Category: Uncategorized

Immunization against tired, self-serving economic framing

We are taught to think of economic cause and effect as if it were understood almost as clearly as trajectory of an artillery round. For example, how many times—and in how many forms—have we been told to consider a proposed increase in the legal minimum wage (either state or federal) as a “job killer”? Every Republican in the U.S. Congress, and especially our current U.S. Representative from eastern Washington, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, jumps to seemingly plausible stories of how the poor or untrained young people just entering the work force will be disadvantaged by a rise in the legal minimum wage. Inevitably, McMorris Rodgers will trot out her youthful summer work experience toiling at her parents’ produce stand—as if her parents were legally bound to pay her minimum wage. The stated economic mechanism of “job killing” is always that employers, seeing their profits squeezed by increasing labor costs, will either hire fewer workers, automate the work with machines (cutting out low-skill workers), or be forced out of business. 

Sadly, I heard this argument against the minimum wage from the mouths of business people and (mostly Republican) politicians so many times that, without thinking about it, the image of a disadvantaged youth priced out of the job market was always the first image that popped into my head when I heard the words “minimum wage”. 

This “job killer” formulation is a sincere article of faith with people like McMorris Rodgers. The trouble is, as Nick Hanauer et al puts it, “Corporate Bullsh*t”. This “job killer” formulation long precedes McMorris Rodgers. It has been regularly trotted out since the minimum wage was first conceived in the 1930s—all on the basis of a made-up thought experiment and zero actual evidence. Simply by endless repetition many who ought to have questioned the concept, like myself, passively came to accept it. 

Let’s twist the economic crystal ball a quarter turn for a moment. What if the legal minimum wage were raised to, say, $15/hr? Minimum wage workers would have enough money (“disposable income”) to occasionally spend some of it on a restaurant meal, or concert, or winter tires, or a better apartment, or…or. That extra spending, i.e. increased demand, would stimulate businesses to expand their operations and hire more workers, right? It turns out that actual data suggests that an increase in the minimum wage does NOT kill jobs, e.g. “High New Jersey Minimum Wage Doesn’t Seem to Deter Fast Food Hiring, Study Finds” from 1993 in the NYTimes. Sadly, the money behind the media affords studies like this minimal oxygen—and the brain worm of “job killer”, endlessly repeated, remains embedded in the public consciousness. 

It turns out that many economic articles of faith put forth as if they were statements of fact are actually nothing but self-serving, empirically dubious, vaguely plausible conjectures that turn out, when subjected to empirical evaluation, to be false. 

Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh, and Donald Cohen have painstakingly assembled quotations illustrating the long history of this self-serving rhetoric in their new book “Corporate Bullsh*t” (avail by order at Auntie’s in “1-5 days” OR at Amazon). The text and the notes offer the modern, empirically based counter arguments. 

Below is the table of contents. 

You will never hear one of these bogus economic arguments the same way again. For example. I recently attended a Spokane County Commissioner meeting at which Commissioner Al French interjected a notation that he was against state building code regulations to limit new natural gas infrastructure because it “would make housing more expensive and ‘hurt the poor’”. This dubious assertion comes under “Oh, those unintended consequences” (p. 108), a subsection of Chapter 5, “You’ll Only Make it Worse”. Whether Mr. French truly believes his assertion or not is only known to him. The point for me was that I was immunized against blithely accepting this dubious, simplistic formulation that he projected from the dais as if it were plain fact.

I recommend you buy or borrow “Corporate Bullsh*t”. It’s readable, ironically funny, well illustrated, and enlightening—and you’ll never hear politicians making tired points about economics the same way again.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Shen Yun, the Falun Gong, and far right politics

A copy of The Epoch Times, December 20-26, 2023, U.S. Edition, appeared on nearly every driveway Spokane last month (at least on the South Hill where I walk). A partial wrap-around page of the main section advertised that the entertainment spectacular, Shen Yun, would be on stage at the First Interstate Center for Arts in downtown Spokane. Shen Yun will perform Saturday and Sunday March 9 and 10, each day at 2PM. Tickets range from $80 to $150, depending on the seating. 

You can watch the 30 second Trailer here on YouTube, where you will see some impressive gymnastic dance clips and a short notice that the show encompasses “5,000 years of history. Inspired by The Divine”, the latter illustrated by horses with wings flying at you out of the screen. 

