News & Stories

From the Everett Herald: If you happened to be in Arlington, Lake Stevens or Snohomish on Friday, you most likely ran into a bunch of bicyclists. In fact, a whole lot, as the annual Ride from Seattle to Vancouver was wending its way through Snohomish County. I was one of those cyclists, and I want […]

California’s budget-by-initiative process has helped decimate the state’s public transportation, education, health care…you name it. And while Washington’s budget problems aren’t as bad as California’s, if Tim Eyman’s Initiative 1033 passes this fall, we’ll know what it’s like to live in the Golden State without even moving across state lines. Just take a look at […]

Why has college tuition been rising so high and fast? Will college costs ever drop back to more affordable levels? According to a report issued by the Delta Cost Project, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.: The main reason tuition has been rising faster than college costs is that colleges had to make up for […]

Universal Voluntary Retirement Accounts provide a simple, easy solution to the retirement savings dilemma facing today’s workers. The program offers a convenient way for individuals to save for retirement and enables small businesses to remain competitive by offering a retirement savings program for their employees. UVRAs can provide IRAs for any individual worker who chooses […]

State government has an interest in supporting citizens saving for retirement; what’s more, the infrastructure to retirement investment much simpler for small and medium sized businesses and for employees is already in place, via the experience of running public retirement systems and existing mechanisms used to invest millions of public sector pension dollars. The first […]

From the Everett Herald: Boeing’s second quarter profit was $998 million. That’s $46 million more than a year ago. How does this work, with the 787 sucking up billions of dollars in development and mistakes? The answer is embedded in Boeing’s tried-and-true, decades-old business model. Boeing made more than $800 million from its commercial airline […]

For a small- or medium-sized business owner, starting a retirement plan can be daunting. The complexity of existing plans makes choosing one a time-consuming and overwhelming process. One of the most difficult decisions is choosing a company to administer the plan. There are many different investment companies, banks, and insurance companies, each with products geared […]

Of 158 million workers in the U.S. in 2007, only 52% (81.9 million) worked for an employer or union that sponsored a pension or retirement plan. Overall, just 41.5% of workers – 65.6 million people – were covered by those plans. The number one reason workers do not have a pension or retirement plan is […]

Focusing scarce public resources on students from the lowest-income families is a reasonable policy choice, but the long term disinvestment in higher education by both the state and federal governments has clearly limited college access for low income and middle class students. As the cost of attending college continues to escalate, more and more students […]

Low-income state residents are not the only ones whose dreams of higher education are thwarted by rising tuition. While schools have at least attempted to off-set some of the rising costs for low-income students, middle-income students and their families, particularly those who fall just above the cutoffs for most benefits, end up being hit hard. […]

Legislators and education administrators claim that higher income families can afford tuition hikes, and that lower income students will receive increased financial aid, both from the state and from new federal policies. However, the evidence suggests that injecting a market-driven model of financing into the public sphere of education will lead to a lack of […]

For the past thirty years, Washington State has been reducing the level of appropriations to higher education. In 1980-81, undergraduate tuition accounted for 25% of the total costs of undergraduate instruction in research universities, while the state covered the remaining 75%. By the 2007-08 academic year, tuition covered 62% and the state only 38%. The […]

Access to higher education is a key contributor to family economic security and upward mobility. But despite the acknowledged importance of higher education to state residents and businesses, Washington lags other states in promoting college access. Since 1980, median family incomes have risen steadily for adults with four-year or graduate degrees, but have stagnated or […]

In Washington and across the country, far more men have lost jobs than women, and it’s a situation that has reversed the role of “breadwinner,” even in the most traditional families. The main reason is that jobs filled mostly by men are in some of the hardest-hit industries, like manufacturing and construction. Those two categories […]

When the federal minimum wage increases from $6.55 to $7.25 this Friday, an estimated 4.5 million of America’s lowest paid workers will receive a raise. It’s an important step in supporting both economic growth and economic security in America. However, the increase still leaves the real value of the minimum wage lower than it was […]

Reprinted from the Everett Herald: Things haven’t exactly worked out for Boeing’s 787 global production strategy. The Chicago-based corporation farmed out the pieces to sites around the world, and then brought them back to Everett to be fitted together. It is hard to maintain quality controls when the production and design is shopped out to […]

Three legs underpin the early education “stool”: Accessible care, affordable prices, and professional teachers. And while some good strides have been made in those arenas, three recent posts on the New America Early Ed blog highlight just how much ground we have left to cover: ‘A Confusing and Frustrating Maze’: Underlying Reasons for Underenrollment in […]

Debate over government-funded police protection heats up: Now that the president and the Democrats in Congress have set a fall deadline for legislative action on universal police protection for all Americans, battle lines are being drawn on Capitol Hill. On the right are conservative defenders of America’s system of for-profit, private mercenaries. The Democrats are […]

From the Everett Herald: Does the arc of the moral universe bend toward justice? Martin Luther King Jr. believed that it did, and so have millions of other people who want to see justice achieved. But justice and injustice are episodic. We have made great progress in the 20th and 21st centuries, progress for well-being, […]

The idea is simple: Ensure every worker in America has the right to earn paid sick days on the job. Catchy, isn’t it? MarketWatch – the online media group owned by the Wall Street Journal – recently published a great article called “Ill and on the Job” which nicely encapsulates the current policy discussion. and […]

From the Seattle Post-Globe: The health care debate is heating up, for good reason. In our state, tens of thousands of people lost their health coverage when they lost their jobs. They will soon be joined by tens of thousands more who are losing their Basic Health coverage. The number of uninsured has spiked to […]