Donald Trump’s New Economic Agenda: More Food Poisoning, More Government Subsidies of Low-Wage Employers

September 15, 2016 Paul Constant

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2016, Economics, Policy

Donald Trump unveiled a new economic agenda today, marking his third attempt at a tax plan in less than a year . But this was more than just taxes—it’s an “agenda” that aspires to serve a bunch of conservative masters while never once aspiring to coherence. It must be said, though, that Trump’s conservative masters are pretty happy with the plan. The Wall Street Journal has gone gaga over it, running an editorial from Michael Saltsman titled “ Don’t Raise the Minimum Wage: Trump Has a Better Plan .” That better plan? It’s to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, which basically would pay out based on how much or how little a taxpayer earns. According to Saltsman, this is a pro-business idea. Which is true, but artificially so. By not raising the minimum wage and offering a higher EITC in its place, government is basically subsidizing low-income employers. ( Nick Hanauer wrote about this at length back in May .) So much for small government. So much for the free market. Anyway, a s I just told you yesterday , proponents of trickle down economics employ three major tactics to ensure that the top one percent benefits from inequality: 1. Tax cuts for the rich. 2. Deregulation for the powerful. 3. Wage suppression for everyone else. You’ll see these three tactics throughout Trump’s economic agenda . Especially the deregulation bit. Here’s the part of the plan that’s getting the most attention right now: Specific regulations to be eliminated include: …The FDA Food Police, which dictate how the federal government expects farmers to produce fruits and vegetables and even dictates the nutritional content of dog food. The rules govern the soil farmers use, farm and food production hygiene, food packaging, food temperatures, and even what animals may roam which fields and when. It also greatly increased inspections of food “facilities,” and levies new taxes to pay for this inspection overkill. Yeah, you read that right. Donald Trump wants to save government money by cutting the regulations that keep our food safe
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Uh, OK: The Republican Running for Governor of Washington State Wants to Regulate Regulations

September 14, 2016 Paul Constant

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2016, Economics

Yesterday morning, we woke up to great news: household income in the United States has finally begun to rise, after eight years of stagnation. Reuters reports : The Census Bureau said on Tuesday that median household income surged 5.2 percent last year to $56,500, the highest since 2007, in large part due to solid employment gains. The jump was the biggest since record keeping began in 1968. But that’s not all: the poverty rate saw its largest drop since 1968 , among other assorted pieces of good news. And today we learned that Seattle’s jobless rate is now lower than it’s been in eight years . Of course there’s more work to be done—housing costs are out of control, we have decades of inequality to overcome, and the fact that we still have as much poverty as we do in the 21st century is ridiculous—but the numbers indicate that we are finally, eight years after the financial collapse, on the right track. More people, and not just the top one percent, are seeing more income. So yesterday was kind of a rough day for Washington state Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Bryant to deliver a jobs speech. But that’s what he did, and it was broadcast on Facebook live to an audience of somewhere between two and three dozen people. I was one of those viewers. Between frequent drops in the streaming service and the crappy sound quality of the stream, I was able to discern that Bryant offered a six-point plan to improve jobs in Washington state. And if you’ve been paying attention to any Republican gubernatorial candidate in Washington state over the last four decades, you know what it contained. As Nick Cassella recapped this morning in Daily Clips , the three demands of candidates who promote trickle down economics are as follows: 1. Tax cuts for the rich. 2. Deregulation for the powerful. 3. Wage suppression for everyone else. And that’s exactly what Bryant offered. Aside from
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Why Would the NRA Pay for this Embarrassing, Error-Riddled Ad?

