News & Stories

Excerpted from Washington State Budget 101: The recession has taken a big toll on jobs and family incomes – and on public revenue. The state has mostly cut services, not raised revenue, resulting in $10.5 billion in cuts. (Note: Federal aid in 2009-10, rainy day funds, and fee increases prevented deeper cuts.) Cuts from 2009-11 […]

Following up yesterday’s post about the the big payoffs for intensive early learning programs, here’s another piece of the puzzle from Kevin Drum, excerpted from Mother Jones: The chart on the right compares four big English-speaking countries on a single measure: vocabulary test scores of five-year-olds. You’d expect that children of highly educated parents would […]

Every 2 years the legislature and Governor adopt a budget. The General Fund Budget is based on state tax revenues. In addition to the General Fund, the state receives money from the federal government for specific services, such as Food Stamps, Medicaid, and children’s health. The state also has separate budgets for transportation, funded by […]

The fact that women earn less than men is a major theme of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ newest databook, Women in the Labor Force. The earnings gap has certainly narrowed over the last several decades, but despite national and state policies to eradicate workplace discrimination, the changes aren’t happening quickly. So does gender discrimination […]

By Kevin Drum, excerpted from Mother Jones: Jon Cohn has an eye-opening piece in The New Republic, “The Two Year Window,” about advances in the science of early childhood development. It opens with a description of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a study that removed infants from warehouse-style orphanages in Romania and adopted them out: […]

Guest post by Stan Sorscher (cross-posted from Huffington Post) Let’s look at public policies for economic development that help us recover from the recession. In one view of economic development, the role of government is to “make business succeed.” In this view, government should get out of the way and let markets find the most […]

From The Nation | By Katrina vanden Heuvel: As we head into 2012, there are a lot of questions about where the Occupy energy will go from here. I’m confident it will move in powerful directions–fighting unjust foreclosures and evictions, exploring alternative banking, taking on outrageous student debt, countering the corrosive role of corporate money […]

Via Seattle Coalition for a Healthy Workforce: From the Huffington Post | By Ellen Bravo: This time last year, Desiree Rosado, a school bus driver in Groton, Connecticut, was dreading flu season. “Working without paid sick days, you’re always worried about what will happen if you get sick,” she said. “When my kids caught the […]

From the Everett Herald: If there’s a single lesson to be drawn from the events of 2011, it’s this: Democracy is based on acting and doing, not sitting and watching. The actions of a sole protestor in Algeria, magnified by thousands of others, toppled dictators in Algeria, Egypt and Libya. People did not just watch […]

From the Yakima Herald | By Mai Hoang Employees say raise eaten up by higher costs for fuel, food; employers say it forces them to cut back on hours. Cesar Covarrubias has been paying about $5 to $10 more for his groceries lately. As a result, Covarrubias, 20, sees a lot less of the $10 […]

From the Everett Herald: By Christine L. Owens and Marilyn Watkins In 1998, an overwhelming two-thirds of Washington voters supported a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage and adjust it upward each year to keep pace with the rising cost of living. As a result, there’s a bright spot on the horizon for Washington’s […]

From the Everett Herald: The accepted wisdom is that the wealthy, banks and the biggest corporations are job creators. But in fact, too many are job-taker-away-ers. They suck money, our money, out of the economy and hoard it or spend it outside the country. That slows down economic activity right here in our state. When […]

On January 1st, Washington’s minimum wage will increase by 37 cents to $9.04 per hour, in line with a voter-approved law that provides for raising the minimum wage as the cost-of-living goes up. That bump – making Washington’s the best state minimum wage in the nation – will help increase consumer spending at local businesses […]

From the Washington News Service: SEATTLE – For women in the workforce in Washington, 2011 could be summarized as a year of treading water – or even sinking a bit. According to a new report, women’s wages and benefits in the Evergreen State continue to lag behind those of men. Even in the same job […]

A widening gender wage gap, declining workplace benefits, and state budget cuts are putting Washington’s women at risk for more economic instability and poverty in 2012, according to a new report from the Economic Opportunity Institute, Washington’s Working Women 2012. Women continue to earn less than men overall – and the gap is widening. In […]

Guest column by Brendan Williams, former Washington State legislator A progressive can fairly argue that one-time budget gimmicks are as insidious as an all-cuts budget in keeping the focus away from the budget sustainability that can only come from real tax reform. From that perspective, the result of the 2011 2nd Special Session can be […]