You are invited to think of Shen Yun as an introduction to traditional Chinese culture, a stage show that must have paid The Epoch Times for the advertising. In reality, Shen Yun, with its eight companies comprised of nearly 500 individuals, is an outreach effort of the Falun Gong (aka Falun Dafa). The Falun Gong is a Chinese “new religious movement” with End Times overtones headquartered in their 427 acre Dragon Springs compound in the town of Deerpark, New York, about 70 miles northwest of New York City. The Falun Gong was founded in the early 1990s by Li Hongzhi in northeastern China. Li Hongzhi took up permanent legal residence in the U.S. in 1998, shortly before the Chinese government declared the Falun Gong movement a doomsday cult and suppressed the movement in China. 

The Epoch Times digital and paper newspaper, New Tang Dynasty Television, and Shen Yun are all closely intertwined, sharing “missions, money, and executives”. The Falun Gong in the U.S. mostly stayed away from politics until the movement started to see Donald Trump as their Savior. An excellent and exhaustive 2019 NBC News article, “Trump, QAnon and an impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times”, details the propaganda efforts of the Falun Gong/Trump alliance:

Former practitioners of Falun Gong told NBC News that believers think the world is headed toward a judgment day, where those labeled “communists” will be sent to a kind of hell, and those sympathetic to the spiritual community will be spared. Trump is viewed as a key ally in the anti-communist fight, former Epoch Times employees said.

The Falun Gong possesses religious roots in Taoism and Buddhism, meditation and gentle movement (think simplified qigong), all leavened with Li Hongzhi’s particular views:

It [the Chinese crackdown on the Falun Gong] has also invited scrutiny of the spiritual leader’s more unconventional ideas. Among them, Li has railed against what he called the wickedness of homosexuality, feminism and popular music while holding that he is a god-like figure who can levitate and walk through walls.

Li has also taught that sickness is a symptom of evil that can only be truly cured with meditation and devotion, and that aliens from undiscovered dimensions have invaded the minds and bodies of humans, bringing corruption and inventions such as computers and airplanes. 

You would be forgiven if, having found The Epoch Times last month in your driveway, you tossed it into your recycling bin, but it might have been worth a look. A two page spread in the main section is titled “Trump’s Legal Challenges Explained.” The paragraph under the title establishes the tenor of the article with the notation that most of the lawsuits stem “from his efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election”—as if these were simple, benign “challenges”. For anyone who has followed the six legal cases against Trump, this article fairly drips pro-Trump bias, presenting defense arguments with a tone of fact and the indictments as overreach. Reading the article, though, goes a long way to explaining the attitudes of people who believe The Epoch Times is demonstrating “Truth and Tradition” as claimed under its masthead. (Even Fox finally gave up “Fair and Balanced”—but not The Epoch Times.)

The Epoch Times has all the trappings of a conventional mainstream news source, including testimonials like this one:

“Very informative, well balanced and trustworthy. My eyes have been opened to many things I wasn’t even aware of and my suspicions were confirmed on other things that mainstream media was choosing to misrepresent.”

– DAVID OLSON

It would be unwise to dismiss The Epoch Times and Shen Yun as trivial or irrelevant. Its multimedia reach is broad with tendrils piercing even ‘lil ole Spokane. Almost three years ago a dear, elderly, former neighbor of mine declared to me her delight in her $16.90 monthly subscription to the Epoch Times. She went on to say she was recommending it to all her friends and relatives. One of the things she said she’d learned from it was that “Biden is ruining the country!” 

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Bidenomics v. Reaganomics–a Paradigm Shift in the making

You’ve heard it endlessly from U.S. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-CD5-eastern Washington): the formula for economic growth is 1) cut taxes (especially for corporations and the already wealthy) and 2) reduce regulation. According to her (and most other Republicans in the last forty years) this will “unleash the power of the free market”. The underlying theory is this: if you provide businessmen with more capital, they will use that money to produce more goods and services. Then, by the magic of supply and demand, prices will fall due to the greater supply—and the economy will rev up. Providing corporations and the wealthy with more money while reducing regulation was consistently marketed to the average voter as “reducing yourtax burden” and increasing your “freedom”. (Remember McMorris Rodger’s endless parroting about “money in your pocket” as she promoted the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017”?)

