Recent Stories with tag bill

Here's Jim McDermott, of "the poker-faced 7th," explaining his position on CNBC, who ask him if his pragmatic defense of online gambling (everyone's doing it, so let's legalize it so we can at least regulate and tax it) extends to marijuana legalization. McDermott says he's on record as being in favor of medical marijuana, but that's as far as he goes.

The Seattle Times has the full story: In brief, illegal online gambling is supposed to amount to $5.8 billion annually, a figure that would no doubt increase if it weren't illegal. With no effective prohibitive enforcement on the horizon--and gambling legal in all kinds of other forms--Jim McDermott and Barney Frank are pushing for legalization.

The tax revenue--McDermott estimates $42 billion over ten years--would pay for "improved foster care and early-childhood education. McDermott would earmark a full 25 percent of revenue for foster child care, in fact.

The legalization move is opposed most vocally by Virginia's Bob Goodlatte, whom the Times says believes "legalizing Internet gambling would pave a path to addiction and financial ruin." The Seattle Weekly points out that Goodlatte's strict stance would also lead him to ban church bingo nights. In any event, McDermott's bill allows states to opt out of legalization if they'd like. So Goodlatte would be free to keep Virginia's foster care system safe from gambling profits.

Courtesy of KIRO TV's Wildside, Summit West web cam.

I have two $90-plus electric bills this month, one for the office, one for the home--a 13.8 percent rate increase went into effect this January--so my inner Scotsman danced a jig on reading Cliff Mass's weather report on our blustery weather:

This is exactly the kind of pattern that lays down lots of snow. Below is the forecast 24-h snow amounts ending 5 AM Tuesday morning...some locations get well over a foot. City Light should think about revoking their electricity surcharge.

Mass is probably being a little facetious there, but I spoke with City Light's Scott Thomsen about it anyway. You never know when you might learn something. Besides, Crystal got 26 inches the last 48 hours. That's not nothing.

Earlier this month, Seattle City Light announced that thanks to an anemic snowpack (the lowest in 20 years), the amount of hydropower they could generate would likely be limited. With no "extra" power to sell, they were forecasting a loss in revenue of $70 million. On March 22, the City Council approved a 4.5 percent rate increase, to go into a rate stabilization account.

The rate stabilization account, claiming $2 extra per "average" customer per month, is supposed to create a $100 million fund that Seattle City Light can use to combat volatility, either in power costs or in snowpack. Once the account reaches $100 million, the surcharge goes away....

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One of the health care reform bill reforms that won't start until 2014 is the implementation of "insurance exchanges." Instead of the public option--where the government provides both the pool of customers and provides the health care--with the insurance exchange, the government simply creates the pool of customers. We can go "shopping" in the exchanges for health insurance options.

The idea is that the exchange system will promote more price competition between insurance companies, and since the government regulates the exchange, it can exert downward cost pressure on them, too. Participants will have to demonstrate, for instance, that they're spending the majority of their money on providing health care services, rather than on overhead.

But Seattle may lead the way in cost competition for another reason entirely. HR 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, allows flat-fee direct primary care practices ("medical homes") into the exchanges. Seattle-based Qliance (see my earlier interview with founder Dr. Garrison Bliss) claims that its health care costs up to 50 percent less than traditional insurance, even with the addition of wrap-around coverage to deal with unexpected medical events that fall outside primary care.

Qliance's business model has the potential to be a disruptive technology, when it goes head-to-head against traditional health insurance plans in an exchange. Their level of customer service (open seven days a week, 30- to 60-minute office visits, with no deductibles or co-pays for primary care), combined with a monthly fee that's less than digital cable, tends to stand out compared to HMOs that pressure doctors to keep patient visits under eight minutes....

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Governor Gregoire today signed bills that will eventually eliminate the use of copper in brakes and the industrial chemical bisphenol A (BPA). Copper undergoes a timed phaseout, so that by 2021, copper can make up no more than five percent of your brakes. The Seattle Times says the ban on BPA in children's containers begins July 1, 2011. Your sports bottle willl be BPA-free as of July 1, 2012.

In both cases, Washington is in the forefront of states taking strong action--we're the first state to ban copper in brakes, reports Sightline, and the Washington Toxics Coalition says we're only the second state to ban BPA.

Sightline explains why the free roadside copper is not such a good deal:

Copper is a problem because it flakes off brakes and winds up on roadways, where stormwater runoff washes it into streams and rivers. Salmon and other aquatic life are harmed by even very low concentrations of copper--and the state estimates that between 70,000 and 320,000 pounds of copper are being washed into Puget Sound each year....

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Washington's House of Representatives has responded to a Senate bill making cell phone use a primary offense (that is, you could be ticketed just for that) by reassuring teens that their status as second-class citizens is secure. The Seattle Times summarizes the House bill, saying it:

...makes texting a primary offense, but use of a handheld phone by a driver 18 or over would remain a secondary offense. Teens would be barred from any phone use.

