Media Center | Other Voices

Take a Stand: Minimum wage is too low

04.27.2008 | Lawrence Journal-World and News | The April 1 Journal-World carried a column by Kansas University business professor Mark Hirschey called “Inconvenient truth about minimum wage.” Since it was April Fools’ Day and the article gave many anecdotes but few “facts,” we’re not certain it was altogether serious. In case it was, we’re responding with some facts of our own. | Read

In Our View: More Learning

04.16.2008 | Vancouver Columbian | Justifiable demands for improved quality of public education will continue to reverberate fruitlessly until a stark confession is made: Students in Washington state and across America are not spending enough hours and enough days in classrooms. | Read

State's Department of Early Learning paying dividends

04.11.2008 | Longview Daily News  | Washington lawmakers made early childhood education a high priority beginning in 2006, with the creation of state Department of Early Learning. More than a dozen programs dealing with early childhood development were assigned to the new department. The Legislature was betting that bringing programs under a single, cabinet-level umbrella would improve the effectiveness of the state's efforts to help Washington's youngest citizens succeed. | Read

Fair wage engenders basic human dignity

04.10.2008 | The Tennesean | The United States first introduced minimum-wage legislation in the midst of the Great Depression. Recognizing the failures of unregulated markets, the nation chose to draw a moral line below which no market economy could fall; desperate people should not be required to work at desperation wages. Citizen-emboldened politicians understood taking advantage of people's economic vulnerability was morally unconscionable, even amid economic turmoil. | Read

Social Security sounder than you might think

04.07.2008 | Christian Science Monitor | The latest report from the trustees of the system show improvement in its finances, despite some grim coverage. The 1 in 4 American families who receive some form of Social Security benefits should be cheered by the latest annual report of the system's trustees. That report, issued March 25, shows "a really significant improvement" in the finances of the system, says Andrew Biggs, who helped draft the report while serving as deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA). That's not the way some in the press saw this report. | Read

Seattle “pay-for-k” a cautionary tale for other states

04.07.2008 | New America Foundation - Early Ed Watch | Rounds up progress - and backsliding - in Minneapolis toward universal full-day kindergarten. Seattle Public Schools get a mention as a cautionary tale. | Read

Paid family leave is on track, and costs were lowered

04.04.2008 | Puget Sound Business Journal | Ask any parent, and he or she will tell you that bringing a new life into the world takes equal parts courage and hope. Ask any business owner, and that person will tell you that supporting the employees is good for the bottom line. That's why we're proud that Washington's Family Leave Insurance program is on track to deliver benefits to our families and businesses in October 2009. | Read (subscription required)

Don't fall for Bush's Social Security scare

03.30.2008 | Seattle Times | The stock market hasn't been this nasty since the 1970s. House prices continue their dive, and consumer confidence has gone splat. The rocketing federal budget deficit will probably orbit Mars by the time the government finishes cleaning up the mess left by the housing bubble it so blithely let fester. Good job, fellas. The Bush administration doesn't have a heckuva lot of credibility left on economic matters. But some members think they have one little ideological game left to play: scare people out of their wits about Social Security. | Read

Family matters - State lawmakers must find a way to pay for parental leave.

03.14.2008 | Puget Sound Business Journal | Last year, Washington lawmakers created a family medical leave provision. The original idea was to let workers take paid time off to care for sick family members or a newborn or to recover from a disability. Workers would pay the cost. Through a 2-cent-an-hour tax on their wages...they would receive $250 a week for up to five weeks of time off. ... We believe an employee-funded solution is the right approach, and are encouraged at what appear to be moves toward compromise. | Read (subscription)

Improving and Rating Our Local Child-Care Choices

03.09.2008 | Kitsap Sun | Where's a good day-care? That's probably one of the most frequent — and important — questions asked by newcomer families in Kitsap County, or by families where a stay-at-home parent is returning to the workforce. But it also can be one of the most difficult to answer. Personal referrals from a friend are a possibility, but sometimes, for various reasons, they're not a good fit; or possibly, they have no openings. So where does a parent go for advice? | Read

Child-care bill a new kind of law for the private sector

03.05.2008 | Seattle Times | The child-care bill in the state Senate, House Bill 2449, is an ingenious creation. It places the workers and managers in most private child-care centers in a bargaining group with others in the area. There will be a vote on union representation, and if a majority of those voting vote yes, the whole group, bosses and workers alike, will be in the union. The union will bargain with the state over payment per child, and will negotiate a fee for itself. | Read

Lessons to be learned in tanker deal

03.04.2008 | Seattle Times | Critics have pointed to a Seattle and Boeing smugness and sense of entitlement. To the extent that they are correct, it's in our forgetting this relatively new economic calculus. Talent and capital are the mobile prizes of the 21st Century economy and they can move. It doesn't mean they will move anywhere. In this fast-moving environment, Seattle awakes to a cohort of — gasp! — mature and perhaps hubris-bitten companies facing nimble competitors: Microsoft, Starbucks, Washington Mutual and Boeing. | Read

The Boeing tax break argument doesn't fly

02.27.2008 | Seattle Post-Intelligencer | Back in the Dark Ages of elementary school Valentine's Day, teachers had a basic rule for maintaining order and avoiding bruised feelings: Everyone gives everybody else a card, even if it's to the kid most likely to wind up being named in a restraining order. These days the debate in Washington is whether the same theory should apply to tax breaks handed out under the guise of economic development incentives. | Read