The modern version of this top down formulation of how the economy best works gained ascendance with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Technically (and confusingly) Reagan’s economic formulation is a mix of “neoliberal” economic policies that harken back to the unfettered free market capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the “Gilded Age” and the “Roaring Twenties”). Thanks to Paul Harvey, this Reagan’s neoliberal formulation was dubbed “Reaganomics”. According to Wikipedia, “These policies are characterized as supply-side economics, trickle-down economics, or “voodoo economics” by opponents, while Reagan and his advocates preferred to call it free-market economics.” (None of this is new. Older versions of top-down economics were labelled “horse and sparrow economics” by detractors, alluding to the working class feeding off the oats that passed through the horse fed by the plutocrats, the horse and buggy version of “trickle-down”.) Note that the Clinton administration with its banking deregulation at least partly bought into neoliberal economic orthodoxy. 

Forty years of neoliberal supply side economics has resulted in pronounced wealth inequality, hollowing out of the middle class (defined as doing better than living paycheck to paycheck), decreased class mobility, and increasing homelessness. All of that produces a sense that the system is rigged, a sense that fuels the rise of an autocrat like Trump (“I alone can fix it.”) or, better, catalyzes a shift in economic paradigm.

We are at a turning point

You’ve all heard President Biden declare that his administration will build the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out”. The term Middle-out Economics comes by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer in their book Gardens of Democracy published in 2011. Middle-out Economics is meant to contrast to the Top-Down paradigm that has dominated Republican (and some Democratic) administrations for the last forty years. It is the economic model that underlies every bit of parroted rhetoric about deregulation and cutting taxes that comes from the mouths of people like Rep. McMorris Rodgers. Middle-out Economics, in contrast to Top-Down would once again empower the middle class as the primary driver of the American economy. It is time to change the narrative—a paradigm shift.

Simplistically put, when people possess economic clout beyond the necessities of food and shelter, they use it to pursue (“demand”) goods and services. Business responds to the opportunity to make money by satisfying the demand. In contrast, when corporations and the wealthy have more money they tend to invest in stock buy-backs and stocks that ultimately contribute to the widening wealth gap. 

Nick Hanauer, one of the authors of Gardens of Democracy, went on to found Seattle-based Civic Ventures and the associated Podcast series “Pitchfork Economics”. I encourage you to click and spend twenty minutes listening to Hanauer’s January 2, 2024, podcast entitled “Seizing the Middle Out Moment”. Here’s the pitch for the Podcast Series:

Any society that allows itself to become radically unequal eventually collapses into an uprising or a police state—or both.

Join venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and some of the world’s leading economic and political thinkers in an exploration of who gets what and why. Turns out, everything you learned about economics is wrong. And if we don’t do something about rising inequality, the pitchforks are coming.

President Biden’s “growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out” is a big deal. The Reaganomic, neoliberal polices that are articles of faith with Republicans like McMorris Rodgers have had a forty year test run. They’ve run their course. The financial deregulation piece of Reaganomics brought us the Dot-com bubble and the Great Recession of 2008 as money at the top sought mechanisms of expansion. The Biden administration’s policies, dubbed “Bidenomics”, include a return to public infrastructure investment, a strengthening of union bargaining, advocacy for a rise in the minimum wage, encouragement of industry on our own soil, efforts to rein in monopolistic tendencies, and support for the IRS to collect taxes due. Early successes include job growth, curbing of inflation, and avoidance of a predicted recession. 

This year we choose between “bottom-up and middle out” or a return to “top-down” served up with a dose of oligarchic authoritarianism. Choose wisely. 

We need to get this right.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Who or what determines food prices?

In a true “free market” price is determined solely by supply and demand. If, for example, the supply of eggs decreases on account of a bird flu epidemic while demand for eggs remains the same, the price will rise and, as classical economics teaches us, some consumers will be priced out of the market and demand will decrease. The result is a new equilibrium price. It’s all supposed to be very tidy; no regulation or oversight needed; price is determined automatically. (This is Adam Smith’s formulation of “the invisible hand”). 

There are a number of troubles with this formulation when applied to the real world. Money itself is not a stable commodity, the value of a unit of money tends to diminish with time. When monetary inflation is in the news like it was last year, consumers tend to seize on inflation as the cause of rising prices. We don’t haggle with the grocer, we pay the sticker price if we want our eggs—especially if all the grocers are posting similar prices. 

