When the minimum wage increases, jobs increase as well

Last week Snohomish County state representatives Mike Sells and June Robinson, D-Everett, Cindy Ryu, D-Shoreline, Derek Stanford and Luis Moscoso, D-Shoreline, and Mary Helen Roberts, D-Edmonds, joined Jessyn Farrell, D-Seattle, in proposing to increase our state’s minimum wage to $10 in 2015, $11 in 2016, and $12 in 2017. It is about time. Our minimum wage has steadily fallen away from its high point in 1968. That was 35 years ago. And yet, worker productivity has almost doubled since then.

Up to 1968, increases in the minimum wage kept up proportionately with productivity increases. That made sense, as the gains in productivity were in that way equitably shared between employers and employees. Workers could increase their everyday purchases and businesses could increase their investments (or just enjoy greater profits). But after 1968, minimum wage increases tailed off, while productivity continued to increase.

In fact, the minimum wage has actually fallen in value when you take into account inflation. The value of the minimum wage 35 year ago, in today’s dollars, was just about $11 an hour. So even though Washington has the best statewide minimum wage in the country ($9.32), a worker earning the minimum wage here starts out $1.68 behind what she would have made in 1968.

A bit of history is helpful: In 1998, voters passed Initiative 688, which increased the minimum wage from $4.90 to $5.70 in 1999 and $6.50 in 2000 and linked increases thereafter to inflation. In the two decades leading up to Washington’s minimum wage policy change, the bottom 10 percent of income earners, who earned near or at the minimum wage, experienced an eight percent decline in real earnings. Since implementation of I-688, that decline has been reversed, underscoring the importance of a solid wage floor.

But we have a long way to catch up. If the minimum wage had kept up with increases in productivity, it would be over $17 an hour. It isn’t, and while wages for the top fifth of workers have grown, everyone in the middle and below has actually lost ground. The bottom 10 percent of workers, compared to the bottom 10 percent 35 years ago, actually make 25 cents less per hour. The worker in the middle makes about $18 an hour, a 15 cent per hour decline.

The decline in wages didn’t just happen. It is a conscious result of public policy decisions over the past 30 years, especially at the federal level. Our legislators know that they have the power and responsibility to reverse this impoverishment of workers. That’s what a minimum wage increase can begin to do. Plus these workers spend their earnings in the local economy. A $1 increase in the minimum wage equals a $2,000 increase in annual income. With 20 percent of our state’s total workforce benefiting, they would have over $1 billion more to spend in local businesses.

That’s what the historical evidence shows us. Low wage workers spend their earnings in the local economy, in retail businesses. As spending goes up, employers meet the demand by hiring more workers. This trend is particularly reflected in service sector jobs, which have a greater share of minimum wage workers than the overall economy. So it should be no surprise that when the minimum wage increases, jobs increase as well. In 1999, our minimum wage increased by 55 cents, employment in restaurants and hospitality in Washington grew by 6,400 jobs, and overall employment grew by 54,000 jobs. In 2000, the minimum wage increased another 70 cents, hospitality employment grew by another 4,700 jobs, and overall employment grew by 63,000 jobs.

A better minimum wage increases incomes and jobs for workers, their families, and our economy. It is a public policy that works … for all of us. And the bottom line is that low wage workers deserve a wage that approaches the value of their labor.

Originally published at EOI Online as Wage should approach value of labor.

Can we all benefit from the economy?

The slow recovery from the great recession has heightened stark inequality in Puget Sound. Corporate profits and the stock market are soaring (think Boeing) but wages are stagnant, workers have lost their company pensions (think Boeing) and job growth is still lagging. Even with the 777X, think of Boeing again — they pushed 1,500 engineering jobs out of our state last year. The middle class is besieged.

Wages for the top fifth of workers have grown, but everyone in the middle or below has actually lost ground. The bottom 10 percent of workers, compared to the bottom 10 percent 35 years ago, actually make 25 cents less per hour. The worker in the middle makes about $18 an hour, a 15 cent per hour decline. Meanwhile, worker productivity has almost doubled. So where did this money go? Corporate profits and CEO salaries, for starters.

