Comments

1

The Stranger Uses Poor People as a Human Shield to Protect Failed Socialist Policies.

3

Or: The Stranger Uses Resentment, and Fear as a Shield to Protect Communist/Socialist Failed Policies in Seattle.

4

As always, the Seattle Times care solely about its class. Its position on this is no different than the demagogy of the campaign supporting Initiative 1634, a measure which would ban soda taxes(it would have no effect on the taxing of anything else sold in grocery stores, since virtually no types of groceries are being taxed now or ever would be taxed). The passage of Initiative 1634(which actually hired street people to gather signatures on its behalf in Olympia, and probably in other places as well) would do nothing to help the working and kept-from-working poor, and ordinary working people would not in any way benefit from corporations continuing to be exempt from having to pay for the pollution they cause. The defeat of I-1631 would do nothing to help ordinary working-class Washingtonians or anyone who owns a family farm in this state.

5

@1, @3: It's never been about "resentment". Nobody calls on corporations to pay for the pollution they cause for any reason other than to help save the planet. None of us ever wanted to be rich or run a corporation. You simply have trouble accepting this because you can't accept that anyone can ever be motivated by anything other than individual self-interest. "Sad!"

6

"The carbon fee will almost certainly raise energy prices for Washingtonians. Homes will be more expensive to heat, food will be more expensive to move to grocery stores, and gas will go up 14 cents a gallon, according to the Washington Policy Center.

And that’s the fucking point."

That'd be a BINGO.
And I spend Tonnes,
just getting to point B.

7

sSSgreed -- or, Fascist Takeover of America Well-Enabled by Pro-Corps [Pro Bono?!] Far Alt "Right" Concerned-for-the-Commonest-Man Trolls.

Pick yur Poison!

8

"The Blethlens may lack moral fiber, [omg] but they are not idiots. They know the Trump administration and the Republican Party do not believe in science or fighting climate change. The Seattle Times is in the pockets of the world’s richest people and corporations. That’s why they have opposed income taxes, public transit, and corporate taxes. And that’s why they are fighting one of the country’s most viable measures to fight climate change."

Well done / Powerful. Thank you.

And may Catastrophic Climate Change take its Enablers 1st.

9

The social engineering taxes on tobacco didn't work, and the social engineering on climate change won't work either. Extortion slush funds with no oversight are what they are. Good people will vote NO on 1631.

10

If you want to reduce pollution then stop driving your car so much. Take personal responsibility for your life, and stop consuming more than you need.

You decide how much you consume. And I will decide how much I consume.

11

Gas is too cheap. So is Frank Blethen.

12

@11 - Always will be for people who don't drive.

13

10 : "If you want to reduce pollution then stop driving your car so much."

Pro Transit? Excellent!

"... I will decide how much I consume."

Uh-Oh. You didn't buy one of those GIANT all wheel drive Pickups didja? Where you gotta get a step ladder to try and clamber aboard? Where if you wanna put somethin' in the back (it's a fucking PICK-UP), you gotta getta a Forklift to put it, way up there? (then how do you get it the fuck back out?) (oh -- you get the Dumper option, and you Dump it out! Brilliant.)

I bet them Gas Prices were a bit of a sticker shocker, eh?Get ready for more. 'Cause Trumpfy's At The Wheel. And he don't give a Royal Fuck about your transpo worries. Or any of 'em.

14

Every one of us has oil on our hands. The world’s economy is based on oil. Plastic comes from oil. Get rid of packaging. We need world economy reformation 101. Anyone?

15

@9 According to the most recent meta study I could find, the long term price elasticity of gasoline is -0.58 (M Espey, 2018), which means 10% increase in the price will decrease consumption by 5.8%. So evidence suggests it will change peoples behavior.

16

This sounds like it's written by a pist off 15 yr old. Free magazine/ad booklet, endorses higher prices on everything.....Oh the irony!

17

@13 kristofarian: Fuck Trump, Pence, Kavanaugh, Sessions, Zinke, the Blethens, ad nauseum!
Vote YES on I-1631 and I-1639. My beloved little VW Beetle and I, by conserving (driving on occasion, + my riding the bus, walking to and from, etc.) are both trying to leave as small a carbon footprint / tire tracks as humanly and vehicularly possible.
I will never purchase another issue of the Seattle Times again. Their asinine support of Dino Mafia Don Rossi killed the last shred of respect I ever had for that miserable rag. To think The Seattle Times won 11 Pulitzer Prizes in its glory days. What a fucking waste.
Blethens for Bankruptcy 2018
Trump / Pence for Prison 2018.

18

@13: All commuting isn't urban. What about urban to rural or rural to rural? Consumption is by no means mostly discretionary.