Energy Taxes: Rocket launch

02.27.2008 | Seattle Post-Intelligencer | The economy or the environment? How about both? Congress approved Wednesday $18 billion in new oil company taxes, money that will be used to spur investment in wind, solar and alternative sources. | Read

Don't "subprime" Social Security

02.17.2008 | Seattle Times, Everett Herald | During the push to privatize Social Security, the idea's foes were accused of not trusting the American people to manage their own money. The naysayers prevailed, and aren't we glad. How interesting that the buildup to the mortgage meltdown employed many of the same sales tactics as the Social Security privatization scheme. Resentment, fear, flattery and hype — plus scant details on fees and other costs — all went into the pitch. | Read (Seattle Times) | Read (Everett Herald)

Support education programs that boost working families

02.17.2008 | Seattle Times | We all know education pays. It is the foundation of prosperity for most working families. The lack of an education is a factor in the rapidly growing income inequality in our state. As the educational-achievement gap widens between higher- and lower-income workers, so does the income gap. To begin erasing these disparities, more low-income working adults need to gain the education and skills necessary to compete for higher-wage jobs and prosper in our local economy. | Read

Nurturing human capital

02.17.2008 | Seattle Times | In the 19th century, industrialization swept the world. Many European nations expanded their welfare states but kept their education systems exclusive. The U.S. tried the opposite approach. American leaders expanded education and created the highest-quality work force on the planet. That quality work force was the single biggest reason the U.S. emerged as the economic superpower of the 20th century. That progress stopped about 30 years ago. | Read

State tax policy: First things first

02.16.2008 | Seattle Post-Intelligencer | Washington has a "complicated" tax structure. We'd use stronger words -- incoherent, perplexing, unfair -- but it's easier to show rather than tell. | Read

Throwing minimum-wage 'experts' for a loss

02.13.2008| Philadelphia Daily News | WHEN THE clock expired at the end of the Super Bowl, a lot of so-called experts turned out to be wrong. The game is played on the field, and that often has a funny way of defying ill-placed prediction. Overshadowed perhaps by football, but even more important to millions of Pennsylvanians, was the January debunking of forecasts by experts even more certain than football commentators. | Read

Family-leave program needs funding source

02.10.2008 | The Olympian | Creation of paid family leave to care for a newborn or newly adopted baby was a bold step forward by the 2007 Legislature. But a new program like paid leave is meaningless unless lawmakers decide how to pay for it. And now it appears that legislators have punted on that question two years in a row. | Read

Paid leave deserves to pass

02.08.2008 | New Jersey Star Ledger | It's hard to understand the hostile reaction of the business community to the idea of allowing a worker time off to care for an infant or a seriously ill child or a parent coping with the medical conditions that accompany advanced age. Such opposition is especially tough to comprehend because companies wouldn't have to pay a dime. | Read

Head Start: Raising Standards

02.08.2008 | Seattle Post-Intelligencer | During the past year, Congress and President Bush raised the standards for Head Start. That decision threatens to leave a Washington state program for young children even further behind the national model. With a little flexibility, though, establishing and funding a state Head Start will strengthen the academic and social foundations for thousands of lower-income children. | Read

An argument for Social Security

02.07.2008 | Washington Post | "The Pain Game" [Magazine, Jan. 3] mentioned that monthly Social Security disability benefits constitute the bulk of former All-Pro defensive lineman Dave Pear's income. The point deserves emphasis. His story exemplifies why Social Security is so important to working Americans, why the benefits it provides should not be cut and, indeed, why those benefits should be increased. | Read

We still have Social Security

02.06.08 | Atlanta Journal-Constitution | Considering the current state of our union, it might be good to remind ourselves that not everything has gone wrong. There have been things in the past few years that could have gone awry but didn't, mistakes that we could have made but didn't. For example, we could have decided to privatize Social Security and divert money into the stock market, as President Bush and others were suggesting. But we didn't. | Read

Good education is key to everything

01.31.2008 | Everett Herald | Real estate professionals have proven time and again what you already know -- strong schools make for stronger home values. If your home is a major investment for you, then schools should be, too. | Read

Family leave

01.28.2008 | New Jersey Voices | Family Leave may make it to New Jersey. Senate bill S786 was approved by committee today and will be sent to the full state Senate for consideration. But not if the Chamber of Commerce and its allies have their way. That, by the way, should include the ideologically driven concern trolls that frequent these environs. On the anti-government side, the rhetoric has been ramped up to inspire fear of impending disaster. | Read

Family Leave: Fairer treatment

01.25.2008 | Seattle Post-Intelligencer | When it comes to the first few weeks after a child's birth, the state of Washington plans to give parents a small taste of the fair treatment that is the standard worldwide. To make that happen, the Legislature has some work to do. | Read

Look for a focused legislative session

01.13.2008 | The Olympian | One bit of important business remains from the 2007 session when lawmakers approved a paid family leave program scheduled to begin in 2009. | Read

Pay Checked

01.12.2008 | Spokane Spokesman-Review | "...it would be better if the [minimum wage] were the same in each state. But because the federal rate is so ridiculously low, some states have stepped in. The federal minimum wage hit its peak purchasing power in 1968, when it was $1.60 an hour. If it had kept pace with inflation, it would be $9.49 an hour today" | Read