These inequalities did not happen by accident or because of some immutable laws of economics. Since the 1980s, national policy changes have undermined the middle class. Congress cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations, resulting in less public money to invest in education, college, Head Start, basic research and public infrastructure. Corporations strategize how to grab tax credit windfalls and government contracts simultaneously (think Boeing) and face less oversight (think Boeing and self-certification of a certain battery on the 787) and move around the globe searching to exploit the cheapest labor and avoid any consequences for environmental destruction.

Boeing’s demand that the Machinists give up their pensions and the state hand out further tax breaks was successful because the middle class across our country is so beaten down. If we want to realize a better and shared quality of life, we must reverse the growing inequality of income, opportunity, health and wellbeing. Instead of just being on your own, facing the unpredictabilities of health, work, education and life, we could all be part of a community of responsibility. Sort of like Social Security, through which everyone pays in, everyone gets benefits from, and everyone has skin in the game. With a platform of shared economic security, our private economy will thrive, with more customers for businesses, which means more profits AND more hiring, and that means more competition that increases bargaining power of workers.

Think about that, and run it backwards. High unemployment drives down workers’ wages and benefits and autonomy. High unemployment, especially in a state dependent on sales taxes, drives down public revenues, which means the state can’t fund the public services — like education and higher education — that workers and citizens need. Public workers — teachers, public health workers, snowplow drivers — are all threatened with diminished salaries and benefits because there is not much money, and, after all, that’s what’s happening in the private sector. And so the story goes, shifting money and power and hopes and dreams from ordinary workers and citizens and public services to corporate coffers and power brokers. Hurray for the recession.

This is the context our state legislators face as they start the 2014 legislative session. There are plenty of things they could do to re-channel the benefits of economic growth to working people rather than to corporate profits. Here is a short list:

  • Increase our state minimum wage to $12. Our lowest wage workers earn less than the inflation-adjusted level of the 1960s.
  • Pass paid sick days. No one should be forced to go to work sick, or leave their sick child miserably suffering at school.
  • Give child care teachers a raise. They deserve worthy wages. Investing in them is an investment in high quality early learning.
  • Expand access to higher education. Pass the Dreamer Act for immigrant kids and implement the Pay-It-Forward model of debt-free college financing for middle class students.
  • Close tax loopholes — and don’t create any new ones. Corporations that whine about wanting more public investment in education and infrastructure need to start paying up.

Is this a pipedream? Maybe. But if voters demand action from the people who represent them, then maybe we’ll start getting our economy working for the benefit of all of us … some day.

Originally published at EOIOnline

Respecting workers and their work

Last month voters approved a $15 an hour minimum wage for workers at Sea-Tac. In California, Ron Utz, a conservative Silicon Valley millionaire, is pushing an initiative for a $12 minimum wage. In Seattle, there is a growing movement for increasing the minimum wage to $15 within the city limits.

Is this a trend? Perhaps the critical focus on the top one percent has finally turned a spotlight on the impoverishment of the middle and low wage workers. After all, the income for the top one percent didn’t fall from the sky. It came from somewhere. And a lot of it came from working families.

How do we know this? Simply by looking at the evidence. In 1968 the minimum wage in our state was $1.60. Toggle that to inflation, and it was the equivalent of $10.74 today. Our current minimum wage, which is the best state minimum wage in the nation, is $1.55 short of this.

But just keeping up isn’t a very good metric. Our economy is much more productive now. What does this mean? It means that for every hour of work, more things, goods, services of value are produced. A simple measurement is gross domestic product per hour worked. That measurement has doubled in the past 30 years. In the decades after World War II, the gains in productivity were proportionately shared between workers and owners, and wages kept up with increases in productivity. But that relationship has been knee-capped. If the minimum wage had grown proportionally with the increase in productivity in the past 30 years, it would be at $17 an hour now.