September 14, 2016 Paul Constant

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Guns

I spent the first twenty years of my life in Maine. I visit my family in Maine once a year. And though I choose to live in Seattle, I take a lot of pride in being from Maine, born and bred. It’s a culture unlike anywhere else in the United States: indpendent, reliant on common sense, and proudly insular. There’s a term Mainers use for people who were born elsewhere and move to Maine: they’re From Away. I had a friend who spent the first three months of his life in Connecticut before his mom moved home to Maine. He’s From Away, and he’ll always be From Away. Even if he lived in Maine for the rest of his natural life, my friends and I joked, he’d have to put “From Away” on his gravestone. I share all this because the National Rifle Association just debuted a new advertisement opposing Question 3, a commonsense background check initiative. And here it is: Okay. So many issues with this ad. First of all, that’s not even the New York City skyline they use in the beginning of the ad; it’s the San Francisco skyline with a Statue of Liberty stapled into it. Second of all, they got Maine’s shape wrong. This is not what Maine looks like: They lopped off the whole western side of the state that borders New Hampshire. Third, and perhaps most importantly: what kind of ridiculous Maine accent is this voiceover supposed to be? None of my aunts and uncles sound like this guy; this is the kind of exaggerated, Hollywoodized Maine accent you see in a bad episode of Murder She Wrote. It’s almost as bad as Freddy Quimby’s intentionally terribad Boston accent . Mainers are used to hearing people From Away mangle our accents—tourists do it every summer, and we fake a smile and
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Tomorrow Morning, Speak Out for Secure Scheduling at City Hall

September 12, 2016 Paul Constant

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Policy, Scheduling

Over the summer, a Seattle City Council committee has gradually moved toward approving secure scheduling laws that will make it easier for workers to plan their lives around their jobs. City Councilmembers Lorena González and Lisa Herbold have met with workers, business owners, and other interested parties over the last half-year, and they’re finally ready to bring secure scheduling to the whole council for a vote. As the proposed law is written now , workers at large retail and food service establishments would earn predictability pay when employers ask them to go home early, they would be guaranteed ten hours of rest between shifts, and they would get an opportunity to pick up open hours before the employer hired new workers. This would enable part-time workers to make doctors’ appointments, plan time with their families, and even allow them to go back to school—all things that the current scheduling status quo makes difficult or even impossible for many workers. ( Listen to our Other Washington podcast for more information about secure scheduling .) Seattle made an important choice when we raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour; now we have to make sure these workers have the time to spend that money, and the security to invest in their futures. Tomorrow morning, the committee finally votes to send the legislation to the full council. But as always, the opportunity exists for tricky amendments to be added to the bill that would water down—or even completely defang—the secure scheduling legislation. What can you do to help? You can make your voice heard, literally: come to Council chambers and show your support. Any Seattleite can testify before the City Council: all you have to do is show up before the hearing—9 a.m. or earlier would be best—and sign in on the checklist. Then, you’ll have a minute or two to voice your support. This is useful for two reasons: for one
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New Study Shows Paid Sick Leave Has No Effect on Business Costs

September 9, 2016 Paul Constant

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Policy, Scheduling, small business

As Washington state prepares to vote on Initiative 1433 , which if passed would raise the state minimum wage and enact paid sick and safe leave for all workers, we’ll likely hear the usual threats from business owners: providing sick leave for their employees will allegedly force them to cut benefits, hours, or even jobs. We heard these complaints five years ago from business owners before Seattle adopted its own sick leave law. We see this kind of thing whenever the people propose any kind of law that might benefit workers, of course: business owners loudly argue that their workers will suffer most of all, and they threaten total economic collapse. But we now have a few years of data from cities that have enacted paid sick leave laws, so we can put those scary claims to the test. And guess what? As Slate’s Henry Grabar says , a New York City study shows that paid sick leave has pretty much no effect on business. Here’s the nut of it: Their survey of 350 random New York businesses, stratified to appropriately represent different firm sizes, says: 85 percent of employers reported the law had no effect on business costs, 91 percent reported no reduction in hiring, 94 percent reported no effect on business productivity, and 96 percent reported no change in customer service. That jibes with findings from other cities published by the U.S. Department of Labor in October. San Francisco has outperformed surrounding counties in job growth since the passage of its policy in 2007. Likewise, analyses of Seattle and Washington, D.C., found negligible impacts on hiring and business location. A ton of research has also shown that flexible leave policies have a positive effect on worker productivity, happiness, and health. Huh. It’s almost as though business owners just don’t want to change because humans are uncomfortable with new things and would prefer to stick
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Are You Ready for the Trickle Down Economics Comeback Tour?

