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What’s in “McCleary?”
In 2012 the Washington State Supreme Court found that Washington State is not funding our education system at anything close to the level the constitution requires. Just before the holidays the court opined again, that “the overall level of funding remains below the levels that have been declared constitutionally inadequate.” (Washington State Supreme Court, 2012)…
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Budget Outline 2013-15
In 2013 the Legislature has three big budget problems to address. It may be that there are other issues for the Legislature (gun safety, mental health, transportation…) but as the budget chair I have an odd focus on what I’m responsible for. Balance the 2013-15 budget, plus make sure that the 2015-17 budget is structurally…
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2013 Legislative Agenda
My agenda for 2013 is simple to outline here, but I expect great difficulties in working through it: Produce a budget that balances for 2013-15 and 2015-17, resolves the McCleary education funding decision, implements the Medicaid expansion envisioned in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and projects rationally into the future. Inside the education box make some strategic…
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Great article on early childhood education
The most leveraged investment, the investment that would have the strongest effect on educational outcomes would be a high-quality pre-school program for at-risk 3 and 4 year olds, with thoughtful attention paid to making sure we don’t damage the child care system for younger kids. (There is a lot of financial cross-subsidization to enable care of very…
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Today’s speech at Redmond Chamber of Commerce
A super crowd at the Redmond Chamber today. It was great to see everyone. I said I’d post the slides from today’s talk and here they are. WA State Budget Preview (PDF, requires Adobe Reader.)
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Who built that?
The New York Times ran a great article in the business section this week talking about the relationship between business and government. It’s a little historical perspective, including a plug for a great book I read this summer “Why Nations Fail.” I highly recommend the article AND the book. This is another case where thinking…
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Boring post about Joint Education Financing Task Force
For those who are interested the state is maintaining a website with information about the meetings the task force is holding. You can sign up at this website for notifications of meetings, perhaps the most interesting part of what is, for now, pretty empty and forlorn. http://www.leg.wa.gov/jointcommittees/EFTF/Pages/default.aspx
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Budget Reference Material
Every time we start up a new group of legislators looking at how to fund a particular project (in this case the K12 Finance Joint Task Force) there are questions about the budget from members not familiar with it. Here are a set of reference links that should be useful for anyone seeking to understand…
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Tax Incidence in Washington
(9/25/2014 Fixed link to DC study and updated it to the 2012 version.) There were a number of questions asked in today’s K-12 Finance Task Force meeting about how taxpayers in different income strata experience Washington’s tax system. I’m providing some links to interesting data while we wait for more up-to-date information from the Office…
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School Funding Task Force Work Plan
At the school funding task force meeting this morning we discussed and adopted the a work plan for the exercise. The document describing this work plan is available here: Initial Plan for K-12 funding policy development . Below is the intro text from this document: In January the Washington State Supreme Court ruled (in McCleary) that…