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Seattle mayor announces $15 minimum wage agreement endorsed by most members of his income inequality advisory committee

Mayor Ed Murray just concluded a press conference in which he announced that his appointed committee has reached agreement on a phased-in $15 minimum wage. Here’s the schedule:          

More details on Seattle's proposed $15 minimum wage

The Puget Sound Business Journal has a good overview. As the PSBJ reports, it’s complicated. Under the mayor’s proposal, which the City Council has to approve, businesses with fewer than 500 employees would have up to seven years to reach $15 an hour. But counting what is called “temporary compensation responsibility,” these small businesses would […]

Gov. Inslee names "Carbon Emissions Reduction Task Force"

Inslee’s Executive Order 14-04 attempts to jumpstart action on his climate change initiatives. But it’s not clear that the EO has any teeth. Nonetheless, it’s a clear statement of where the governor wants to take the state. The Governor’s Carbon Emissions Reduction Taskforce is hereby created to provide recommendations on the design and implementation of […]

Minimum wage, maximum hassle. Uncompromising activists threaten to take $15 to November ballot.

My column today’s looks at the ongoing wrangling in Seattle City Hall over how to get to a $15 minimum wage. What Seattle does matters statewide. So far, no one has devised a containment strategy to prevent Seattle politics from spreading. It’s not Vegas. What happens in Seattle doesn’t stay in Seattle. …Here’s what’s clear: […]

No recommendation from Seattle mayor on how to get to $15 minimum wage. Yet.

Yesterday’s press conference (video) had Seattle Mayor Ed Murray explaining why he was not announcing his proposal for a $15 minimum wage. Here’s how Publicola characterized it. At a press briefing this afternoon—the official press release read, “Mayor Murray to announce his proposal for raising the minimum wage in Seattle”—Mayor Ed Murray did not announce […]

Teachers' union objects to tying test scores to teacher evaluation; Washington becomes first state to lose education waiver

As expected, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a letter to Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn today declined to renew the state’s education waiver.   Dorn pulls no punches in his press release. “Washington state has been doing great work under our waiver agreement,” Dorn said. “We have developed our own system that more […]

Mobility math: 12 Percent of Americans can count on being in the 1 Percent

Static formulations aside, there’s some good news about social and economic mobility. An article in the New York Times by social welfare professor Mark Rank lays it out: The picture drawn of the 1 percent has been that of a static population, just as the 99 percent is often portrayed as unchanging.  But, he writes: […]

"Cruel budgeting," in CA and WA

Dick’s column yesterday is about a blast from the near past: A proposed initiative for the ballot this year would reduce class sizes. This idea is very similar to I-728, approved by voters in 2000. I-728 “redirected money from a fleeting state surplus, one that disappeared shortly after the initiative passed.” This year’s initiative “doesn’t […]

Looking beyond employment effects of higher minimum wage: loss of non-monetary benefits, increased workload, heavier payroll taxes

Mark Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, effectively counters claims that a higher minimum wage has minimal impacts on employment. I’ve argued before on CD that saying (or finding empirically) that minimum wage increases have no or very small effects on employment levels is not the same as saying that minimum wage increases have no negative effects on low-skilled and unskilled […]

More on union-backed class size reduction initiative – costly and unfunded

In my column today, I write about I-1351, the class size reduction initiative endorsed and promoted by the Washington Education Association. We first wrote about it here. I note that the initiative bears some resemblance to Initiative 728, passed by the voters in 2000 as an unfunded mandate. Like I-728, I-1351 doesn’t raise taxes. It […]