September 8, 2016 Paul Constant

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Economics, Minimum Wage

“Supply-side economics has been discredited since the Bush tax cuts failed to boost economic growth, but there is another way of thinking about the problem,” Bloomberg’s Tyler Cowen writes in his review of Edward Conard’s new book . That other way? “It is not enough for funds to be left in the hands of the wealthy; rather they must be invested in risk-bearing equity capital, focused on innovation.” Conard argues in his new book The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class that trickle down economics—he calls it “supply-side economics,” but they’re the same thing; “supply-side” is just a fresh coat of lipstick on a pig—is still the best way to boost the economy. The trick, Cowen explains, is to put the “concept of risk-bearing at the core” of trickle down, which means encouraging the top one percent to invest their money in the economy rather than dumping it in offshore accounts or sealing it away in illiquid accounts. But forty years of trickle-down policies have proven that when you give money to the top one percent, they keep it and figure out new ways to hoard even more of it. How do you supposedly encourage the wealthy to undertake risky investments? Cowen proposes ending the “bureaucratization of society” and “excess regulation,” which are, in fact, the same goals that trickle-downers like Ronald Reagan, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, and George W. Bush have been aspiring toward for generations. The concept of trickle down economics has been propped up for all these years by three core strategies: trickle-down clowns demand tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for the powerful, and wage suppression for everyone else. As we’ve seen, Cowen has already made the case for deregulation. Where does he stand on tax cuts? While we shouldn’t rely on tax cuts, they may still play a role in this
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Job, Wage Growth Surges in King County

September 7, 2016 Paul Constant

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Economics, Minimum Wage

It’s true that Seattle’s minimum wage has not yet hit $15; the minimum right now ranges from $10.50 to $13 per hour, depending on employer size. The minimum-wage increase just started in January of 2015, so it’s too soon to conclusively prove that the minimum wage has been good or bad for Seattle. Two years is a blip of economic data. But we do have a conclusive answer to two very important questions: is Seattle a good place to work right now? Yes. Did raising the minimum wage immediately transform Seattle into an anti-business hellhole? No. Jon Talton at the Seattle Times has published an excellent column explaining where we stand in a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report. King County demonstrated tremendous job and wage growth in the first quarter of 2016: Weekly wages here increased by 5.1 percent to $1,456 through March compared with the first quarter of 2015. Nationally, wages fell 0.5 percent to $1,043… King County ranked 44th in job growth, up 3.6 percent year over year. Nationally the increase was 2 percent. Professional and business services saw the largest gain. King was also ninth among counties in total employment, with nearly 1.3 million employed. Talton addresses minimum-wage advocates directly in the next passage: “I know what some of you are thinking, but this doesn’t really tell us anything about the long-term affects of Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage experiment,” he warns. But he continues: “the propaganda about massive job losses proved bogus — again.” This is a very important point. Those business owners and conservative finger-waggers who warned that Seattle would almost immediately see a mass exodus of restaurants and industry if we raised the minimum wage have been caught in a lie. Workers in Seattle are seeing more jobs and higher wages. Now those same prophets of
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The Free Market Doesn’t Care If You Live or Die

August 24, 2016 Paul Constant

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Economics

This Associated Press story about the tanning industry is so terrible you just have to stare at it for a second, slack-jawed: Business owners around the country say the little-noticed 10 percent tax on tanning in President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul has crippled the industry, forcing the closing of nearly 10,000 of the more than 18,000 tanning salons in the U.S. It’s like a hideous traffic accident, this thing. The unnamed reporter quotes a tanning salon owner from Kentucky with a sentence that is basically Trickle Down 101: “When I go to vote, I’m supporting candidates who are pro-business and who want less government involvement, less government regulation.” Uh-huh. So the tragedy of over-regulation is killing your business. Got it. But why is the mean old government targeting these brave entrepreneurs? What does Obama have against innocent small business owners? The story buries the lede way down in the fifth paragraph: “The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network says those who use tanning beds before age 35 increase their lifetime risk of melanoma, the deadliest type of skin cancer, by 59 percent.” That is a staggering figure. Not even cigarettes claim that kind of cancer rate. But could you imagine a similar story featuring cigarette manufacturers complaining about rampant government intervention? Of course you can’t, but that’s because we’ve passed a tipping point—in modern American society, smoking is no longer widely acceptable. Our leaders made it so cigarette manufacturers couldn’t advertise to children, our governments taxed cigarettes, they made smoking indoors in public spaces illegal, they funded studies to explore the health impacts of smoking. It was the work of multiple generations of leaders, and it will save millions of lives in the long run. Could you imagine a libertarian free market solution to smoking? Or what our nation’s health would look like if we allowed
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Remember the High Costs of Unpaid Sick Leave When You’re Voting This Fall

