Year: 2011

Good Washington Post Op-Ed on Federal Budget

Rep. Alan Simpson (former GOP senator from Wyoming) and Erskine Bowles (former Clinton budget director) produced a difficult but rational plan for dealing with the pernicious federal budget/debt/economy problem. It’s difficult because it asks people to leave their sacred cows at the door and discuss real problems like adults. An op-ed in the Washington Post on Sept. 30th lays out their thinking. It’s worth reading.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-advice-to-the-debt-supercommittee-go-big-be-bold-be-smart/2011/09/30/gIQAPzjBBL_story.html#

Cows (sacred or not) are messy indoors and it is difficult to get them through doors. It’s better to leave them outside. This simple concept seems to be lost on the other Washington.

While it’s hard to quantify exactly what will happen, reports we’ve heard suggest strongly that if the supercommittee doesn’t deliver a solution that can be adopted, the default cuts to the military alone could increase national unemployment by a full percentage point. Our Washington has a higher percentage of military workers than the average state, so we might bear more of the brunt of this single cut.

What are they thinking? Times are bad, let’s not make them worse.

WA State Budget Update – Special Session

The papers today are reporting that Governor Gregoire is calling us (the legislature) into a special session, most likely in late November after the next revenue forecast. This is a good idea, as doing so will give us about 3 more months of traction on whatever changes we make.

As you may have heard, the revenue outlook for Washington State has declined by about $2 billion dollars since we left Olympia in the Spring. Our budget for 2011-13 was lower than the 2009-11 budget, which was lower than the 2007-09 budget. The 2011-13 budget was my first budget as chair of the Ways and Means committee and we tried hard to have a transparent, rational, and responsible budget.

Continue reading “WA State Budget Update – Special Session”

Planet Money podcast – I hope it isn’t prescient

NPR’s “Planet Money” show is interesting enough that I listened to it while exercising at the gym today. This may say more about me than about the show, but I find it fascinating. It’s hard to make this stuff interesting and they do a great job.

This week they talk about Japan’s “lost decade” of the 90s, and the economic policies that brought them back from the brink. There are eerie parallels between their situation and ours, but I’ll let you listen and decide what you think on your own.

http://www.npr.org/templates/archives/archive.php?thingId=127413729

 

 

Washington State Revenue Forecast

I don’t comment much on the “other Washington” but I have to say that I’m a little frustrated at the game of “chicken” we’re seeing played, and the impact we expect it to have here in “our Washington.” The foodfight they had about the debt limit had drastic impacts on consumer and investor confidence, and that will have impacts on the economy here at home.

The Economic and Revenue Forecast Council (ERFC) will release its quarterly forecast of expected revenue for the state next week on the the 15th. I don’t expect it to be pretty, with a decline in the $1 to $2 billion range. Since our last forecast in June the national economy has significantly worsened and we are expecting a large decline in our revenue forecast. The ERFC has a series of meetings and presentations leading up to the official release of the forecast. Last week’s was the initial economic review, where the forecaster (Dr. Raha) sets out his assumptions about the economy and the council approves them. We had a spirited discussion of the accuracy of our normal data streams about construction activity and national GDP estimates, but in the end decided to stay with the current methodology, even though it has been wrong in the same direction 13 quarters in a row, and soon to be 14.

Continue reading “Washington State Revenue Forecast”

Continuing Economic Distress

This is a fascinating chart that shows the difference between the current recession and everything after the Great Depression. As you go further back in time the data become less and less comparable to today’s situation, so we can’t really look at the craziness in the 19th century. I’m reading a lot of economics these days, trying to make sense of where we should go as a state. I’ll let you know if any of the people in the blogosphere have great answers. 🙂 This one comes from www.calculatedriskblog.com.

Continue reading “Continuing Economic Distress”

Progress on 520, not without controversy

92nd Ave Interchange
The 92nd Avenue Northeast interchange features a one-lane roundabout to help drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians safely and efficiently navigate local streets and the SR 520 highway off-ramp.

If you drive on 520 you can see that progress is being made, or at least that there is a lot of construction activity. The start of construction was a shock to many people, particularly the removal of the trees necessary to do the work widening and moving the landing in Medina about 200′ north of the current landing.

The caption on the drawing above was written by WSDOT and is part of the controversy referenced below the jump in this post.

Contracts have been let on both the Eastside portion and the floating portion. We still have financing work to do on the Westside portion – the funds are in hand to do the first two portions, so we are moving ahead. The Seattle Times reported that the State Treasurer believes that if the Eyman initiative (I-1125) this year about tolling passes that we will not be able to finance even this part, as the bond market does not respond well to non-standard toll-setting authority. (article here)

Continue reading “Progress on 520, not without controversy”

Healthcare cost reduction: non-obvious solutions

In Camden, New Jersey, one per cent of patients account for a third of the city’s medical costs. Photograph by Phillip Toledano.

If you’re interested in how to reduce healthcare costs you might want to watch this Frontline video from PBS. http://video.pbs.org/video/2070853636/

It’s about an article Dr. Atul Gowande wrote in the New Yorker in January that is an amazing look into non-obvious cost generation. It’s a long read, and a solution that tries to deal with this view of the problem is hard to implement at scale. Here’s the original New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_gawande

I don’t write about healthcare all the time, but trying to figure out how to deal with the real world in complex ways is how we’ll have a healthcare system that actually works, and save an amazing amount of money for all of us, as the costs for uninsured patients wind up being paid for by all of us, either through Medicaid or by shifting unpaid costs onto the insurance of private-pay patients.

 

School Levies

For the past two years we’ve had a group of technical experts working on proposals on how to fix school levies. They just released their report, available here. The report is amazingly detailed and is a great introduction into how levies work and some possible approaches to fixing the problems.

I read the immediately previous draft of the report (about 150 pages) and haven’t walked through the differences yet, but the draft did a good job of laying out alternatives, but not such a good job of picking a solution. The basic problems:

  1. We depend MUCH too heavily on local property taxes to fund education. We are very close to the levels of dependence we had in the late 70s that created legal cases against the state for violating Article IXof the WA State Constitution.
  2. Continue reading “School Levies”

Amazing Foster Kids

The Mockingbird Society LogoThis morning I attended the Foster Youth and Alumni Leadership Summit put on by The Mockingbird Society. This was one of the most amazing presentations I’ve ever attended. Groups of foster youth from each of the regions spend the conference organizing presentations on how to improve the foster care experience.

The presentations were powerful, as you might expect, because they are coming from inside the system. The big ideas we heard were:

  1. Improve the response time it takes for a social worker to get back to youth.
  2. Safe housing, particularly for alumni. At age 18 they often no longer have state support and wind up homeless.
  3. Improving sibling connects, with some real-life examples of how to do it.
  4. Provide adequate recognition and diagnosis of mental abuse of foster youth.
  5. Provide a sense of normalcy for teenagers in the system by allowing them to stay the night at a friend’s house while the background check is being completed.
  6. Pregnant and parenting youth in care do not feel they are given adequate information or support before, during, and after birth.

Hearing this stuff is difficult, because you want these youth to have the same kinds of experiences your own kids get. Hearing that they often don’t get a phone call returned from a social worker for a month means that they can’t go on field trips, or stay over at a friend’s house, or other things you and I take for granted our kids can do, because we can make decisions on the spot.

This group has a good track record of advocacy – the youth lobby for their proposals to improve the system and we’ve put a number into place. It’s always more complex than you want it to be, but that’s the nature of a system that supports thousands of young people.

The Mockingbird Society does good work.