Alright, I haven't been reading The Stranger for very long. Could someone explain to me why they hate the times so much?

@1 cause they hate the whiny suburbanites.

@1, as a rule it's not the Times news side they rail against, whose editors and reporters do so much of the work on the ground that the Stranger riffs on so beautifully.

It's the op/ed side, the Times' attic full of strange aunts and uncles who can publish whatever they like, that drives the Stranger batty. The Stranger tends to aim for consistency in its own editorial view, so the continuing Times ed board fetish for contradictory illogical statements - it's a head-exploder for our friends at 11th and Pike.

Or is that Pine? I've spent most of my life within a mile of that place but can never remember which is which.

The wrong daily folded.

You got that right, Vadt.

What program that the Seattle Times had advocated we cut funding for will they lament the loss of next?

While the "no-dangling-prepositions" rule can be over-applied, this nearly-incomprehensible sentence is a good illustration of why it exists in the first place.

From 2000 to 2010 the population of WA state increased, at most, about 15 percent.

For that same period, the state budget increased by 50 percent.

Bringing it back to the ratio held in 2000 would require considerably more budget cutting and spending restraint.

We cut that candy tax for the children........

X Removed from Alphabet in Austerity Measure

Cuts in education spending in the United States have forced educators to pare costs to a bare minimum. Class sizes have almost doubled, old, worn out textbooks are being used in place of new, and in the latest rounds of cuts, the letter X has been removed from the alphabet. Educators believe that having 25 letters in the American English alphabet instead of 26 will allow children to learn their "letters" more quickly and move them on to the next grade with less effort.

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?h…

@8, you're an ignorant cuntoramus

State revenue and state spending are lower than they were fifteen years ago as a percentage of the state's economy, which is the only measure that makes sense. Revenue in particular is DRAMATICALLY lower, about a percent less (from 6.6% to 5.6%, while spending has fallen less. That's why our budget is hosed -- huge loss of revenue.

A lot of the spending of the state is mandated by the federal government, too. Mandated but unfunded; we have to find our own dollars to pay for it.

Tea party shits make me sick.

Like I said---Tim Eyman is masturbating like a chimp.

@4 - Pine is north of Pike. It's got an N in it, which stands for north. You'll never forget again.

The dangling-preposition rule is made up, borrowed arbitrarily and illogically from Latin. If we dedangle, latinately, then we get:

Of what program for which the Seattle Times had advocated (that) we cut funding will they lament the loss next?

I can't think of a better example of how completely ridiculous the made-up no-dangling rule is.

@11

That makes no sense at all...why should services be proportionate to GDP? The should only be proportionate to the electorate -- the population. If a business comes up with a new idea, that increases profit by 300%, should state spending then increase? According to your lunacy...yes?!

Here's some charts for you to ponder:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/Wash…

Clearly WA State Government is a bubble...it ramped up based on unlimited growth. But only 100 jobs were created last month...even by your (inane) GDP argument, state spending should be doing an incredible backflip...more so than ever.

@11
Don't be obtuse. Population has grown 1.15 times, inflation has grown 1.27 times. 1.15 times 1.27 = 1.46. The budget has tracked followed inflation and population growth,

Ooops, that was meant for @17. Somebody better check my math, too, since I appear to be bad with numbers,

Andrew: You are welcome to claim that inflation-adjusted per-capita government spending should rise with time. Just don't claim that it hasn't, because it has, consistently.

The census will tell you that from 2000 to 2008 (the last year for which they give data), WA state government spending rose from $25.9B / 5.89M people = $4390/capita to $39.7B/ 6.65M people = $5970/capita. The BLS will tell you that $4390 in 2000 is the the same as $5490 in 2008. So in inflation-adjusted terms, WA state government per capita spending rose 9% over those 8 years. In the terms you used, Andrew, population increased by a factor 1.12 and inflation decreased the value of a dollar by a factor 1.25, so to stay constant in real, per-capita terms, state government spending should have increased by a factor 1.12 X 1.25 = 1.40. But in fact in increased by a factor 1.53.

I knew it was going to work out this way before I even looked up the data, because every level of government just about everywhere in the U.S. has grown in real, per-capita terms over just about any time period you care to pick in the last 100 years.

Fnarf: You are welcome to claim that you believe that government should represent a constant fraction of GDP. (In fact, I'm happy to hear that you do, because most progressives want it to grow faster than GDP.) But to claim that "is the only measure that makes sense" just makes you sound ridiculous. You may not agree with idea that government has a fixed set of basic responsibilities to each citizen, but that idea is hardly non-sensical, and it leads immediately to the real, per-capita spending metric, which is indeed metric is widely used in discussions of fiscal policy.

@14, may flying spaghetti monster grant you magic meatballs for that tip. It's a whole new day.