The fastest way to grow the economy, and a state budget funded by consumption taxes, is to increase consumption by those who spend the largest portion of their income. It seems your point 4 is exactly addressed by this.

I think expanding union representation for the working poor and service sector employees could have a greater impact than all of the efforts listed combined. The only reason we have to legislate a "living wage" is because workers are not organized enough to demand it in exchange for their work. Instead we are all scabs engaged in a wage race to the bottom. How's that working for us?

Olympia is not going to fund the EITC. So forget that. And our Republican Congress, about to grow even more Republican? Forget that.

If you want to daydream about things that aren't going to happen, why not daydream about traveling back in time and preventing the great recession? Or preventing income inequality from ever having happened in the first place? Oh, and everyone gets a pony.

And unions have been working for years to return to their former glory. If they could, they would have. Wishing doesn't make it so.

Raising the minimum wage is a real thing we can do right here in Seattle, right now. The political will exists, from the Mayor down. It's not a panacea but local city governments have never had the option of enacting panaceas. They do what they can when they can.

Well slashing the metro at a time when people who work in Seattle cannot afford to live in Seattle seems to be counter-intuitive. But the people who make the rules don't need to live by them so what do they care until their favorite little bistro has to close earlier and earlier because their staff cannot get home after 9pm. They will ignore the problem and continue to take and take and take until it smacks them in the face and they can't get the level of service to which they have become accustomed. By then it might not be fixable and the people who make the rules will just give up and leave Seattle all together and then what will we have? Another Detroit?

----Applause----

@2 yep, and the crazy part is that people are willfully ignorant enough to think they can "do it on their own, I don't need no damn union".

"The main reason for income inequality is that our tax system is upside-down."

I don't think that's true. California has a far more progressive state tax regime than Washington, but San Francisco is facing the same income inequality and the same affordability issues as Seattle (only more intense). In Seattle, a single company that pays relatively high wages is adding tens of thousands of jobs downtown. That's going to create problems for anyone that isn't a high earner. You'll see the same thing in any boom town (e.g., Williston, North Dakota).

@3 absolutely wishing gets you no where. Action is what makes things happen. Yes some unions are struggling. However there are many that are still capable of securing good wages and bennies for their workers because they are organized and prepared to take collective action to deny labor to employers who won't fairly reward their work. I'm all for the 15now effort but just want to point out that McDonald's and subway employees don't need 51% of Seattle voters (or a msjority of the city council, state Supreme Court, etc?) to agree with them. All they need to do is get organized and sit on their hands to win. And I'm not sure myself, but one might argue that the decline of unions has more to do with a lack of worker solidarity than economic forces and regulatory environment. Indeed, a majority of the actions that achieved gains for labor in the last century were taken without legal sanction and in much tougher times than we now face. Therefore
failure of the city council or voters to approve an initiative for 15 would be inconsequential compared to the power workers hold in their hands to demand fair wages from their employers.

The "global capital markets" have created $Trillions of new money in recent years, both formally in institutions like the Federal Reserve and in unregulated lawless regions of the financial markets. They built south Lake Union, and they fund the tenants and employees' paychecks as well as the office and residential buildings. They think they can print endless counterfeit money, unearned and we are going to compete with that? OK well now they can start paying $15/ hour and we aren't fuckin around.

I have been that person who had crappy, low-wage jobs to live off of. One day I finally woke up and realized that I can't do this for the rest of my life. I sucked it up, pulled out loans for college, picked a path, and have been working my ass off since so I can move beyond earning minimum wage for the rest of my life and not complain that things aren't fair. These jobs are NOT meant to support you forever or raise 5 kids. They are supposed to be temporary. I might be paying student loans for the rest of my life but I can say that did something for myself. And no, I did not grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth. My family has more people with criminal records than a job past min wage, so I had no influence on this path.

http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/202…

"Just raising wages for Seattle isn’t feasible given the regional footprint of our supported-living providers. We would not be able to pay employees working in Seattle $15 and those in Bellevue only $10. We would need to raise wages for all of our employees regardless of where they work.

Providers in King County would need an additional $26 million in annual funding to increase the minimum wage to $15.

If the minimum wage increased to $15 today, my agency alone would immediately need almost $500,000 to cover the increase. That’s money no one is offering — not the state, county or city. Because we’re contracted by the state to provide specific hours of service, we can’t reduce service hours to increase wages."

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) - April 30, 2014
A broad-based coalition of millionaires converged on Washington today to defeat a bill that would have increased the minimum wage for American workers to $10.10 an hour.

Leaving behind their mansions and yachts, the millionaires were motivated by what they saw as an existential threat to the country, Mitch McConnell, a spokesman for the millionaires, said.

“This was an extremely diverse coalition,” McConnell said, noting that everyone from the rich to the very rich to the super-rich united to vote down the bill.

McConnell hoped that today’s vote would burnish the millionaires’ reputation as “people who get things done.”

“Folks who have tried to pin a ‘do nothing’ label on us are dead wrong,” he said. “When it comes to stopping workers from being paid more, we spring into action.”