Emily Makings

New Brief: Senate Ways and Means Chair's Proposed 2014 Supplemental Increases Education Spending, Reduces Taxes

Yesterday the Senate Ways and Means Chair proposed a 2014 supplemental operating budget. We take a look at the proposal in a new policy brief.

January detailed enrollment report from Washington exchange not very newsy

The Washington Health Benefit Exchange has released its January enrollment report (covering Oct. 1, 2013 through January 31, 2014). Like previous monthly reports, it breaks out the enrollment data by age, plan type, county, sex, income, etc. Aside from the higher levels of enrollments, the break outs are not markedly different from the December report. […]

Labor costs and fruit packing technology

The Yakima Herald-Republic has a story today about the technologies being used by fruit packers. It illustrates how industries faced with increasingly high labor costs adopt technologies that automate the work to some extent, reducing demand for low-skill workers. Some excerpts: The job used to be done only by people with knives. But these days […]

More on public pension legal issues

Richard Epstein’s column this week asks, How can the government best roll back pensions in ways that satisfy key economic requirements without running afoul of serious constitutional concerns? The legal questions have arisen in several places (including Washington) and remain unsettled. Epstein: California pension law cases, without careful analysis, have evolved to freeze minimum pension […]

Wages and benefits should be considered as parts of total compensation

Last week I wrote about a series of posts from Sasha Volokh on the California rule for public pensions. Since then, he has added a post asking “Are public-sector employees ‘overpaid’?” This is a perennial question. Volokh mentions several studies on the issue and concludes, “I’m inclined to think that public-sector workers tend to be […]

Washington exchange's ongoing budget and new enrollment numbers

A story in the Seattle Times over the weekend looked at the budget of the Washington health benefit exchange (the Healthplanfinder): Washington and the 13 other states running their own health-insurance marketplaces all had federal grants to pay for startup costs. Now the Washington Health Benefit Exchange will have to transition from federal grants totaling […]

Stats on minimum wage workers

With proposals to increase the minimum wage in the state, there’s a lot of discussion about who the minimum wage workers are. For example, see this Everett Herald op-ed by Reps. Luis Moscoso and Mike Sells. We’ve written on it as well; see here and here. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of workers […]

Work suspended on Panama Canal expansion

According to the Wall Street Journal, work on the Panama Canal expansion has been suspended, due to a dispute over who will pay for $1.6 billion in cost overruns: The pace of work on the project, 70% of which is finished, has been slowing over the past few weeks, as GUPC [the consortium running the […]

Public policy implications of California Rule for pensions

At the Volokh Conspiracy, a legal blog now housed at the Washington Post, Sasha Volokh has been writing about the California Rule and public pensions. Volokh’s brief description of the rule is: . . . in California (and some other states), the courts give constitutional protection not only to the amount of public employees’ pensions […]

Sports and local funds

Many of us in the Northwest have sports on the mind today, understandably. Given that, I found a couple of local articles interesting and timely: In a Seattle Times post, Jonathan Martin writes about the potential costs of the Super Bowl parade through downtown Seattle: The Seahawks’ city-issued parade permit includes standard costs for traffic […]