19

I wish the Stranger would stop linking to Seattle Times articles. If they truly cared, they wouldn’t give the shitty paywalled dinosaur the clicks to keep them going. That crap paper should have gone out of business by now but you idiots keep looking at it and giving them ad revenue.

20

@18: Not all consumption is munching Cinnabons, either, sugarlips. My point was conservation, not consumption.

21

18

"All commuting isn't urban.
What about urban to rural or rural to rural?"

[hmmm ... that sounds suspiciously like some sorta preverted sex club/act] (Excuse me, are we speaking euphemistically here?)

"Consumption is by no means mostly discretionary."

Yes. We've been Socially engineered by Big Auto, Big Oil, and Big Mega Corps, LLC -- our options are now seemingly few, but fuck, we sure got a LOTTA fucking pavement to fill.

And a Biosphere to poison?
Our Tipping Point appears to be quite near...
With a Prez just Fearless enough to bump us up to Armageddon -- and a REPUBLICAN Congress, without
enough Testicular Fortitude to keep his very very sorry ass in Check.

Although, they did get their Ginormous Tax Cuts.

AND the Supreme Court.

Will he pull his Lemming over the Edge?
And with the rest of Humanity, itself tagging along --
and not by choice.

22

I drive a nice SUV with heated leather seats. Gas prices aren’t my concern, it’s poor people and lower middles cluttering up the roads that cause me problems. If this forces more of them onto buses and out of my way, I say yes!

23

@13: OK. But that doesn't mean all rural commuting can ONLY be done by individual gas-power vehicles. There's no reason rural motor vehicles can't be electric or at least hybrids. There's no reason there can't be biofuel-powered vehicles in rural areas. There's no reason why there can't be increased rural rail service, or even high-speed cattle trains. And in any case, the necessity of rural commuting is not an argument against I-1631.

24

@22: An Intrigingly diabolical motivation for supporting the greater good, but hey, we'll take what we can get.

25

@12: Frank Blethen will always be too cheap for people who can't drive?

26

Why is Seattle’s and the strangers solution to all our problems more taxes? For a supposedly progressive forward thinking media outlet. You sure don’t have any new ideas...

27

@22: Fuck you, your capitalist ilk, and the cheap curs that bore you.

28

It sucks that the choices presented to us on climate change are: do nothing (the republican strategy) or vote for this poorly designed initiative that does the right thing the wrong way.

Would it have been so hard to create a progressive tax? Do a tax on new vehicle sales based on miles per gallon. 0% for electric cars, 25% on cars getting less than 10mpg. Grandfather in older cars so that someone driving a 10-year old Sentra doesn’t get hammered.

No, instead we have a flat tax on gasoline, which treats the gas in the 10-year old Sentra being driven by someone who can’t afford to upgrade the same as the gas in tech bro’s S4. Sure, he’ll pay even more in absolute terms, but he won’t even notice the change.

And then maybe if the persom driving the Sentra figures which new assistance program they qualify for, they’ll come out even; but we just threw another hurdle in their way.

It’s stupid and impractical, but it’s either that or nothing, because our retail politics can’t do any better than these two shitty options, I guess.

29

The people WHO REALLY want to stop global warming should go to India, China and other European countries and pass stricter pollution laws there. That is where you'll see a bigger impact on the environment.

30

@29 - Uh, India and China aren’t European countries, but Europe has been regulating carbon far more effectively than we have for decades. And we have no moral standing at this point to say shit to India or China, whose response will be: “Oh, hey, country that’s been driving V8 Cadillacs out of the garages of your 5,000 square-foot mini mansions for a half century, yes, please let us tighten our belts while you sit on your literally fat asses and fart Big Mac-fueled methane in our faces. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you!”

31

The Stranger cares so much about the poor they've supported every single regressive tax on the ballot for the past decade. They're gonna love the po's to death.

32

"Would it have been so hard to create a progressive tax? Do a tax on new vehicle sales based on miles per gallon. 0% for electric cars, 25% on cars getting less than 10mpg. Grandfather in older cars so that someone driving a 10-year old Sentra doesn’t get hammered."

Brilliant, plus at least 1000 bureaucrats to a administer your insanely complex tax and loophole system. Hell, maybe get inspectors to check peoples' cars at night.

Win win!

33

"Do a tax on new vehicle sales based on miles per gallon. 0% for electric cars, 25% on cars getting less than 10mpg"

By the way genius, that's what a flat gas tax does. But don't worry, you're still smart enough for a gub'ment job though.

34

I commented already on bad choice for an article image. The one in this article is a Nuclear electric generating plant with steam rising from cooling towers. I know it looks like evil smoke with with the sun shining through what seems like car pollution and back lighting the steam creating a dramatic look of dark brown smoke but it is steam. Yes steam from other factories can contribute to Carbon levels but using an image of steam from a Nuclear plant for an article that goes on about cars and petroleum seems odd.
Finding an image of that much actual smoke billowing from a factory or plant is quite difficult but finding a simple image of a car exhaust would be more true to the article. But probably not as dramatic. Maybe car exhaust with a basket of kittens next to it.

