1. Earlier this week the King County Council adopted a “living wage” for county employees and county contractors. The new requirement will be phased in to reach $15 in 2017. The Seattle Times notes that it “applies only to people working directly or indirectly for taxpayers, partly because the county has limited authority over how business is conducted in cities and towns within its borders.”

Further, “Most county employees already make at least $15 an hour. . . . County officials say they don’t know how many employees are working on those contracts and don’t know how many workers the legislation will affect.”

2. According to the Tax Foundation, Washington has the nation’s highest wireless tax, fee, and surcharge burden (18.6 percent). (Oregon’s is the lowest, at 1.76 percent.) From the report:

Local government taxes have a significant impact on the overall tax burden on wireless consumers in many of the states that have high wireless taxes and fees. . . . Washington State allows municipal governments to impose utility franchise taxes with rates as high as 9 percent.

3. Microsoft Research Lab has launched a new election prediction site. Economist David Rothschild and the Microsoft team are rethinking traditional polling:

The future is “moving away from the idea that everyone needs to be asked the same questions in the same setting to asking the right questions to the right person the right way,” he says.

Longer term, Rothschild’s hope is to take innovative predictive measures beyond elections to predict policy outcomes. “The real reason I care and you care about who’s going to win an election because that person or group of people are going to influence policy,” he says. “I hope to be talking to you in two years about what the likely tax rate is going to be if candidate A or candidate B wins.”