Tag Archives: income

Business, News, Politics

On Equal Pay Day, Seattle’s Glass Ceiling is Showing

Pay up, Seattle! (Photo: MvB)
Pay up, Seattle! (Photo: MvB)

“Seattle ranks worst for gender pay gap nationally,” blares the KING 5 headline. Expressed as a ratio, the story explains, “women in Seattle make 73 cents for every dollar their male counterparts bring home,” which the National Partnership for Women & Families claims is the absolute worst showing among major metropolitan areas (pdf).  Portland — our usual benchmark — performs six cents better, though as a state, Washington is just middle of the inequity pack, and only one penny off Oregon.

The National Partnership’s numbers are, in fact, from the 2011 American Community Survey, which is a statistical survey done by the U.S. Census. The estimates produced for  2011 show a distinct, sex-based disparity for median income in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA: men working full-time year-round pulled in $60,881 and women, just $44,535. Women do fare slightly better in the city proper, making a median of $49,165.

But the survey also breaks out income into tranches, and by education level, and that’s where it gets even more interesting.

In the Seattle MSA, the largest single group of women working full-time (23.6 percent) made between $35,000 and $50,000 annually. For men, the largest group (23 percent) made $100,000 or more. Just nine percent of women reached that top earner’s bracket.

If you add it up, you see it’s not just a glass ceiling, it’s the proverbial glass pyramid: 45 percent of men made $65,000 or more per year. Just 25 percent of women did. Fully three-quarters of women who put in full-time work made less than $65,000 in 2011. (For the record, margins of error range from plus or minus about $500, men’s median MSA sample, to $1,950, women’s median Seattle-proper sample).

On the education side, absolute inequity increases with educational attainment. The 2011 Seattle MSA estimates, however, were drawn from people 25 years of age or older, who had earnings (not necessarily full-time). Women who didn’t finish high school made about $9,000 less per year than men who dropped out. As high school graduates (or with equivalent), they made $10,500 less. Throw in “some college” and it was more than $14,000 less. Bachelor’s? $29,000 less. Grad school or professional degree? $35,000 less.

In the city of Seattle, women with higher education did slightly better than in the MSA. The top disparity was less still about $21,000 annually, though. High school graduates, though, were neck-and-neck with men, and a gap of “only” $4,000 was visible between men and women with “some college,” before a Bachelor’s degree conferred upon men an $18,000 advantage. (By the way, sex-based inequity persists nationally from job category to job category, with all other things being equal.)

News, Politics

Would You Like to Know Where Your Tax Money Goes?

Congressman Jim McDermott (D-the Fightin’ 7th) has come up with an idea strikes a chord of common sense: Taxpayers should get an itemized breakdown of where their federal income tax goes. It’s in early stages yet, but it feels about time to supply people with better information about how the government spends their money.

Before you dismiss this as a McDermott stunt (too late for some of you, I know) Senators Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Scott “My Old Pick-up Truck” Brown (R-Mass.) have joined forces on the Tax Payer Receipt Act of 2011. RedState says, “This bill could be transformational. Imagine receiving an accounting of what each citizen owes–the interest on the national debt, costs for Medicaid, Medicare, national defense, education, foreign aid, etc.”

The general idea is that something needs to be done to get better information to voters. Hilariously, a recent poll found that voters believed five percent of the federal budget was devoted to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, “more than what the government spends on transportation, law enforcement and homeland security combined,” points out the Seattle Times.

People also regularly over-estimate the amount of federal humanitarian aid, guessing ten percent when it’s something like .05 percent.

While support for the idea is bipartisan, it’s anyone’s guess as to what good it would do. It can’t be too complicated, or people won’t read it. It can’t be too simplified or it won’t adequately reflect reality. McDermott’s sample receipt is a single, two-sided sheet and even that I suspect would be skimmed by only fifty percent.

Another consideration is that–as is clear from the level of debate currently–people have an ambivalent relationship with figures that don’t support their biases. The comments thread on the Seattle Times story carries a lively, hair-splitting argument about the viability of an accurate receipt that leaves you with the distinct impression that people are ready to argue about the meaning of 1 and 0.

Lastly, of course, we need to remember that while our political leadership loves to compare the federal budget to the family budget–“It’s simple, don’t spend more than you make!”–the fact of the matter is that spending more than we make is exactly what American families do. So it is a little unrealistic to expect a receipt to turn us into an army of citizen accountants.

Yet, the receipt seems worthwhile if only for the purposes of establishing a limited common ground. No matter how you slice it, federal income taxes are paid, and do go somewhere–it’s a very low bar to agree that the government should try to offer an annual statement to taxpayers.

News, Transportation

Cycling as a Uniter, Not a Divider

"Summer in Ballard," courtesy of our Flickr pool's Slightlynorth

Sightline’s post on the demographics of bicycling, “Who Bikes?” contains a response of sorts to that viral Vanity Fair article, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” by Joseph Stiglitz.

Stiglitz excoriates the pernicious effects of income inequality, concluding:

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

But when it comes to bicycling, the appeal extends through all income classes. And there’s nothing like nearly getting run over by an SUV to illustrate how your fate is bound up with how others live. (I know it’s irrational, but if I’m going to be hit, I prefer it be a Subaru.)

Now, certainly, biking is a more popular choice for anyone on a budget. Sightline’s Eric de Place says, “the biggest share of bicyclists isn’t yuppies, it’s low income people. In fact, the lowest-earning quarter of Americans make nearly one-third of all bike trips.”

But he emphasizes that bicycling is “remarkably evenly distributed” among the other three quarters. Said another way, the poorer half of the U.S. makes 52 percent of all bike trips, while the richer half make 48 percent.

The extent of this commonality of interests is likely to be overlooked if you’re not careful: in Seattle, just 2.5 percent of commuters go by bike, though that still places us mid-pack in the list of the top ten largest U.S. cities.

But there’s a lot of distance between commuting and riding solely recreationally. Seattle’s Cascade Bicycle Club has over 13,000 members, and their annual Seattle-to-Portland ride has sold out months early, with 10,000 participants. In a city like Seattle, where “practically everyone” has a bike hanging in a garage, I’d be more interested in knowing how often people hit the road with a bicycle for any reason, not just commuting. (Nationally, commuting made up just 11 percent of bike trips in 2009.)

Now more than ever, as Stiglitz argues, we could stand to build bridges that are not purely rhetorical. Seattle City Council’s Sally Bagshaw has returned from a trip to Portland with visions of bike boulevards. Typically, the response to something like this is as if bicyclists had literally stolen a street and made off  with it, though people living on bike boulevards come to appreciate having a safe, quiet street that cars move slowly along.

But again, consider what the real population of cyclists might be, especially in the context of a residential street: kids biking to and from school or other activities, people visiting friends down the street, people just out for exercise, or running an errand near home. Cycling infrastructure is often seen as serving a minority, a niche group. But bike boulevards in Seattle could be serving a cycling population that rivals that of drivers–thanks to the obsession with measuring bike commuting, it’s actually hard to tell. What we do know is that bike infrastructure serves all income classes wonderfully equally.