How about minimum wage workers in comparison to other workers? Low wage workers make about 50% of what typical workers earn. That hasn’t changed over the past 30 years, which means typical workers have been stuck with stagnating wages as well, regardless of the increased value of their work. So a better measurement may be workers at the 90th percentile and the 95th percentile, the folks close to the top. The 90th percentile workers have seen their income increase by about 33 percent over the past 30 years. The 95th percentile workers have seen their income shoot up over 40 percent. A similar increase for minimum wage workers would push it to $15 an hour. If you look at managers in the top 1 percent, their salaries increased 131 percent. And of course, CEO salaries have exploded, increasing from 30 times higher than a typical wage worker to over 200 times higher — that’s 2,000 percent.

The minimum wage is the canary in the coal mine of our economy. Our national economic activity can be roughly divided up between compensation for work and corporate profits. From 1979 through 2007, labor’s share of national income in the private sector decreased from 64 percent to 58 percent. That means that the 120 million American workers employed in the private sector in 2007 were missing $600 billion, or an average of more than $5,000 per worker. What happened to that money? Corporate profits per unit increased 140 percent in the same time period. As a Forbes’ commentator wrote: “(t)here are two ways you can make more profit: sell more stuff, or get a higher margin on the stuff you are selling. The latter has been a big winner since the 1970s.” And that margin comes from pushing down labor’s share of national income.

So back to the minimum wage: One reason that Ron Utz wants to see it increased is that people will be less likely to depend on government for Medicaid, food stamps and child care support. Why? Because they will have higher incomes. This amounts to an admission that the depressed minimum wage has translated into huge subsidies for business. Low wages move money to corporate profits, while workers have to rely on the government to meet basic needs.

The minimum wage is a measure of respect for work. As it teeters on poverty, we are signaling to those workers that we don’t respect them as workers, while we benefit from their services. If we increase the minimum wage, then we respect work and workers.

Originally published at the Everett Herald

Tax-break Boeing needs to get to work

So how about that $8.7 billion tax give-away Boeing just received to build the 777X? We have been here before. In 2003, the Legislature excused Boeing from $4 billion in taxes, in order to build the 787 in our state. What happened to that $4 billion? Over $1 billion was used to construct a copycat 787 facility in South Carolina. The other $3 billion? Some went into outsourcing construction of 787 parts all over the world, which were then shipped back to Everett, there to be snapped together. Only the pieces did not snap together and the Everett machinists and engineers had to re-jigger the pieces in order to make the 787 fly right. The result of this brilliant outsourcing strategy is that the 787 is about $14 billion over budget. And several years late. And how about those batteries?

Is Boeing management inept enough to do this again with the 777X? Its own customers would not appreciate that. “All we said to (Boeing) was, ‘Please don’t do to 777X what you did to the (787)… Don’t do that to us.” Those are the words of Emirates CEO Tim Clark, the 777X biggest customer. Or how about Qatar Airways Chief Executive Akbar Al Akbar, the second largest 777X purchaser: “Frankly, we would rather everything was built in one place, and I think Boeing from the 787 experience have learnt a lesson.”

Boeing has given itself three months to decide on a 777X assembly location. When you put all the pieces on the table, there shouldn’t even be a competition. Everett machinists and engineers produce 100 jets per year. No other state has this experienced and dedicated workforce. No other state can match our aerospace training and transportation infrastructure. No other state has our network of aerospace contractors. And no other state has offered such a plum in tax giveaways, for better or worse!

The Legislature stated that “the people of Washington have benefited enormously from the presence of the aerospace industry in Washington state…” The Legislature could have also stated that Boeing has benefitted enormously thanks to thousands of engineers and mechanics in the aerospace industry, the transportation infrastructure, the state’s investment in engineering schools at the University of Washington and other universities and community colleges and our focus on workforce development specifically for Boeing.

But is Boeing profitable? Is the pope Catholic? $1 billion in 2003, $3 billion in 2006, $4 billion in 2010, $5.6 billion last year. So Boeing has the profits, they have the infrastructure, they have the intellectual and engineering know-how, they have the machinists’ expertise. And they just got a huge tax giveaway. So it is a green light for Washington state … except for those pesky machinists. Should the machinists just bow down to Boeing? Should they agree to break up their own labor force into two or three tiers? Should they agree to a 30 percent increase in health care costs? Should they abandon their pensions, which deliver decent, not extravagant, but dependable checks, in retirement?

