Bravo, Charles! I hope to fk she reads this and takes notes.

Did she run on this at all? It’s feeling pretty bait and switchy...

Also i get the feeling that this is being done in order to find money to finance campaign promises.

@charles - what do you think of Mayor Durkan’s free college tution? Personally i’d think its more neo-liberal bs, and the money would be better spent in public housing.

I can find no fault in this essay. Good work Mudede!

Charles - before you anoint yourself to be the purveyor of all things economically stupid, did you investigate our left coast's other delightfully progressive mayors? No, because you would have read about the quandaries of San Francisco's mayor, Los Angeles's mayor, and Portland's mayor - all whom, unlike progressives and republicans in Washington D.C., don't enjoy the convenience of just asking the Secretary of the Treasury to dial up the mints to have them print more money.

Your trouble is that you base your economic commentary on theory, but none on practice.

Berating Durkan over class war, while arguing for class war. Both sides of your mouth must be tired today.

We don't even know what the cuts are though.

You can't put a blanket statement of "all cuts are bad". There has to be some logic used that agrees there may be bad practices or programs in place now that would actually *help* these populations if they went away.

Think about the ability to boost a program with known benefits by cutting a program that's known to not work.

Durkan won. Seattle made their vote heard. Durkan is a Progressive, not a Leftist. We elected a Progressive and got one. Deal with it.

Jenny is at best a moderate, that's who people vote for in Seattle. It's funny because they're simultaneously entrenched against the raising of any taxes (even taxes that don't affect them) and the consequences of not having a well-funded government, like the escalating homelessness crisis, health care costs, and traffic. It's a paradox of plain stupidity.

@3 Is correct. This is asking departments for cut proposals so the Mayor can identify funding sources for her priorities. Every Mayor does that when they come into office, even during high revenue times such as this. This administration decided to make it more public than usual. The only problem with that is it gets the folks that want the City to cut back more excited than they should be, there won't be any net cuts to the budget. And it gets people like Mudede all angry that their sacred cows could be cut without any specific knowledge. Asking for cut proposals is not the same thing as cutting budgets. Calm down.

I don't think Mudede's thesis squares with Keynes anyway. You don't need to pump G into the economy nine/ten years into an expansion that at least at the national level could be just starting to overheat. Which is exactly what D.C. is doing through tax cuts and increased spending. Cutting back at a local level and saving any budget surplus could help smooth the revenue path during the next downturn. A downturn is when you shouldn't be cutting but pumping more G into the macro equation. Even if the City were to pull back on net spending, which they won't, that wouldn't have a big negative impact to the economy, private investment is more than sufficient during the (very) late stages of an expansion.

These arguments are better made at a national scale though. Intra-regional government spending (a City's revenue base on a City's expenditures) really don't move the economic needle. That's just a function of demand for services against the willingness to pay for them. And Seattle has a lot of both.

Speaking of "utter economic stupidity" ...

1. Seattle is not a relatively closed economy (in which proposed macro stimulus might arguably achieve the intended effect).

2. Seattle's economy is overstimulated anyway.

3. As noted earlier, Seattle can't deficit spend, so we must match spending with taxation.

4. Our tax system is regressive, so higher spending is unkind to Seattle's lower income residents.

5. Major shares of the city budget go to non-resident city employees (and contractors).

If Mudede had any clue to Keynes (or Quiggin) he would not have written this piece - which has more in common with Trumpian tax cuts than enlightened economics of any stripe.

And, of course, we get the Stranger's unrequited hard-on for the miserable failure that was Mayor McGinn:

Recall that Mayor McGinn was a deficit hawk.

There can be no such thing in a government which cannot run a deficit. This is how completely dishonest one must become to praise McGinn's performance as mayor.

When you're down to claiming that McGinn, a truly epic incompetent, was a better mayor than any of the other persons Seattle has had in the post over the last quarter-century, you've pretty much admitted defeat right there.

This is writing born of emotion rather than reason. It is angry, disorganized, and unconvincing.

”You mean class war.”

No, Charles, you mean class war, and your slavering is not subtle.

”This is a sermon even I would say amen to if only government spending spiked during downturns.”

If 2008 spending had been higher, you’d support budget cuts in 2018? Laughable.

”But now that we are "booming," we are doing the same thing again: budget cuts, austerity, being very responsible.”

The city’s operating budget was $4.13 billion in 2010 and $6.08 billion in 2017.

”Are you feeling me?”

What am I reading? No. I am not feeling you.

Holy SHIT, Mayor Jenny! Wake up, already, before Seattle becomes the new Detroit!
Excellent article, Charles. I'm with spunkbutter (@1). I hope Durkan reads this and takes serious notes.

