Washblog

YouBudget provides a wide range of options, including with additional revenue and no cuts.  Some options that people have wondered about (gas tax, income tax), but we don't include in the game are covered in the YouBudget FAQ.

Jay Arnold, Fuse

The state needs to do it's part in implementing and income tax.  Also, there are food goods like soda syrup that are not taxed.  We can even tax candy and soda pop.

I get impatient with stuff like this, although it show the problem.  Too much working 'withing the system' for my taste.  We all know 'the system' has been perverted and thoroughly corporatized.

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20090318/OPINION04/703189963/-1/OPINION#Our.state.%3Ci%3Ecan%3C%2Fi %3E.lay.foundation.for.prosperity

Our state can lay foundation for prosperity

By John Burbank

I woke up this morning, made the coffee and walked out to get the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And I walked back in, empty-handed. The P-I is no more.

As of today, thousands of P-I readers are victims of the latest out-of-state corporate cost-cutting decision. And who knows which will be the next business to be taken down? The loss of the P-I showcases our powerlessness in this great recession. We are unsure of our jobs, our mortgages, our credit card balances, our health coverage, our kids' college tuition. If it isn't the stock market roller coaster, it's Boeing cutting back employment, airlines canceling 787 orders, Microsoft laying off workers, and boarded up store fronts from local businesses gone bust. The demise of the P-I fits right into this era of hopelessness and fear.

The governor and the Legislature are not stepping up to lead the way to economic recovery. We could be laying the foundation for the next round of innovation and broad-based prosperity. Instead, our elected officials in Olympia are raising tuition, cutting K-12 education, eliminating vaccinations, and dismantling basic health coverage.

In our state we have a long history of problem solving for the public good. During the Bush era, the Snohomish County PUD exposed Enron for its manipulations of electricity pricing. Group Health Cooperative delivers health care to state residents, not profits to corporate shareholders. Credit unions like Boeing Employees and the Washington State Employees Credit Union do banking the old-fashioned way -- with solid bottom lines and no "derivatives." Just last fall the Machinists union led a strike at Boeing to protect middle class jobs from being outsourced to other countries. So what gives now? Is this recession so bad that we have lost our mojo to figure out how to make things work?

Well, here is some mojo. A group of citizens is coming together to fix our upside-down tax system and provide a solid base to fund education from pre-kindergarten to K-12 to the community college and our four-year higher education system. Washington has the most regressive tax regime in the country. Middle-class and low-income families pay much more in taxes proportionally than the wealthy. Our over-reliance on sales taxes and property taxes also results in lagging public revenues. We can't fund the public services, especially education, that 21st century Washington citizens and businesses deserve and demand.

We are 46th out of the 50 states in our student-teacher ratios in public school. Out of every 100 ninth-graders, only 69 receive their high school diploma on time. We fail to provide high quality pre-kindergarten for the vast majority of Washington's young children. Twenty-nine states are ahead of us in funding for higher education academic research. Public college tuition has tripled in the past 30 years, while at the University of Washington the state has reduced its responsibility to less than half of tuition costs, offloading more expenses to middle-class and low-income families.

There is a solution to this public failure. We can pave the way for a more prosperous economy with a "high incomes" income tax. It would be offset with an across-the-board cut of the state property tax. The new net revenue would be dedicated to public education. The vast majority of middle-class families would get a tax cut. The 4 percent of families with incomes over $200,000 would pay a 5 percent tax. If your family made $225,000, you would pay $1,250 in a state income tax (you'd only pay tax on the amount of your income above $200,000, and you would deduct that from your federal taxes). The children and students of our state would get a boost of more than $1 billion every year for their education, laying the foundation for their future well-being and prosperity, while giving businesses the skilled, creative workers they need.

Can we realize this in our state? The better question is why not. After all, King County is the fourth wealthiest county per capita in the country. We have no excuse to prevent us from reforming our tax system to provide for high quality education.

If we succeed in these efforts, we will lay the foundation for the advancement of our state, our economy, and our citizens in the 21st century. If we fail, we will be left behind. I would pick the mojo.

John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (www.eoionline.org ), writes every other Wednesday. His e-mail address is john@eoionline.org.

For example, the Center for the Benefit-Cost Studies of Education has some interesting studies on the economic benefit of graduating a high school student. The gross benefits range from about $210 million to $390 million over the lifetime of a given student. The costs depend on the type of program used to help a struggling student to graduate with a diploma. My point is that I-728 monies should have been spoken of in terms of a return on investment, not in terms of the cost of reducing class sizes.

Beyond that, I would like to see comparative analyses of the return on investment for various types of state expenditures. What are the expected economic benefits of building a prison; of giving tax breaks to a particular industry; of building roads; of building mass transit; etc?

I'm not saying that economic benefit should be the sole criterion for an expenditure. Rather, we should understand the relative value of investing in, say, green technologies through tax breaks versus investing in the education of young people. Taxpayers, I believe, can be persuaded to vote for an income tax as part of an overall restructuring of our tax system if legislators consistently demonstrate how certain expenditures are really investments with an expected return.

Did I leave something out? Yes.

Without a dart in your ass. Yes! No fucking cookies or _wmt or whatever. There are other ways to do that, and if one was seriously exploring alternate scenarios (you'd have multiple windows open)... cookies don't work, they belong only to the advertizers (and the stupid and lazy).

Why do we go to the trouble to create/participate in tools like / just to have people come along and try to hijack it with nothing at all?

PHUSE has some something or other, but you will get a dart in your ass. I have stumbled across their entreaties often enough in my spam filter to recognize this for the shallow formulaic troll which it is.

Fin.

People who spam me and don't stop... people who keep making appeals which turn on "hey we're just like you", and don't stop... No, I don't like them. They are not like me.

I just read their privacy policy. It says they don't rent or sell personally identifying information to other companies. It doesn't say they don't collect it. Furthermore, personally identifying information is defined in a very limited manner.

Other than that, the policy calls out cookies; it doesn't call out any other kind of data collection. Having a SEND option to send your solution to them is data collection.

Both political major political parties have been into microtargeting for a while now... or at least they wanna be. Noemie, you're a PCO: you know, and I know, that the State Democratic Party wants us to collect information on all kinds of things... things, quite frankly, that if a for-profit company collected... it would get some attention. But they're political parties and basically they do it because they can.

Does PHUSE's spam, which I did not agree to receive, not contain web beacons? Funny, I don't see that mentioned in their privacy policy.

The only thing which is new here is that it's a Flash game.

Here's another way to do the same exercise: Take a ball point pen. Write "Education" on the knuckle of your thumb with an arrow pointing to your index finger. Write "Health Care" on the heel of your hand with an arrow pointing towards your pinkie. Write other important sounding thinks all over the rest of your knuckles. Now take some Playdoh and make a ball of it. Hold it in your hand and squeeze really hard.

What are these things engineered to do? Aren't they designed with a purpose? I think so. I think they're all engineered to make us feel powerless and sympathetic with our legislators... who are also therefore powerless in the face of... you know... events we couldn't possibly have foreseen (yeh, right. we Dems and especially progressives have been decrying the Rethugs as crooks and liars all along, where have our legislators been?).

We elect our legislators to do the best they can. I'd rather have them spending their time doing that hard work than either listening to statistical drivel gathered from observing the Playdoh game, or trying to engineer consent for a decision which they know isn't the best they could do but is the one they choose because they're too cowardly to do the right thing.