard to find the right balance of new revenues and spending cuts in order to balance the 2010 supplemental state budget. We know that you are facing many difficult problems and facing hundreds of competing interests, and we are confident that you will ultimately do what is best for our state.

As you continue your deliberations and negotiations, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you of the importance of our state’s four-year higher education institutions. Our state universities and college are key to Washington’s economic recovery and future.

Each of the proposed supplemental budgets includes significant cuts to state appropriations to four-year higher education, ranging from a low of 3 percent to a high of 6.4 percent. We recognize that cuts are inevitable, but we hope, for the sake of our students, that when the final budget is written, the cuts to our universities and college are as low as possible. The proposed cuts are certain to have a tremendously negative impact on our students. Cuts beyond what have already been proposed will be utterly devastating, and will dramatically reduce college access and affordability.

As you know, this year’s cuts will come on top of 23 percent cuts to our state appropriations in last year’s biennial budget. These cuts were some of the deepest in the state and the nation.

These cuts were partially offset by tuition increases that will approach 30 percent in this biennium. These steep tuition increases make it imperative that you do everything you can in your current negotiations to retain funding for the Student Need Grand and Student Work Study Program. Public four-year higher education must remain public and available to all qualified students in Washington.

Again, we understand that you have a lot of tough choices to make. We stand ready to help you in any way we can.

Sincerely,

The United Faculty of Washington State

Bob Hickey, President, United Faculty of Central

Gary Krug, President, United Faculty of Eastern

Laurie Meeker, President, United Faculty of Evergreen

Steven Garfinkle, President, United Faculty of Western Washington

Bill Lyne, President, United Faculty of Washington State

Sandra Schroeder, President, American Federation of Teachers—Washington

Mary Lindquist, President, Washington Education Association

We'll Always Have Paris

Submitted by Bill Lyne on 03/10/2010

Oscar night had us here at the blog reflecting on our old school movie tastes. We’re suckers for a flick like Casablanca, not just for all the good lines, but also for the way it takes place in the interstices, away from the main action. While World War Two rages outside, beautiful people and character actors alike can find the refuge and time to reminisce, worry about their love lives, and find moral clarity at Rick’s place.

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A similar thing happened last Friday in House Hearing Room D at the State Capitol in Olympia. With the battles over budgets and revenues reaching their peaks outside, the House Higher Education committee rounded up the usual higher ed suspects for a work session to talk about the future. Even as their colleagues were penciling out millions in new university budget cuts, House Higher Ed chair Deb Wallace and some of her fellow committee members introduced yet another study of state universities (this one to be conducted by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee), and led an elegiac discussion of the state of Higher Education.

The long overdue intervention against the House Higher Ed addiction to studies and task forces still hasn’t come, so now we’re all looking forward to the latest from the good folks at JLARC. This will certainly be a fresh perspective and no doubt we’ll all learn some new things about the nooks and crannies of higher ed. But the basic ineluctable and obvious facts will remain: Our state universities are funded at some of the lowest levels in the country; Participation rates at our state universities are among the lowest in the country, forcing the state to import truckloads of people with degrees from other states; Our state universities are some of the most efficient in the country; State funding for our universities has been steadily declining, forcing tuition to rise; and if we keep trying to squeeze even more blood from the stone, the education our students receive will inevitably suffer.

Once the presentation of the JLARC plans was over, Committee Chair Representative Deb Wallace pretty much ceded the floor to ranking Republican Glenn Anderson, who could step into a white tuxedo and time machine and look right at home next to Humphrey Bogart at Rick’s. Representative Anderson warmed up with some boilerplate observations about the bleakness of state budgets for the foreseeable future but then really hit his stride as he announced that college is no longer popular and that we had all better get used to the new world order. He told us that salaries for people with college degrees have been flat for a while (as opposed, presumably, to those skyrocketing salaries for people without college degrees) and thus people were no longer seeing the value of higher education. And then he closed with his signature statement, an argument that he has repeated at HEC Board meetings and in the legislature, telling us that for many of his constituents, college was little more than a “parenting exit strategy.” And higher taxes and six or seven grand a year in tuition seems like a lot just to get the kids out of the house.

Well, O.K., that’s one way of looking at it, but we’re not quite ready to give up on the idea that a college education is both a ticket to a better material life and a broadening of one’s intellectual horizons that is good in and of itself. But whether it’s about economic advancement and personal growth or just about finally turning junior’s room into the study you’ve always wanted, the fact is that our state universities are busting at the seams. All six are over-enrolled and turning away thousands of qualified applicants.