August 23, 2016 Paul Constant

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Initiative 1433, Policy, The Other Washington

This fall, Washington state will vote on Initiative 1433 . Many Washingtonians know that a “yes” vote on 1433 will raise the state minimum wage to $13.50 by the year 2020. But fewer people know that 1433 also provides up to seven days of paid sick and safe leave for workers per year. This is so important. Over a million Washington workers have no access to paid sick leave, which means that a missed day of work results in the disappearance of one-fifth of a weekly paycheck for those who work 40 hours a week. Many minimum-wage workers simply can’t afford that kind of a hit to their weekly pay; an unpaid sick day could mean the difference between paying rent or driving up credit card debt yet again. And many of these workers are in the food service industry, which means that when they show up to work sick, they put all their customers’ health at risk. For the latest edition of our podcast, The Other Washington, we talked with 46th District State Representative Jessyn Farrell about why she supports paid sick and safe leave. She makes a great case for the initiative to provide sick leave for food service workers, but she also makes a strong, personal case for family leave: Farrell was born with a quarter-sized hole in her heart, and the economic impact of that birth defect was hugely consequential in her family. We also talked with food safety lawyer Bill Marler about the nearly quarter-century he’s spent fighting companies that make customers sick. Marler is one of the world’s leading experts on foodborne illnesses, and he provides a compelling case for allowing sick workers to stay home. The tiny amount that employers like Chipotle are saving by not providing sick leave is insignificant when viewed in comparison to the millions—even billions—that companies pay out to sickened
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Capitol Hill to Get Another New Pizza Place, One Year After Conservatives Predicted a Pizza Apocalypse

August 9, 2016 Paul Constant

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Minimum Wage, small business, z pizza

As you may recall, I wrote about the eight pizza places that opened on Capitol Hill in the past year. All those new restaurants arrived within one year after conservatives trumpeted a single Capitol Hill pizza place’s closure as a sign that Seattle’s higher minimum wage was killing small business. Today, we can add another new pizza place to the list. John Sundstrom, owner of the fabulous fine dining restaurant Lark and the more casual Slab—which I believe to be the single best sandwich shop on Capitol Hill—is opening a pizza place called Southpaw on 12th Avenue, a little over ten minutes’ walk from the pizza place that closed down last year. Southpaw, as with all of Sundstrom’s restaurants, will use locally sourced ingredients. But it’s not going to be ridiculously expensive. Bethany Jean Clement broke the story for the Seattle Times : “We’re not just backing up the pizza supply truck to unload standard mozzarella,” Sundstrom says. But while you can expect some of the “Lark aesthetic and quality range,” he notes that big-enough-to-share pizzas will “probably be around 20 bucks.” Instead of slices, Southpaw will serve quarter-pies, about two slices’ worth for $5 — “enough for a one-person lunch with a salad… a walking-and-eating kind of size.” Southpaw will also serve fancy soft-serve ice cream, which is a familiar staple at another bustling business on Capitol Hill, the Rachel’s Ginger Beer on 12th, just down the street from the future Southpaw site. Considering that Seattle workers are doing better now than they were before the minimum wage increased, and considering that restaurant owners are investing in workers despite all those supposedly “job-killing” regulations, maybe it’s time for conservative talking heads to take notes from Idris at the top of this post and cancel the apocalypse? Seems as though the sky might not be falling, after all.

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Civic Ventures

Posts by Paul Constant