Imagine in this setting some very large producers of eggs who account for, say, 90 percent of the egg supply, get together and agree they will all set a price of five dollars per dozen eggs. After all, why not take advantage of the public’s perception that prices are up because of some combination of the bird flu and inflation—both items that are in the news? That’s price-fixing, the use of effective monopoly power to make more profit for the companies and for the company’s shareholders by gouging the consumer—a short-circuit of the vaunted “free market”. 

One can readily see how this could spiral out of control with companies in every industry consolidating, setting prices, taking huge profits for them and their shareholders (investors in the stock markets)—all at the expense of what my dad used to call “the little guy” (among whom he counted himself). Conglomerations of corporate behemoths can get richer by fixing prices, effectively stealing small amounts of money from a huge number of consumers—no one or several of whom has the wherewithal or the investigative clarity to challenge the robbery.

Is there anyone who protects the little guy from such corporate predation? Isn’t that supposed to be one of the functions of government? Well, yes, but the efforts rarely get much press, partly because lawsuits take years and many steps to resolve and partly because the those most hurt by the price gouging are not often compensated directly (more on that later). This does not make for eye-catching news stories. 

Just such an easily missable story appeared on the front page of the Business Section of the Spokesman on December 7, 2023. The headline was “Many Washingtonians getting checks from settled cases”. If you read the article closely you might have learned that Washington State Attorney General’s office is taking notice of illegal corporate monopolistic practices that violate the principles of a “free market”.

In 2021, Washington sued 19 chicken producers for violating the state’s antitrust laws, asserting the producers conspired to “inflate and manipulate prices, rig contract bids, illegally exchange information and coordinate industry supply reductions to maximize profits,” according to the AG’s office.

Washington’s AG’s office under Attorney General Bob Ferguson has been looking out for consumers by policing activities antithetical to the function of the free market. The AG’s office has amassed evidence of price fixing across a concentrated industry over more than a decade in order to bring—and win—these civil suits. By the time of the article 15 of the 19 chicken producers had settled a series of suits for a total of $35.5 million. (Here’s the list and the amounts paid as of April 2023.)

One must assume that this anti-competitive, anti-free market behavior would have continued had it not been ferreted out by the AG. $35.5 million, while a big number on its own, is likely only a small dent in the profits of these corporations—but the cost in time and treasure of dealing with these civil suits is still likely to make corporate executives think twice before engaging in price-fixing behavior when they are next tempted. 

So what happens to the $35.5 million the state collected? For that matter, what happens to the money paid the state in any civil suit like this? Generally, the results of successful class action lawsuits are meant to be distributed to those harmed. Of course, it is an impossible task to identify everyone who bought over-priced chicken from one of these producers in Washington State during some specific time period. Instead, the Attorney General’s office negotiated a “cy-pres” (pronounced SEE-pray) settlement. According to the AG’s website: “Cy pres means ‘as near as possible’ and requires that the funds be distributed in a manner that benefits the category of consumers harmed by the illegal conduct”. On the reasonable theory that low-income Washingtonians were likely to be those most harmed by the illegal rigging of the cost of chicken, about a month ago the AG’s office disbursed the money “as near[ly] as possible” to low income households. Checks for $50 went to single-person households and $120 to a multi-person households with incomes less than 175% of the federal poverty level for the size of household. (That threshold is an income of $25,515 per year for the single individual and stretches to $61,495 for a family of five. More detail here.) 

One might have (incorrectly) imagined that Republicans would laud the work of the Attorney General’s Office for its efforts to rein in monopolistic practices that clearly violate the core principles of a properly functioning free market. After all, Republicans claim to stand in defense of free market capitalism over the supposed depredations of “socialist” Democrats, right? 

But that’s not the way Sue Lani Madsen sees it. After all, it is a Democrat, Bob Ferguson, leading the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. In an 850 word opinion piece in the January 4 Spokesman entitled “Chickens, checks and conflicts of interest” Sue Lani Madsen wants us to know that Bob Ferguson’s name appears with the checks—and that she and Toby Nixon, a former Republican State legislator and president of the non-profit Washington Coalition for Open Government from 2007 to 2021, think it’s unethical for Ferguson’s name to appear in the mailing, even though Ferguson actually isthe Attorney General. Why? Because nine months from the mailing of the checks Bob Ferguson’s name will appear on the primary ballot as a candidate for governor. Ms. Madsen also wants us to know that the mailing of a little over four hundred thousand checks wasn’t flawlessly executed (surprise!) and that she thinks the AG’s office should have, instead, quietly distributed the money to food banks. She offers zero credit for the AG’s office defending integrity of the free market by working against monopolistic corporate actions.