35

Sigh...

The income tax on high earners was designed to fail. It was unconstitutional for violating state law and for targeting a minority of wealthy people no matter how much you hate them for being successful. The entire fight was just that. A fight, to rile the masses and move toward a state income tax. Which wouldn't be such a bad thing if it was revenue neutral and dramatically reduced our regressive sales tax system. Alas, liberals have forgotten how to negotiate and what the meaning of revenue neutral.
The Head Tax was the single dumbest tax ever devised. You may want to help the homeless and you may want to punish Amazon. But making Dick's Burgers pay the same dollar amount per employee they hire as Amazon... is insane. The tax would hurt small businesses while the big boys would barely feel it. It was more about punishing big business than helping the homeless, and it couldn't even do that right.
I-1631 won't reduce carbon emissions. British Columbia's real carbon tax didn't even achieve that. It won't create new clean energy. It won't hurt the oil companies... but it will increase the price of gas for the poor in Washington by 15-50 cents a gallon. It is literally the most regressive tax one could concoct. And for what? A panel of "experts" who will tell us later what we are going to get...

Seriously, who comes up with this stuff.

36

Great column! This initiative has been endorsed by over 400 organizations, plus AL GORE (!!); and even Jane Fonda came to lend her name and support by doorbelling in north Seattle one day. It is also supported by the Union of Concerned Scientists. But the Seattle Times knows better....Yeah, right. The Times wants solutions that are totally pie-in-the sky and not politically possible while undermining the one right in front of us. We have to start somewhere, and I-1631 is a fine place to start.
And THEN they endorse Dino. Wow, how retrograde can the local paper get, plus being out of step with Seattle's citizens?

37

To Sir Walter Raleigh: The initiative will NOT increase gas prices 15 cents/gallon. It is estimated to cost each household $10/month.

38

No one in Seattle really cares about poor people. Just look around. We have a million social service agencies, most of which are run by bible-addled nitwits, and the SHA, but mostly we just let them fend for themselves.

39

@33 - 25% of a $60,000 vehicle = $15,000. $15,000 divided by $.14/gallon = 107,000 gallons of gas.

Still think it does the same thing?

Fuck off, genius.

40

@19 - That dinosaur is the main source of real reporting in the Puget Sound. Half of Slog posts are basically: “Here’s what I think about something important the Seattle Times reported on.” That’s no accident.

Fuck the Bletherenz, but they make their money by publishing the work of real reporters reporting real shit. If that gives them a platform for their bizarrely contradictory nonesnsical editorials, small price to pay really. Save your disgust for Sinclair, which forces their reporters to read the editorials aloud.

41

@30 seanat: Thank you, bless you, and bravo. I have nothing more to add.
@38 Catalina Vel-DuRay: I know, right? sigh I wish that weren't so.

42

@40 It is a pretty high rice really, and not one we have to pay. KUOW does a great job presenting a wide variety of local news and a variety of voices (as infuriating as it is to give airtime to someone who believes the solution to climate change is waiting for exactly the bill he describes, I still think it's worth having a discussion). Listening to, reading, and otherwise supporting public media is a great way to say 'thanks, but no thanks' to both the Seattle Times and KIRO.

43

An idiot, a stoner and the lost and found walk into a bar...

44

@29 "India, China and other European countries" - comment made my day. Thx.

45

@37- Those are not mutually exclusive. A $.15 tax on gas, assuming that someone drives 1000 miles/month at 20 miles/gallon = 50 gallons/month amounts to $7.50. Allowing a bit more for increased electric rates brings you to the $10 ballpark. For my money, I am afraid that the $7.50/month increase will not be enough to make people change their driving habits.

46

Let's ask UW Climate Expert Cliff Mass:

"(1) The initiative doesn’t say how to spend the billions the proposed new tax would generate, thus creating a political feeding frenzy.

(2) It would create a clumsy bureaucracy with only one elected official to direct tax investments.

(3) Special interests get big bucks, such as directing 10 percent of tax dollars to Indian tribes, while exempting tribes from paying the tax.

(4) The tax would not reduce carbon. Gas at the pump would increase about 14 cents per gallon in the first year, within normal market price fluctuations and not enough to change people’s behavior, which is the whole point of the tax.

(5) In sharp contrast to recently failed Initiative 732, I-1631 taxes would not be revenue-neutral and giant petroleum corporations would pass price increases directly to consumers.

Carbon pollution deserves our most serious efforts. I-1631 would create serious problems while solving none."


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