Now, it's true, teens are in general terrible drivers. For one thing, they're sleepy all the time. On NurtureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write that "young adults are involved in 55% of the 100,000 fall-asleep crashes annually, even though they aren't even close to being half of the driving population."

Rep. Dan Roach

But one thing you don't see in legislators' quotes is a reference to data showing teens are any worse at driving while on the phone than terrible adult drivers. (They may use the phone more often.) What you get is Rep. Dan Roach proclaiming, "The libertarian in me comes out with these types of issues." That's the adult libertarian, I guess. Because creating a law that applies only to a minority would give strict libertarians pause.

Senate Minority Leader Mike Hewitt said, "I don't like the government being in all aspects of our business." Just teens' business. That is fine. Now the House and Senate have to come together on either the Senate's "That's it, no one gets to hold the cell phone!" ban or the House's "Meddling teenagers!" version.

It's tough out there for a teen. They're sleep-deprived, and they're broke. As Jon Talton points out, teenage unemployment has risen to a "scary 25 percent." Now they might have to sit in the car and watch mom and dad yap away on the cell phone, knowing if they did the same thing, it'd be one more thing that they could get busted for.

Rep. Deb Wallace

"A bill that would allow the state's largest universities to set their own tuition, within limits, appears all but dead after it failed to move out of a House committee Tuesday," reported the Times today, just after its editorial board admonished state Rep. Deb Wallace that she "shouldn't drag her legislative heels on what would be one of the most significant fiscal-policy measures to come from the Legislature in decades."

Apparently Wallace does not read the Seattle Times op-ed page, or like many, ignores the unreasoned, unsupported perspectives when they appear.

(Lately the Times has shifted from ill-defended opinion to indefensible opinion, as in today's "forget health care reform" piece in which they argue that the election of a Republican in a state that has already instituted health care reform was a vote against health care reform.)

In any event, students at Washington State University, Western Washington University and the University of Washington can breathe a little easier. The Senate bill (SB 6562) would have ceded tuition-setting control to the state universities, with the ludicrous "limits" of a maximum of a one-year fourteen-percent increase, but not more than an average of nine percent per year, over fifteen years. (It's worth noting that the legislature already granted the universities a one-time 14 percent increase last year.)

As I mentioned a little while ago, Washington state higher education rated an "F" in affordability back in 2008. Tuition at the University of Washington has risen about 327 percent over the last twenty years. College presidents like to pitch tuition increases as a "soak the rich" scheme, pointing to increased financial aid packages, but the financial aid is overwhelmingly in the form of student loans, not grants.

The people getting soaked are the middle class parents of students who go to public schools, and the students themselves. (Median household income has not tripled or doubled over the same time period, if you needed to be reminded.) Certainly what has not increased 327 percent in the last twenty years is the entry-level salary for a college graduate. In the midst of the Great Recession, recent graduates will be lucky to find a job at all.

They can save money for student loan payments, of course, by not subscribing to the Seattle Times. [UPDATE: In retrospect, that last line is too harsh. Plenty of good reporting is in the Times, and it would be a shame for people to go without because of a few hundred witless words. People might even pay extra for a subscription that came without the editorial board or Krauthamer.]

Go on. Guess how many are on cellphones.

SB 6345--the Senate bill that would make (non-handsfree) cell phone use while driving a $124 ticket and a primary offense--was placed on second reading by the Rules Committee yesterday. (I have no idea what that means, outside of a sense of progress. There's no lyric about "second reading by Rules Committee" in Schoolhouse Rock's "How a Bill Becomes a Law.") With eleven senators sponsoring, it may have enough momentum to pass.

Its House counterpart, HB 2365, had a public hearing by the House transportation committee on the 18th, with no doings reported since then.

But the Highway Loss Data Institute--an insurer-funded nonprofit organization--has just released a study showing that anti-cell phone laws have had no effect on the number of collisions. As KING TV reports, the study compares "insurance claims for crash damage in four jurisdictions before and after bans were enacted in California, New York, Connecticut, and Washington, DC."...

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The House Public Safety Committee voted down the bill to legalize marijuana in Washington state, 6-2, and also voted down a bill to decriminalize marijuana, 5-3, says the Seattlepi.com.

HB1177 would have reclassified possession of forty grams or less of marijuana from a misdemeanor to a class 2 civil infraction. According to the Capitol Record, committee chair Christopher Hurst (D-Enumclaw) argued that if you were out on a boat and crossed the state line, "you could be convicted of a federal drug crime." People who are arrested for using marijuana would face "a lifetime of despair," he said, in arguing to maintain that exact predicament in-state.

Rep. Roger Goodman noted that federal agents do not typically arrest people who smoke marijuana.

Legalization, HB 2401, as expected, failed to win much support at all. Though once again, Christ Hurst offered some trenchant analysis. Per the Capitol Record: "One of my observations is that should fundamentally should the federal government be in the business of regulating marijuana?" Many people would, of course, classify that as a question rather than an observation.

His nemesis, Roger Goodman, countered that the state should regulate marijuana, not "fantasize" that keeping it illegal has kept usage down....

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