I love "new time time-traveling iPhone camera." Please make this a regular feature! Where will it go next?

Speaking of weather, I saw two cherry trees blooming in north Seattle this morning. I guess it's been pretty warm, eh?

Those cherry trees are a variety that blooms twice a year regardless of the weather.

Lindy West!
Yes, go listen to that segment of the This American Life episode. That segment is really something. Lindy is really something. In his own way, even the troll is really something.

Lindy doesn't even try to be funny and still socks it outta the park. She even tears up a bit. Rock on Lindy!

@3- I know about twice blooming cherry trees, but they're on a early spring/early fall rotation and will fail to bloom in cold autumns. I've never heard of a plant that blooms regardless of the weather.

The good thing about an NYC blizzard is you don't have a car. The ironic thing is the wind whips off the Hudson when it's 19 degrees, and is nowhere to be found when it's 90 degrees and 80% humidity. I used to laugh about that walking west on 23rd street to the 7th avenue station. You appreciate a full face mask.

Please the GOPs only talking like a socialist, thier plans to fix the problem is the way we got into the problem in the first place: give more money to the rich and punish poor people and the middle class

Someday I hope someone has a blog that promises to never ever use stock photos. If you can't find or create an actual photo of whatever it is you are talking about, then don't bother.

I feel sorry for my Vermont friends. I hope global warming is more equitable next winter with snow in the west.

"1:40 p.m. ET: Uber car service issued an email to New York City customers stating that ride prices will not surge beyond 2.8 times the normal fare."

"The future light rail station is currently 78 percent complete, on time, and under budget."

Light rail was supposed to go to the UW by 2006. By what measure is literally a decade later anything even remotely resembling on time? Is this the new "Seattle Way", misinform until the masses believe it?

Lindy West really brought a personal perspective to horrible comments. I can't believe people made those rape comments. Trolls don't realize what they are doing? It's a shame the corporate media is just a marketing tool and not engaged in journalism.

@8, I share your concerns about income inequality.

It does require some myth busting though. Progressives and liberals in the U.S. widely regard European countries as countries that tax the wealthy to pay for social programs for the poor. That is only partially correct. According to the OECD, The U.S. tax system is actually more progressive (the wealthy pay a higher % of income in than the poorest tax payers) than all but three European nations (Ireland , Portugal, Italy). What European countries actually do is tax everyone pretty flatly. The bottom 20% of income earners in Europe pat 40% to 50% (depending on country) of earnings to the state in taxes mostly through highly regressive taxes similar to the WSST. The top 20% of income earners pay about the same proportion of their income in taxes (mostly through income taxes). In the U.S. the top 20% or wage earners as a group (there are the outliers like Romney) pay about 30%, and the lowest income earners can actually have a negative federal tax rate of -8% because of the Earned Income Tax Credit (when you add in regressive state taxes it moves back to zero or slightly positive).

So if we want to be like Europe with our social spending, it is not a matter of taxing the wealthy and raising their taxes, although it would include that, it is a matter of taxing everyone at 40% to 50% of income rather than what we do now, which is to tax the top 40% of wage earners at about 30% of income( avg. by income quintile, there are outliers in every group, e.g. Romney at 14% - not counting state and local taxes which probably doesn't increase it much) and the poor at increasingly smaller percentages. I am using Ezra Klien's #S from Wonkblog (not a those of a conservative think tank). The number is total state, federal, and local taxes, not just federal income taxes.

"You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.

4.You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

5.You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich."

William J.H. Boetcker - 1873 Just as true then as now.

So the real question is not whether we tax the rich more, but whether we tax everyone more, like Europe. And Europe has the same growing income equality problem we do. Everybody's income and standard of living are flat or declining slightly, while the top 10%, and particularly the top 1%, run away from the rest of us.

This was my favorite news roundup in quite a while. Nice work, Mr. Frizzelle!

@12 you're horribly misinformed. They didn't approve the route until 2006.

@15 you're horribly misinformed.

Seattle 63, New England 28.

Current temperatures AND Super Bowl prediction.

Once, when I was living in Vermont, I went outside before my hair was completely dry after washing. It froze and broke off. Instant ugliest punk cut EVER. Took several months to stop looking hideous. Dear East Coast, take care and I hope your roofs don't collapse.

I hope my earlier post isn't offensive or sound like I'm making light o f the seriousness of the blizzard you are facing. I didn't mean it to be, just got foot in mouth, so sorry.

@18, Refute the data then.

The Western European tax structures are pretty flat, and higher than ours, when you look at all taxes paid by all income groups. I am not talking just about income taxes, on either side of the Atlantic. Take all taxes paid, no matter what they are called or applied to, to all levels of government, divide by income, and the percentage is pretty flat across all income levels in Europe. Less so in the U.S)

The European model is a valid policy choice, if the U.S. electorate wants to go there. Just as long as people understand what they are choosing, and choose it democratically, that's fine.

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

@22: I think he meant that you're misinformed about how liberals perceive typical Western European tax structures, not the tax structures themselves. "Europe is all socialist and shit when it comes to taxes" is more of a conservative talking point intended to blame the effects of their preferred policies (austerity and regressive tax structures) on our preferred policies (social safety net, funding of arts and research, and progressive taxation).

#17, funding was secured for a 2006 completion in 1998, as an addendum to the original Sound Transit funding in 1996, based essentially on an extension of the original sales and MVET taxes.
Yes, the route wasn't approved until 2006. Construction didn't begin until 2008. That's how off schedule Sound Transit is. At this point we were supposed to have Light Rail from 320th in Federal Way to the UW finished and running. That all changed in 2002. That's when they "revised" the timing to the current 2016 time frame.
The record is excruciatingly clear on this one. ST promised the sky, then pulled a bait and switch on the entire region in 2002. I've wondered ever since why people just sat back and let them get away with it. I'm amazed at the attempts at revisionist history by blind faith light rail advocates. The region deserves better than the RTID. We're never going to get the transit we need until we get the ST monkey off our backs. It's just stealing too much bread to feed the masses with the remains.