Oh heck. Everyone is rich in Seattle. Its the San Francisco of the Pacific Northwest West. Just what liberals and progressives and folk investing in the over-inflated housing market wanted for the last 20+ years. But like all of Charles’s writing and his overstating the obvious, he misses the point of prediction. And just like the housing bubble of banks in the past “that threw the great world into the great recession”, progressives and liberals will do the same thing with Seattle as that bubble pops and rents increase, wages stagnate, crime increases, and the gross Detroit-esque graffitied bridges continue to mar the skyline, it will get ugly. Make no mistake, this isnt just Jenny’s fault, its pretty much rests on every Democrat’s shoulder who held political office in Washington or represents Washington in D.C. It reminds me of wealthy southern democrats of the 1860s, this just seems like a new kind of slavery. Wealthy liberals and liberal politicians call it a “viable workforce” but in laymans terms it will always just mean “The Working Poor”. Give the workforce enough to survive but never enough to thrive. Enjoy voting for your overlords - yet again - in the midterms

Free community college tuition.
Nullification of sentences for pot offenses.
100% pushback on Trump policies affecting Seattle.
Got rid of some pretty inept department heads, esp at SPU.
Is retooling the corrupt HR department that gave harassers a pass.
Signed order for fast rent/utility assistance
Is asking departments to trim Ed Murray's fat
For starters. Oh, and,
Doesn't give a shit about sniping from the Stranger

Also the city is not a major economic driver. Amazon, Boeing, RE, trade, etc. are. Keynes policy demands expanding government during recessions, and not burning up your ability to do so during economic expansion. Lets be honest here: the city doesn't get rid of bad bureaucrats, they get shifted around. Time to trim the fat.

@8: I'm all for progressives. I was concerned about the content of Charles' article. The trick is to make budget cuts where the real FAT is, and leave vital programs and services (i.e.: Sound Transit) in place, for the good of the majority.
@20 Thank you for reminders of what wonderful things Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is doing for Seattle and King County.

There's a pretty good chance I'll end up agreeing with you that at least some of the cuts Durkan will settle on are a bad idea and she shouldn't do it, but holy crap this is lazy paint-by-numbers stuff, Charles. Your deeply held convictions about economics from 35,000 feet shouldn't be an excuse to not bother to dig into the particulars. Your paper has hired some talented journalists with a tiny fraction of your experience who are pretty good at this. Perhaps you should learn from their example, or get out of the way so The Stranger can afford to hire more them.

You will be changing your tune in a few years and then you (or another reporter) will be writing about the wisdom of Jenny Durkan to see into the future and budget accordingly.

@12, @13, @14, and @19 are correct. Seattle’s budget is in the ordinary realm of microeconomics, not the macroeconomics of Keynes’s “General Theory.” Seattle has to finance spending through taxation, other revenue, and borrowing. The city has no ability to monetize its debts, like the Federal Government does, and its borrrowing capacity is ultimately limited by the ability and willingness of its citizens to and companies to pay taxes. Furthermore, runaway spending within Seattle doesn’t really benefit Seattle. You can make a better case for borrowing to make capital investments like mass transit improvements, which actually increase the value of land around stations and hence raise the city’s taxing ability.

Charles, I think you are a smart man, but you get in over your head when you write about finance and economics. You have no business calling Jenny Durkan or her policies “stupid.” You have a difference of opinion.

@24: There's also the problem that SDOT's enormous maintenance backlog will continue to worsen under the pounding of heavy equipment servicing Seattle's multitude of private construction sites, and the number of contractors available to upgrade our infrastructure remains constricted from said construction. Thus, one of the only true Keynesian methods of effective government spending to improve the economy -- major public infrastructure improvements -- is currently off-limits.

@23: You will be changing your tune in a few years and then you (or another reporter) will be writing about the wisdom of Jenny Durkan to see into the future and budget accordingly.

Or, the gang at the Stranger will continue to be in denial about it, and will still be using their one unflattering photograph they have of her from election night 2017: the moment she decisively defeated the Stranger's own endorsed candidate. :-)

@ 25: There are no Keynesian methods of government spending in Seattle, period! Keynesian economics is a branch of macroeconomics that deals with the ability of the Federal Government to manage the economy through deficit spending (or surpluses) and monetary policy. A municipal government doesn’t have these powers!

Keynesian economists are often advocates of investment in publicly owned capital, of which transit infrastructure is a good example, and human capital. Durkan’s college tuition initiative is a good example of the latter. Keynesians criticize a pure cash ledger approach to government spending, since capital investment can increase the productive capacity of the economy.

This editorial, like many that Charles has written, throws around names and tropes of macroeconomics, but Charles Mudede doesn’t understand them. That doesn’t make him stupid (although he loves to call other people stupid), and it doesn’t even mean that he is wrong. Even people who do understand economics are often wrong. But it does mean that he is either trying to fool us about what he knows, or that he is fooling himself.

To me, it often appears that Charles took a 1980s or 90s course taught by a professor who was reading from his 1960s notes. His writings contain many dated references to a post-Keynesian school that tried to marry Keynesian economics with the Frankfort School of Critical Theory. I’m not sure if any of these theorists are still living and actively writing. I have trouble seeing how they are relevant to 21st century Seattle. In the early 1980s, when I was a student, they already seemed cultish and obscure.

@24, @26

Howard, your comments helped me think through this in a new way. Thank you for the thought-provoking contribution.

@26: The Oxford English Dictionary defines "Keynesian economics" as "economic theory or practice based on the ideas of Keynes, esp. the belief that the state should play a role in regulating the economy." Infrastructure investment, especially when done with the intent also to support the economy in non-boom times, fits this rather broad definition.

I understand you're writing from a more technical perspective than most of us here on Slog, so you may have a tighter definition than the more common ones.

I second what @27 wrote, and thank you for your comments here.