Even as reported, rather breathlessly, by the right-leaning online “news” outlet, The Center Square, the response of the AG’s office to the Republican generated “ethics complaint” sounds entirely appropriate [the bold is mine]:

AGO Communications Director Brionna Aho wrote, “when Washingtonians receive restitution from cases brought by our office, it is our longstanding practice that those checks are signed by the attorney general, and come with a letter from the attorney general. We serve the people, and it is important that Washington taxpayers know the work that is being done on their behalf. This has been standard since at least 2013. We have provided more than $200 million in direct restitution to Washingtonians during this time.”

That the Washington State Attorney General’s Office is successfully addressing price-fixing corporate behavior that abuses the free market ought to be cause for celebration by both political parties. In this era of suspicion of the workings of government (nurtured by at least three decades of Republican rhetoric) the successful return of illegally obtained profits ought to be the subject of a PR campaign explaining the years of work and the results—not the target of a gotcha complaint. 

But here we are.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Development over (other people’s) health and welfare

Spokane County Commissioner Al French remains as the most powerful elected official in Spokane County even after expansion of the County Commission from three to five members in January of 2023 (an expansion he fought tooth and nail). 

“AL FRENCH AND THE “FOREVER CHEMICALS” COVER-UP” (click to read) by Tim Connor shines light on French’s efforts, working in the shadows, to stymie the best efforts of citizens working in the public interest. 

Note that the entire story told by Mr. Connor occurred prior to the expansion of the Spokane County Commission from three members, Al French, Josh Kerns, and Mary Kuney to five—with addition of Amber Waldref and Chris Jordan. During most (or possibly all) of the time of the story, Commissioner French was not only the senior member of the three member county commission, but he served as the chair of that governing body. In that position, he wielded considerable power in determining the agenda of official commission meetings. 

Representing the Spokane County Commission, Mr. French also serves on “several local, regional, and statewide Boards and Commissions”. At the time of the events covered in Tim Connors reporting, those boards notably included the board governing the Spokane International Airport and the Spokane Regional Health District Board. Mr. French still serves on (and now serves as chair of) the obscurely named S3R3 Solutions Board. Its former name, the “West Plains/Airport Area Public Development Authority” (click for more info) was far more explanatory of its purpose. S3R3 Solutions is focused on West Plains business development. That focus, as well as Mr. French’s background in development, may help explain the events described in Mr. Connor’s article.

With that background, here once again is the link to Mr. Connor’s article:

Al French and the “forever chemicals” cover-up

I strongly recommend sitting back, reading, absorbing, and sharing the story.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Listen for the twisting of words

The front page of the Sunday, Christmas Eve, Spokesman carried the headline “Half of WA Babies Born into Poverty” (defined in the article as a birth funded by Medicaid). The sub-headline read “Proposed law would create funds for low-income families to address state’s growing wealth gap”. [The article title at that link differs from that in the paper version—as is often the case.] 

For a state like the State of Washington, where in 2020 “the median Washington household net worth was 150% higher than the national median household net worth” to be also the state in which “Half of WA Babies [are] Born into Poverty” is a standout statement. The gulf between the wealthy and the poor in Washington State is further illustrated by the following quote from the same document: “According to an Office of Financial Management (OFM) analysis, in 2010 over half of the total household wealth within the state was concentrated within the 5% wealthiest households.” 

The Spokesman article goes on to discuss a bill proposed to the Washington State Legislature, SB 5125 – 2023-24, which is meant to offer a modicum of help to the children born in our state, who, by no fault of their own, are born into families that are unable to offer their children the financial leg up that wealthier families can afford.