@23. Perhaps you are correct. If so, my apologies.

That said, its a fair question of the progressive position to ask how making the rich poorer, as steeply progressive taxes would effectively do, makes the poor richer or more upwardly mobile. It does not follow that if the highest income earners lose, that this will automatically lift the middle class and poor.

I am more interested in the latter question. I will put it another way. How do we make the middle class and poor better off? How do you raise their standard of living? As the European socialist systems show, there isn't enough revenue from taxing just the top 20% of income earners at 40% to 50% of income to pay for their generous social programs. They have to tax everyone at that rate (and do). Yet their real incomes for the bottom 80% of wage earners are just as stagnated as ours if not more so.

@25: *headdesk*
The point is that you take taxes MORE from the rich, allowing you to take taxes LESS from the poor while still balancing the budget. You give the poor tax breaks paid for by tax hikes on the rich.
And please tell me how raising the capital gains tax will make ANYONE poorer than they are.

@26, I have mixed feeling about the Capital Gains Tax. I think everyone ought to pay proportionally the same % of their income as everyone else. Those that can rely on the Capital Gains Tax, can be taxed at a rate less than higher income laborers.

That said, we compete globally for capital investment in our country, and our rates is one of the higher ones in the world (as Bill Clinton recognized). We have had some citizens renounce citizenship and move off-shore to avoid the tax. I generally want more capital investment (and resulting employment) in this country rather than capital investment in others.

The critique of your plan, "Tax the rich more, so you can tax the poor less" is that math does not work when you total up all the programs that progressives want. Two things happen. 1st you can't tax the rich (the top 10%) enough as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Federal retiree obligations, and interest on the debt (current 66% of all federal revenue and growing to 100% in about 15 years) eat the budget, let alone add more spending that the progressives want. France found that out when they failed to raise taxes on the wealthy and the wealthy just left the country. They repealed their 75% income tax. There aren't enough rich people even if you took 100% of their income. It is too small a base of tax payers.

2nd you don't get the revenue you think you are going to get because at certain rates the people make the rational decision not to engage in the taxable activity or flee to other parts of the globe to avoid the tax. Why do something 50% of what you do comes off the top?

So you wind up broadening the tax base to capture revenue from lower and lower income earners. We wind up looking like Europe with a very flat, proportional tax system.

We can have what we want in terms of social programs, but there is not a free lunch. The trade-off is paying more. We are seeing that play out at a State level now. We voted ourselves the benefit of smaller class sizes for our kids. We did not vote in the taxes to pay the piper.

Just as a point of trivia. Did you know that the U.S. Income tax was only originally a tax on about the top 2% of wage earners or so. Who pays it today? The top 80% of wage earners. I don't have a problem with that, but for those who advocate expanding the programs we all like, it has to be paid for somehow, and the promised benefits, which keep getting expanded, eventually outpace the tax on higher income earners that pays for them. You then have to broaden and be more inclusive in base of taxpayers chipping in.

So taxing the high income earners so the poor can pay less sounds good, but has mathematical and practical limits. Actually at a Federal level its what we do now. The poor, through the Earned Income Tax credit actually can have a slightly negative rate. It is why our tax code is more progressive than all but 3 European countries.

@27: "Social Security...eat[s] the budget"
intothetrashitgoes.bmp
"Did you know that the U.S. Income tax was only originally a tax on about the top 2% of wage earners or so."
Did you know that the federal government didn't explicitly have the right to tax incomes of all sorts until 1913? I didn't research your claim thoroughly enough to find a source for it, but it's a meaningless number without historical context. Did you know that originally the federal government didn't regulate air travel at all? Did you know that slaves used to be counted as 3/5ths of a person for census purposes?

I am aware that the income tax did not exist prior to 1913. A constitutional amendment was approved to allow it. My point was that it was originally sold, in part, as a way to correct a nationally regressive system. It was a way to get the wealthy to pay. I have no problem with that.

My point is that it did not last long for that purpose. It was expanded down to near the bottom of the income ladder as more and more services and benefits were conferred on the public by popular demand. So the proposition that we tax the rich more, so we can tax the rich less, has never been sustained. We eventually wind up taxing everyone, not just the wealthy, if we don't restrain our appetite for new "free" benefits from government. I am not saying that is good or bad, just what is. Europe is ahead of us in this regard, and they have hit a wall. Everyone is paying 40% to 60% of income to the state, and the well is dry. The state can't fund the promises the public votes on itself, because tax avoidance, rational decisions not to participate in economic activity since the individual reward is not there when so much benefit to the individual is taken off the top by the state, tax evasion, capital flight, "brain drain" (Canada has this problem with the U.S., when its brightest citizens seek places to work where they don't have to share as much of compensation for their brilliant labor with the state), etc.

Policy choices have consequences. Unlike Europe, the liberal left in this country, seems to want the benefits, but not to tax everyone in the same proportion (at rates 2/5 to 3/5ths of their income). They want European single-payer healthcare, liberal unemployment, housing, retirement, and other benefits, but only if taxes on "the other" (usually the rich) are the only taxes to go up. We can have what Europe has, but to pay for it, everyone has to cough up at much higher, and much more equal proportions of their income than they do now. You can't have the former, without the inevitability of the latter. As long as that policy choice is made transparently, openly, realistically, with willful intention, and democratically, fine.

The Lindy West bit was pretty interesting. I'm surprised that a troll willingly outed himself to her and apologized, even sent a donation in her (father's) name.