Here is the thing: The machinists don’t need to approve a new contract. They already have one that runs for another three years. It is a legally binding agreement between the Boeing Co. and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers IAM. It was the machinists, after all, who proposed a 10-year contract a few years ago. It was Boeing that ran away from that proposal for labor peace and productivity. It was the machinists who exposed Boeing’s breaking of federal labor law, when the company actually wrote that it was moving production to South Carolina to undercut the union. And it was the machinists who agreed to drop this unfair labor practice charge in exchange for the current contract.

What Boeing needs to do is focus on building the best airplanes in the world, instead of taking away hard-won benefits, defunding the Boeing pension, and seeking out a “union-free” environment. We have helped Boeing enough. Now it is time for Boeing to get to work on the 777X, right here in Washington. That would be a productive partnership.

Post election is good time to count our blessings

Now that the election is over, it is a good time to reflect. We elected these public servants. What do we expect our governments to do, from local fire districts and water districts to libraries to school boards, city councils, public utility districts, and county governments?

These local governments are the street-level face of democracy in our country. The elected leaders and the workers of these governments are the public servants of all of us. What do they do? Well, it helps to think about your day, from when you wake up to when you go to sleep at night to when you wake up again. If you are like me, you wake up and switch on the coffee pot before you take a shower. And, bingo, the light goes on, the coffee drips out, you have a sip and life seems pretty good.

It is not magic that makes that happen. The Snohomish County Public Utility District provides the power for your coffee maker, as well as for 726,000 other households and businesses. Their electricity rates are 10 percent less than privately-held Puget Sound Energy and 20 percent less than Portland General Electric. Plus, it was the Snohomish PUD that exposed Enron’s bilking of consumers, a product of utility deregulation that hurt all of us. Snohomish PUD serves Boeing Commercial Airplane manufacturing and the Everett Naval Base. It has weatherized 60,000 homes. Its ongoing efforts for conservation have saved enough energy to serve 75,000 homes. It is at the forefront of planning for the future, with new investments in geothermal energy, wave energy, solar, and small hydro energy. It is your government, and it works for you.

How about that water for the coffee? You don’t even question if it is safe to drink. It is, because the city of Everett Public Works Department makes sure it is. Everett also takes away and treats the wastewater coming from your shower.

OK, so you are up, showered, you’ve had some coffee, eaten some breakfast. Now the kids go off to school. That is part of our government as well. We all appreciate our local schools. And we pay for them, through property taxes, as part of our government.

You head off to work. If you are driving or bicycling, you can rest assured that your travel will be pretty safe, with police and traffic lights directing the flow of vehicles. And you know that if there is an accident, the police and firefighters and emergency 911 vehicles will be along right away, untangling the mess, treating the injured, saving lives, and putting out fires. That’s our government again.

The power and water and lights and heat you depend on at home are also all on at work, thanks to your local governments. You might wonder what you are going to do about lunch, so you go to a nearby restaurant. Do you worry that the food will be contaminated? No, because the Snohomish County Public Health Department inspects and permits all the restaurants in the county. You might decide heading back from lunch that you should get a flu shot. If you are in downtown Everett, you can just drop by the Public Health Department and get one.

Going home, you decide to pick up some books and audio tapes from the library. That, too, is your government working for you. It doesn’t cost you a penny (if you get your books back on time). It is paid for with your taxes, working for you.

When you go to sleep, government doesn’t stop. Police are patrolling the streets, firefighters are awake and ready to respond to any emergencies. They don’t demand a credit card before they go into action. They are public servants. Their wages are paid with your taxes.

So on this day after election day, let’s count our blessings for governments that work for us. Let’s hope that our newly elected political leaders understand that democratic government is best when it serves the people, you and me, with regard for the best interests of all of us.

Via the Everett Herald

Seeking some balance in disparity city

On my way to a conference in Philadelphia last week, I took the subway from the train station. It was in disrepair, with no signage and blocked exits and entrances. And the people I saw on the subway reflected the cards they had been dealt — somewhat forlorn, not much hope and a lot of poverty.

Then I popped up from the subway into the center of the city, and started walking down a beautiful, bright, museum-filled promenade named after Benjamin Franklin. Going down to the river, past the rowing clubs and circling back to upscale downtown, the people I saw were happy, prosperous, hopeful and healthy.

This tale of two cities is the story of present day America. The top 1 percent are doing great. Indeed, the top 20 percent of people are doing pretty good. Their quality of life has recovered from the depths of the recession. But the rest of Americans? Not so much.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The downturn and diminishment of America is the consequence of changes in public law and the disregard of social contracts that were the norm not long ago. And just as public law was used to cradle the top 1 percent and undercut wages and economy security for the vast majority of Americans, public law can be used to boost living standards and the hopes and dreams and realities of working people in our country.

In fact, something is happening right here in Washington to reverse the 21st century tale of two cities. In the city of SeaTac, citizens will vote on an initiative to bring better wages, working conditions, and respect to many of the people who live there.

Sea-Tac Airport is also a split society, two cities in one airport: one of transient passengers flying in and out, the other, the workers who service planes, handle baggage, sell meals and run the stores that cater to the flying clientele.

Those flying enjoy substantially better incomes than the people on whom they depend for service. Almost half of all passengers have incomes exceeding $80,000; two-fifths have incomes over $90,000; and over one-third have incomes over $100,000. You can tell they have money to spend when 20,000 copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey” were bought in Sea-Tac bookstores last year — plus 90,000 neck pillows … which, by the way, I always found useless after I bought them!

The workers at the airport are paid a wage that puts them right on the brink of poverty. They can’t use a paid sick day if they get sick or if their children get sick and need their parents’ TLC. They can’t take a day off of work without fear of losing their job — even if they are trying to flee an abusive partner.

Right now, the economic rules we’ve written as a society consign workers at the airport to subservience. The message of those rules is clear: your work isn’t respected, and neither are you. You exist to serve, and you are expected to make sure that travelers’ needs for comfort and safety are met — whether that be providing food, magazines, or a massage, getting our baggage, or fueling the planes.

So the citizens of SeaTac have called the question by putting Proposition 1 on the city’s ballot: If the typical airport passenger has an income of $80,000, how about the typical airport worker having an income of $31,000? Proposition 1 would make that happen, by raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

How about a sense of respect so that a worker can get a paid sick day when she is ill, instead of muddling through a shift at Anthony’s in the airport or the nearby Cedarbrook Lodge and being a human vector for disease? Proposition 1 would do that creating a workplace standard for paid sick days.

It is that simple: change the rules of our economy, and you change the results. Under Proposition 1, we might begin to see one airport in SeaTac, a city of workers, passengers, and managers who all have a sense of hope, of opportunity, of security, of being Americans together. Sea-Tac Airport can start to be a place that truly resonates with liberty and justice for all … as Ben Franklin would have expected.

Originally published at the Everett Herald

Story of hope: People want, need this care

Republicans in the Congress have lost. They failed to stop the Affordable Care Act from starting up. Every day, more and more people sign up for health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act. And every day, by doing nothing, the hole the republicans have dug for themselves gets deeper and deeper.

The numbers in our state tell the story: In just five days, 9,500 people completed their health care enrollments. Of these, 2,600 got immediate coverage. For the rest of the new enrollees, coverage kicks in on Jan. 1. They want this coverage. One thousand have already made their payments — two and a half months in advance.

People want — and need — health coverage. There is a pent-up need and a pent-up demand. Washington’s health exchange website has had 165,000 unique visitors, their call center has received 23,000 calls, almost 40,000 accounts have been created, and 10,000 applications have been completed in addition to the 9,500 enrollments.

This is a story of defeat for the congressional Republicans. But it is a story of hope and promise for our state and our country … that is, if you believe that American citizens should have the right to affordable health care.

Some people think the Affordable Care Act doesn’t do enough. It’s not universal health coverage. It is not a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system. It works through the market of private health insurance companies. It doesn’t challenge pharmaceutical pricing. That all is true … and it is beside the point.

The Affordable Care Act is what we have. Yes, it was a tortured process of political compromise and bargaining. But it is the law. And now we see that it works. The Congressional Republicans should embrace it. Its genesis was in right-wing think tanks that wanted to preserve the private market options for health care. They won that argument. Now we see that it successfully extends health coverage. Great — the GOP should embrace this instead of running away from it.

Instead, the actual implementation of the Affordable Care Act has pulled the curtain aside and revealed the true intentions of the congressional Republicans: they don’t want to extend health coverage to Americans.

Our state’s own congressional Republicans — Dave Reichert, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Doc Hastings and Jaime Herrera Butler — are partly responsible for the government shutdown being used in an attempt to defund Obamacare. They aren’t questioning their own leadership. They’re kowtowing to the tea party caucus.

Sure, they have made a big deal about forgoing their pay or giving it to charity during the government shutdown. But none of them are giving up their government-provided health coverage. None of them would want to see themselves or their family members denied care because of pre-existing conditions. None of them want to impose lifetime limits on their own insurance coverage, and frankly, if there were limits, probably some of them would go bankrupt.

These members of Congress have all the benefits of the Affordable Care Act themselves — they just don’t want their constituents, the American citizens who vote for (and against) them, to have the right to those benefits.

It doesn’t have to be this way. They don’t have to proceed along this crazy pathway to defund the federal government — which wouldn’t roll back the Affordable Care Act anyway. Washington’s congressional Republicans should learn from some of their Republican colleagues in our state Legislature — those 22 Republicans from all over the state who voted for the operating expenses of the health benefit exchange. They wanted to make the Affordable Care Act work. And now that it is working, they can claim some of the credit! That’s what governance is all about in our democracy.

Congressional Republicans should take that lesson to heart…and stop playing ideological games with Americans’ health.

Originally published at the Everett Herald

Health care helps lessen the fear

I looked out the window as I was getting ready for work and realized that, yes, fall has come to Puget Sound and with it, rain. So we start our six months of gray, dark, rainy weather. Twilight comes earlier and earlier. Could it be that fear also ratchets up? There are reasons — fear of automobile accidents in the dark, fear of bicycle accidents in the rain, flu season, fear of mentally unstable hungry, wet, cold, and homeless people, fear of heating bills piling up.

Add those to the typical household fears that haunt us like a hangover from the collapse of the financial markets five years ago: fear of losing a job, fear of not being able to pay tuition, fear of debt, fear of your paycheck not keeping up with inflation, fear of your kids getting ignored in a crowded classroom, fear of not having health-care coverage.

But wait, come Oct. 1, that last fear can be diminished. And that diminishment of fear is what the Republicans in Congress, all of them, fear the most. Which shows that these Washington, D.C. Republicans are not interested in is easing fear, they want to exploit that fear. Shutting down the government is a damn good way of doing that.

How would a government shutdown pile on the fear? Worried about floods, forecasting, FEMA help with disasters? While you are thinking about Colorado, you will just have to worry more with a government shutdown. Safety of prescription drugs? Guaranteed by the Food and Drug Administration. Shut down with a government shutdown. Applications for small business loans suspended. Medical research interrupted. Museums, parks, monuments shut down.

Social Security checks will still be issued, and Medicare will still be paid. That’s the most ironic thing about the threat of a government shutdown — it is meant to stop Obamacare from expanding health care to millions of people, but the Republicans insist that they will not cut Medicare coverage to millions of other people.

So does Obamacare actually lessen your fear? It lessens mine. Obamacare mandates 10 essential health benefits for everyone:

  1. Outpatient services
  2. Emergency room
  3. Hospitalization
  4. Maternity and newborn care
  5. Mental health services
  6. Prescription drugs
  7. Rehabilitative services
  8. Lab work
  9. Preventive care and chronic disease management, and
  10. Pediatric services, including dental and vision care

These essential health benefits are covered with no dollar caps. Hundreds of thousands people who are under-insured, paying through the nose, or just plain uninsured in Washington will be able to get coverage, and they can get coverage which they can afford. That takes away a lot of fear, from all of us.

What happens if you lose your job because of an illness? How about if you are an older worker in poor health, staying on the job despite your illness because this is the only way to keep health coverage until you turn 65? With Obamacare, you will be able to buy affordable and comprehensive insurance, not dependent on employer coverage. That lessens the fear.

So while the Republicans in Congress want to pull the ladder for health care up and away from the near-elderly, Obamacare insures that the sick and near-elderly can make it into Medicare without facing destitution. What’s not to like about that?

Finally, let’s ponder the mental health benefit. Many of the homeless people on the street are mentally ill. They may be single, poor, and don’t have health coverage. What does Obamacare do for them? It enrolls them into Medicaid and includes mental health coverage. Finally there may some light at the end of the tunnel for these folks. And for those of us who may harbor a little fear (even if we don’t want to admit it), providing mental health coverage for the homeless makes our world a lot safer, for all of us. That’s what Obamacare does: it lessens our individual fear and increases our individual and collective well being. That’s precisely what the Republicans in Congress fear.

Originally published at the Everett Herald 

Adding up the benefits of Obamacare

The other day I went onto the Washington Health Benefit Exchange website to look at the actual costs for health coverage. (In the interest of full disclosure, my spouse works for the Washington Health Benefit Exchange.) I wanted to escape the non-stop rhetoric from those who are panicked that the Affordable Care Act will actually begin. It is not that they think it won’t work. They fear that it will.

Will it? To find out, I looked up what the cost of health insurance next year under the Affordable Care Act will be for workers and their families in Snohomish County.

Let’s say you are single and working at a minimum wage job. You are working close to full-time and going to community college. So what does the Affordable Care Act do for you? Actually, a lot. With your income of less than $16,000, you’re covered under Medicaid and pay nothing for your health care coverage.

What happens if you have a couple of children, while working full-time at a $15 an hour job? Your monthly Obamacare premium for health coverage for your whole family is $104. If your employer cuts back your hours to four days a week, you keep your health care coverage and your premium goes to zero.

Two out of five households in Snohomish County have less than $50,000 in income. How about these households? With a $40,000 income, your monthly Obamacare premium to cover your family of four will be $164.

OK, well how about a family smack-dab in the center of the middle class? Their household income is $63,685. Their Obamacare premium to cover two adults and two children is $449. If they have three kids, the premium for total coverage drops to $383 a month.

How about those families with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000? Yep, even they get some help. If your family income is $90,000 and you have three kids, your monthly premium will be $713 to cover all five family members. Add all these families together and almost 75 percent of households can benefit from Obamacare.

Wonder how your family will make out under the Affordable Care Act? See for yourself at www.wahbexchange.org/news-resources/calculate-your-costs/

Many of us have already benefited from Obamacare. Do you remember pre-existing conditions? If you admitted to any of a number of health incidences, and you were denied coverage or forced into a very expensive pool of “high risk” people, not because you were bad, or didn’t pay your bills, or cheated on your taxes, but because you were sick. Now you cannot be discriminated against because of a pre-existing condition. That didn’t happen through the good graces of insurance companies. That was part of Obamacare.

How about young people in their 20s? It used to be that once they turned 25 (or much younger in other states) young adults were kicked off their parents’ family coverage. Now young adults can continue their coverage on their parents’ insurance until they are 26. This provision particularly helps the children of upper income families the most because their parents are the ones most likely to have employer health insurance.

Are you on Medicare? You should notice that the doughnut hole for prescriptions is getting smaller and smaller and you are paying less for your medicine. Is that because the pharmaceutical companies have decided to trim their profits to help you out? No, it’s thanks to Obamacare.

The Republicans in D.C. seem intent on doing everything possible to dislodge health-care reform. Just last month, in their 40th Obamacare repeal vote, every single Republican voted to prevent enforcement of the Affordable Care Act. That includes our state’s Republican members of Congress — Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Doc Hastings, Dave Reichert, and Jaime Herrera Beutler — all who receive government-paid health care coverage for themselves and their families.

They should be panicked. Once the Affordable Care Act kicks in for good with affordable care, we are not going back. It’s good public policy, if you believe that everyone should have access to high quality health care. But if you don’t care about the benefits of health coverage for the citizens of our country, then you will try to throw every barrel in the way of the Affordable Care Act. Luckily for us, the act has been signed, sealed and is about to be delivered. No symbolic vote of opposition is going to block its implementation and your health-care coverage.

Originally published at the Everett Herald

Keep in mind government’s good works

This past week I flew out to visit my 94-year-old dad in Vermont. We drove around a large part of the state, taking in the Green Mountains, the old towns chartered before the revolution, the pastures and forests and hills… Then I flew to Minneapolis and drove back to Seattle in a two-day, 1,700-mile marathon with my son.

The entire trip was pretty safe and seamless, thanks, in large part, to the federal government. Every time you fly, you are dependent on the federal air traffic control system. You don’t think twice about being up at 35,000 feet, because you don’t have to, as your airplane has been licensed and inspected through the Federal Aviation Administration. You are safe from terror attacks, thanks to the Transportation Security Administration. We may grumble about waiting, and taking our shoes off, and missed connections, but really, flying coast to coast in five and a half hours?!

Fifty years ago the Interstate Highway system didn’t exist. It took the leadership of President Dwight Eisenhower (a Republican, by the way), to get the ball rolling. Now our country is crisscrossed with 47,000 miles of these high speed highways, thanks to the federal government. The cost was a little under $500 billion. We could never have built highways, or the FAA, if Congress had sequestered the money. And we’re crazy to think we can keep those systems running without funds.

Driving across Interstate 94, we wondered how far we had to go to Bozeman. So we looked that up on our cell phones. We think of cell phones as being the domain of Apple, Nokia, Samsung. But how do these work with global positioning? Courtesy of the federal government. Another initiative launched under President Eisenhower was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA. DARPA developed the global positioning satellite system. GPS is maintained by the United States government and is freely accessible to anyone.

Vermont, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington … all across this country I got the sense that we are recovering from the great recession. It may be slow, but we are going in the right direction. Part of what enabled us to stop the economic freefall was the federal stimulus in 2009, 2010, and 2011. That stimulus focused on infrastructure for the future and created jobs for the present. Money went to re-paving and re-building interstate roads, including I-94 in Montana. So we got a two-fer. People got back to work and their work benefited transportation for the next decade.

Unemployment insurance wasn’t around until the New Deal. Now it is a key cog for economic stability. Without it, tens of millions of households would have lost all income in the great recession. Their purchases in the local economy would have tailed off, creating a spiraling-down effect that would have benefited no one.

The minimum wage was another New Deal legacy. When workers are unemployed, they have no bargaining power. So they are easy to take advantage of, and employers can hog more of the money coming in, instead of sharing it with their employees. At least the minimum wage puts a floor on that behavior, again enabling employees to maintain some purchasing power. Our minimum wage in Washington state is higher than the federal minimum wage and geared to inflation, thanks to the people voting for a minimum wage initiative in 1998. Without it, low-wage workers would be toast.

Before the New Deal, when you got old, you got poor. With Social Security, when you get old, you maintain some economic security and a decent quality of life. You are insulated from the economic rollercoaster. So when the recession hit in 2008, my dad still got his Social Security check, month in and month out. But if you had a 401K retirement account, you might have seen it drop down to a 201K account. Social Security provided the stability to weather the recession.

We tend to whine about our government, looking at only the faults and not the benefits. But that attitude ends up reinforcing attacks on the very programs we value. Do we really want to cut Social Security benefits? How about cutting 57,000 kids off of Head Start, thanks to sequestration? Instead let’s celebrate our government this Labor Day. And then get to work rebuilding and refunding public services. That’s what government in our democracy is.

Originally published at The Everett Herald