But while the evidence seems to suggest that college remains more popular and valuable than Representative Anderson suggests, none of us should be shocked to discover that his core point is as obvious as gambling in Casablanca. No matter how much people may want their kids to go to college and no matter how much they may perceive college as a good thing, right now the political will does not exist in this state to support four-year higher education. While some members of the House Higher Ed committee met with us in House Hearing Room D, their colleagues were right outside fighting about budgets and taxes. Some were worried that they might lose in November if they cut social services, many were worried about their electoral future if they raised taxes, none were thinking that they would pay a political price if they cut appropriations to state universities.

The time we spent last Friday talking about JLARC studies and the nuances of performance agreements and tuition policy probably would have been better spent talking about how we might organize the thousands of students and alumni in this state to help make state universities a voting issue. Until we do that, everything else is just hanging around Rick’s begging for exit visas.

The View From The Cheap Seats

Submitted by Bill Lyne on 03/04/2010

Being a state legislator has got to be a pretty crappy job. You get paid enough to qualify for public assistance, you have to abandon your home and family for two or three months a year, lobbyists and constituents assault you every fifteen minutes expecting you to fully understand and solve their problems, you spend a lot of time locked in a caucus room with the same old faces fighting about the same old things, and no matter what you do, you can pretty much count on half the people being mad at you. That’s when you’re in session. When you’re not in session, you have to spend most of your time sucking up to people for money so you can get reelected and go do it all again next year. And, as with college football players eyeing the NFL, the odds of moving on to the true fame and fortune of the other Washington or the Governor’s mansion are pretty damn slim.

So when we here at the blog look toward Olympia and wonder what the heck they could possibly be thinking, we do so without in any way meaning to question the good will and genuine commitment to public service that animates most of our elected representatives.

But geez.

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The governor, the house, and the senate have now all laid their budget and revenue cards on the table, so you’d expect to see some clarity beginning to emerge. But all we really know now is that we don’t know much. Almost from the minute they hit the web, the tax packages started to fall apart. Even the things that everybody thought were no-brainers, like taxes on private jets and cigarettes, have gone wobbly as squads of luxury jet manufacturing lobbyists have parachuted into Olympia and 7-11 owners have delivered petitions on behalf of future lung cancer victims everywhere. The senate’s third-of-a-penny sales tax hike was pretty much dead on arrival, the most striking evidence of which was the spectacle of Senator Rodney Tom voting against the budget he wrote.

Maybe the most peculiar thing about the Democratic caucus meltdown is that it has come in midstream. New taxes were always going to be a two step process and the Dems took the first step without a hitch. The suspension of Initiative 960 brought a lot of noise and some lame photo ops for Tim Eyman, but the vote was never in doubt. With all the blather about flouting the will of the people, it’s a pretty safe bet that the Fall line of Republican attack ads are already in the can. Democrats could now go home on March 11 without having raised taxes one dime and still have to face the tax-and-spend charge in November.

So suspending I-960 and then losing the nerve to actually raise some taxes seems a little bit like getting half a root canal—all of the pain with none of the relief.

The Republican and “Road Kill” Democrat position (and the rationale that Senator Tom offered in voting against his budget) is that the legislature hasn’t done the hard work to reduce state government’s “footprint.” Perhaps the most credible evidence that this is nothing more than union-busting bullshit is that the Republicans, when called upon to offer a budget-balancing plan of their own, can do nothing more imaginative than demonize state workers. When the smoke clears after this session, the legislature will have permanently cut at least $4 billion from a $30 billion state budget. Two-thirds of that budget cannot be cut due to constitutional protections and federal mandates. That means that the final damage will be around 30% to 40% of what was available to be cut.

No, the hard work that hasn’t been done is the hard work of genuine tax reform. Washington has the distinction of being a relatively low tax state with an incredibly regressive tax structure. The taxes that are now being proposed would solve some short-term problems and prevent a lot of suffering over the next couple of years, but they will do nothing to reform Washington’s fundamental tax structure. Until we wake up, join the twenty-first century, and move toward income taxes and away from sales taxes, the current chaotic way of doing things will remain the norm.

Part of us hopes that the collapse this time is complete, that the legislature goes home having done nothing, and that the ensuing disaster will help create the political will to follow the Economic Opportunity Institute and Bill Gates’s daddy toward sane tax policy.

But in the all politics is local department, no new taxes means more cuts than have been proposed in anybody’s budget so far. And the universities are the first place they usually come looking for more cuts.

So here’s hoping that the legislature gets it together enough to kick the can a little further down the road.