News

Five to Four

by Josh Feit

Seattle P-I cartoonist David Horsey had a great cartoon a while back depicting President Bush at a press conference. No matter what question the press asked, Horsey made Dubya respond with the same refrain: "Tax cuts for the wealthy."

Reporter: "Mr. President, how do we stimulate the economy?" Bush: "Tax cuts for the wealthy." Reporter: "How can we deal with job losses?" Bush: "Tax cuts for the wealthy."

The final panels of Horsey's cartoon brought the joke home: "Mister President, what if the fan belt goes out on my '95 Toyota?" Bush: "Tax cuts for the wealth... Okay, who's the wise guy?"

Like all good jokes, Horsey's contained a grain of truth. Giving tax breaks to rich people seems to be Bush's only trick.

Horsey could draw up a similar joke about our mayor. It would go something like this:

Reporter: "Mr. Mayor, how do we stimulate the economy?" Nickels: "Biotech." Reporter: "Why a trolley in South Lake Union?" Nickels: "Biotech." Reporter: "Why lift the lease lid in the U-District?" Nickels: "Biotech." Reporter: "Mr. Mayor, Pike or Pine?" Nickels: "Biotech."

Indeed, judging from Nickels' current major neighborhood initiatives--lifting restrictions on the University of Washington's ability to lease land, and entering into a public-private partnership with Paul Allen to revamp South Lake Union--it's clear Nickels thinks biotech is Seattle's elixir.

I'm not pooh-poohing Nickels' biotech dreams. I'd just like some clarity about this whole biotech-economy thing. It reminds me too much of the dot-com fix--which obviously got us into our current mess. And in that light, it seems a shallow strategy: replacing one gold rush with another.

Moreover, it's not as if every city in the U.S. isn't hep to the exact same idea. The mayor's office is quick to point out that Seattle is different from all the wannabes, though, because the UW is a "premier research university." Fair enough; the UW is one of the country's top research universities. But let me stress: the UW is one of the country's top research universities. Get in line. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Duke, Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Yale, UCLA, and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota all rate higher than the UW. I'm not putting down the UW--I'm just saying, surely Boston et al. are vying for the same business.

Nickels' office likes to talk about Fred Hutch, ZymoGenetics, and Immunex, too--the flourishing biotech industry here. Fair enough. (Although Immunex, like Boeing, is no longer based here. It was bought by California's Amgen last year.) And a little reality check: Of the 14 biotech companies on the Fortune 500 list, none hailed from here.

Again, I like Nickels' impulse to make Seattle an attractive spot for what appears to be a vibrant industry, but the mayor needs to stop his pat biotech mantra until he can give an honest assessment of the sustainability and reality of the biotech gold rush. Bio bust just has too much of a ring to it.

josh@thestranger.com