The concept of SB 5125 – 2023-24 isn’t a hard one. The economic rules developed over the last forty plus years under Republican and Democratic neoliberal administrations have put the first rung of the economic ladder further and further out of reach for families starting at the bottom. The road to gainful employment and the accumulation of even modest wealth requires seed capital to apply to an education, an apprenticeship, licensing fees, and/or downpayment on a home. In a “baby bond” program, the general idea behind SB 5125, the state deposits into a trust fund managed by the state a small sum of money each year per baby born into poverty. When the cohort of these babies born in that year reach a certain age they become eligible to apply for money to be withdrawn from the trust for the purposes outlined above—at least if their family remains eligible based continued marginal financial status. Voila! A small chunk of money is made available to the youngster to help in reaching that first rung of the economic ladder.

Unsurprisingly, the Spokesman article quotes a prominent Washington State Republican legislator, State Senator Mark Schoesler (Ritzville), who stands doctrinally opposed to SB 5125. Let’s look at the rhetoric of his objections:

Schoesler, a former longtime state Senate minority leader, also worries the program would take away from the state’s current investments in education.

This is a classical Republican rhetorical twist: funding for any government program is a zero-sum proposition. Any new program is posited to threaten funding for a different program that the listener is presumed to value. We might call this the “We’d rob Peter to pay Paul” argument. The presumption is, of course, that the state legislature would never dare to consider additional sources of funding. 

“I represent two universities, and I probably know the students and their parents better than most. They’re tired,” Schoesler said. “Ask the average hardworking taxpayer what they’re paying in taxes. They’ll say they’re already paying too much in taxes to start a new entitlement.”

Schoesler, like every Republican (and especially U.S. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers), cannot utter the word “taxpayer” without adding the qualifier “hard-working”. The rhetorical intent is right out of the Republican trickle-down playbook: the listener is supposed to puff up with pride over the compliment—and, more tellingly—the listener is bidden to imagine a horde of lazy slackers constantly demanding more from their “hard-working” taxpayer selves. Schoesler wouldn’t want the listener to think of a single mom with no familial support working two or three minimum wage jobs trying her best to keep her family of two housed and fed. That scenario might arouse sympathy, and, God knows, we wouldn’t want to have that. (Irony alert.)

Finally, in a state in which 5% of households control more than half of total household wealth, Schoesler not-so-subtly suggests the listener should look down, not up, to see the threat from the lazy folk he considers “entitled”. 

But who are the entitled and what are the real entitlements? First, sticking to the baby bond idea for the moment, consider 529 college savings plans. 529 Plans were developed under U.S. law and are administered through the State of Washington (and through other states). These plans work like baby bonds for the wealthy. The State of Washington 529 Plan offers a taxpayer who possesses the extra money a chance to squirrel away as much as $500,000in a tax-advantaged investment vehicle for the benefit of a prospective student (often a child or grandchild). “Under these plans, you contribute after-tax money and your money grows tax-free, and all withdrawals are tax-free, when used for tuition, room and board, and other qualified higher education expenses.” Nationwide only 2.5% of families participated in a 529 Plan in 2013 according to the Federal Reserve. 

529 Plans sound like a nice perk, an incentive to plan ahead for the high cost of education—but the people who most need to plan ahead for these expenses are precisely those people who are least likely to possess the personal or familial wealth—or the financial awareness—to take advantage of the program. And here’s the twist: The taxes NOT paid on the growth of a 529 clearly represent an “entitlement” only the well off can and do take advantage of. 

Going slightly more afield, consider that, while constantly harping on the woes of “hard-working American taxpayers”, the wealthy have disproportionally benefited from steady reductions in marginal income tax rates over the decades since 1980. At the same time the families of the wealthiest among us have disproportionately benefited from consistent Republican-backed efforts to slash estate taxes. These reductions allow the wealthy to retain ever greater multi-generational familial wealth.

When the wealthy add to their wealth by making “capital gains”, realized gains in monetary value of investments, they are privileged with the lower tax rates leveled on such gains. Are we not “entitling” the wealthy to even greater wealth by not treating capital gains the same as wages for the purpose of taxation? We need to quit thinking of “entitlements” as only applying to the poor.

So, in summary, The Washington Future Fund that would be established by SB 5125 – 2023-24 would be one small investment to foster the ability of the least advantaged children among us to mount the first rung of economic ladder. Anyone who wishes to tar this investment as an “entitlement” needs to understand that “entitlement” is a politically loaded word used by Republicans to mistakenly focus attention downward. It is time to realize that the most well off in society benefit from a host of entitlements. Republicans just don’t want us to see them as such.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

Back Next Wednesday, January 3

Time for a short vacation!

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry