Search Results for: seattle wage

From the Seattle Times:

Seattle and King County could make the homelessness services system run like a fined-tuned machine, but without dramatically increasing the region’s supply of affordable housing options, solving the region’s homelessness crisis is all but impossible.

That is the central finding of a new, independent analysis of King County’s homelessness crisis by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which produced the report pro bono for the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

The report estimates King County is short up to 14,000 units affordable for people experiencing homelessness. Because of the gap, and the rising numbers of people who are homeless, annual spending — public, private or both — needs to double to $410 million if the problem is to be solved, according to the report.

And that’s only if the annual rate of people becoming homeless doesn’t increase.

“This is a supply-side issue,” said Dilip Wagle, a McKinsey senior partner based in Seattle. “We are just running out of affordable housing units.”

So the great minds behind Enron have come up with a system in which they will offer free housing in one of the world’s most desirable places to live. World and U.S. population will continue to boom, yet the $410 million per year in free housing isn’t likely to be oversubscribed:

Some corporations keen to alleviate homelessness in their local communities already fund emergency shelters. These are crucial. But they are not a long-term solution. Affordable housing is.

The McKinsey geniuses don’t answer the question that always strikes me when I’m in Seattle and I see homeless folks camping in the cold rain: Since these unfortunate souls don’t have a job or a house, why don’t most of them move to Santa Monica and camp in a warm dry climate?

(I don’t think the answer is “Washington State provides more generous welfare benefits than California”; CATO Institute’s Work v. Welfare analysis in 2013 found that collecting welfare in California was worth 96.5 percent of the state’s median salary while in Washington State it was worth only 72 percent (see Table 4).)

Seattle does have a new “head tax” on companies such as Amazon that use office buildings within the city limits. This is supposed to be what funds the new construction of apartments for the currently “homeless.” Most of heads being taxed, presumably, commute in from the suburbs because they can’t afford prime urban residential real estate in a walkable neighborhood. This commute will have them spending 1-2 hours every day in some of the nation’s worst traffic. By contrast, people who haven’t worked for years or decades will be living in the desirable central city. Once this situation is fully developed, I would love to see the commuting suburban wage slaves call themselves smarter than the newly-housed urban “homeless”!

Friends on Facebook are discussing “A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news for liberals” (Washington Post). Of course, like most things in the U.S. media, this starts off with a lie (the minimum wage in Seattle is $13/hour, not $15/hour). But let’s look at the rest of the article…

With labor more expensive, employers are getting rid of their lowest-skilled employees (certainly those for whom the market wage would be less than the minimum legal wage). Okay, that’s Econ 101. But is it “bad news for liberals”?

Suppose that the goal of a liberal is to live in a city without too many unsightly low-skilled people (see Tyler Cowen explains why rich white Democrats freely express love for immigrants and people of color for how liberals already have segregated themselves away from dark-skinned Americans and immigrants).

Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to live in his or her city? Probably not. Can the liberal make it illegal for anyone without a college degree to work in his or her city? Sure! That’s the minimum wage.

With a minimum wage much higher than other parts of the U.S., a city can limit its residents to (1) folks with high-paying jobs or pensions, (2) Official Poor who are already established in public housing and other welfare systems (mostly funded by state and federal taxpayers), and (3) divorce or custody plaintiffs who collected a free house, child support, and/or alimony through the family law system.

Low-skilled immigrants don’t fit into any of these categories. By definition they can’t have high-paying jobs (since they are “low-skill”). They would have to survive in the city for 5-10 years on a waiting list before they get their free apartment and they don’t have sufficient family connections to do this. Immigrants are unaware that having sex with a high-income American will yield the spending power of a medium-to-upper-income American and/or they have religious or social scruples that prevent them from having sex with an already-married dermatologist.

What do readers think? Instead of building a wall or aggressively preventing 8 low-wage people from sharing a 2-bedroom apartment, a city simply puts in a high minimum wage. With no jobs available for undesirable/Deplorable people, the city is left with the sought-after “creative class” plus some folks on Welfare who vote for Democrats and make the city wealthier by pulling in Federal Medicaid, food stamp, and housing dollars. If you’re a Democrat on the city council or in the mayor’s office, what’s not to like about that outcome?

Related:

• Can Puerto Rico be a laboratory for the future of the rest of the U.S.? (Puerto Rico already has the equivalent of a $15/hour minimum wage)

Update: A Facebooker commented on the above with “To illustrate that point, Singapore enforces a minimum wage on immigrant labor, but not on its own citizens. Does anybody believe a government would pass a law to treat foreigners worse than its own citizens?” (this post from a law firm suggests that it the minimum wage is about $2,660 per month)

On a recent Nor’easter-tinged odyssey from Boston to Seattle, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and back home to Boston, I took quite a few Uber rides. All of my drivers across three cities were immigrants from either Ethiopia or Somalia, with two exceptions: a Bangladeshi and a while male in his 30s.

In Dallas there is a lot of Presidential history, starting with the unfortunate memory of JFK being shot (by a guy who fired just three bullets; not like our modern AR-15 sprayers) and ending with the George W. Bush Presidential Library. I asked one of the Ethiopian drivers what he thought of President Trump: “Obama was in office for 8 years and didn’t change anything, so now I don’t pay attention to who is president or what he says.” What about on immigration? “Trump is not bothering me.”

In Seattle there is an infinite supply of virtue. People there say that they will do anything for homeless people… except provide homes for them. So the streets are packed with folks who are camping in the cold rain. (Contrast to Dallas, where nobody talks about their love for the vulnerable, yet the conservative Christians have set up “missions” that provide services, including beds, for the homeless. I didn’t see anyone sleeping in the street.) One of my Uber drivers, however, was that white male native-born American. He lived in Marysville, just north of the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington. He had voted for Trump because he thought that (a) welfare programs were enabling Americans to spend their lives as drug addicts, and (b) immigrants were reducing the wages of people such as himself (MIT has been looking into the net income of Uber/Lyft drivers and, if their initial number of $3.37 per hour is correct, the availability of Ethiopian and Somalian labor has indeed had a negative effect on this Deplorable!).

Separately, the Seattle airport requires drivers to show up in an electric or a hybrid car. In practice that means every Uber on an airport run is a Prius. I was shocked at how noisy the Prius is on the highway (my airport trips were at midnight and at 6:00 am and therefore we were able to exceed the usual 5 mph practical speed limit on I-5).

Related:

• Harvard prof George Borgas’s analysis of how immigration affects low-wage Americans

Since I was the last person on Planet Earth to see Black Panther, I’m not going to worry about spoilers.

The king dies. The rest of the movie was about people fighting over succession. Why? There was a perfectly functional queen. Why couldn’t she rule for 20 years? Why was a successor required?

Maybe the answer is “the queen didn’t like to fight all the time.” But Wakanda never sought to fight wars with other countries and had all kinds of advanced defensive technology that other countries couldn’t match. Why would Wakanda have needed a leader more aggressive than TV’s Mr. Rogers?

What about the ending? The wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet picks a project that a retiring city politician might undertake? How was it different from Derek Zoolander’s School for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Want to Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too?

Before you answer “It’s a made-up movie, stupid,” consider that my Facebook friends and the media have assured me that this movie offers important Black History Month lessons.

[I saw the movie at Seattle’s Cinerama, restored at tremendous cost by Paul Allen. The $15/hour minimum wage seems to mean that they can’t afford to hire people to clean up popcorn in between shows. Seattle shows that a fair world is a dirty world? (Separately, the city was packed with panhandlers sleeping on the sidewalks. Are there city workers who ensure that they collect at least $15/hour for the hours during which they are actively asking for money?)]

For many of the people expressing opinions regarding how many immigrants the U.S. should accept, the immigrants themselves are an abstract quantity. Unable to afford to live in Sanctimony Cities, immigrants themselves are invisible to the typical Hillary supporter (see Tyler Cowen explains why rich white Democrats freely express love for immigrants and people of color). The New York Times gives us some of the texture of what is being debated with “When Syria Came to Fresno: Refugees Test Limits of Outstretched Hand” Here’s my comment on the article:

Nasser Alobeid, who worked as a security guard in Syria, is still jobless, and he and his wife, Neveen Alassad, get by with a $1,100 monthly welfare check, food stamps … “Nasser doesn’t speak English,” Ms. Alassad, a mother of five, said in broken English while Syrian children poured into a concrete courtyard to play.

The good news for this family of 7 is that, assuming that demand from employers for non-English-fluent workers picks up, Mr. Alobeid will earn at least $15/hour under California’s new minimum wage law if he is able to find a job in the year 2023.

Other reader comments are interesting.

[Michael Cook from Tampa, FL] Why does Fresno as “the largest city in the agricultural belt” not have jobs available? This goes against everything we are hearing about “crops rotting in the fields”, due to the labor shortage.

How about the inter-generational conflict?

[Matt from Algonquin] American kids who go to public schools are the ones who sacrifice the most. Almost every public school now has translators. If they aren’t on staff, they are on call. For a school in the community that this article is about, you probably have Arabic translators and Hispanic translators. What does this mean to a English speaking American kid? They don’t get the attention that they deserve.. the teachers have to ‘teach down’ and e.g., use their Google translating software to communicate with the non-English speakers.

[response from GRH in “New England”] And, conveniently, the children of the politicians and the elite of both parties, be it the Clintons or the Bushes; Justice Merrick Garland or Justice John Roberts, choose to “opt-out” of the laws and rules they impose on everyone else and instead send their children to the most elite private schools…

A black woman, one of the victims that New York Times readers purport to seek to assist, takes a tougher line than Donald Trump:

[Lois from Seattle] I’m black and my family was brought here as slaves 7 generations ago! That said, just because a country takes pride on consisting of CITIZENS from the globe, it doesn’t justify an endless stream of entrance for everyone at any time!

At this point America is inundated with people from all over the world. That would be okay if they were all legal, spoke English, could support themselves w/o resorting to welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, free breakfast/lunch, education, medical and social services for their children!!!

What’s in this for us, the American citizen who foots the bill?

I thought the rules with regard to “refugees” was for them to move to the nearest safe haven/country! Syrians have moved a world and culture away from their native land! They have crossed over many Arabic and predominant Muslim countries…yet, like others of their kind, they come expecting to be fully accommodated even though it would be unthinkable for them to do same for you in their country!

There should be an immigration moratorium! NO ONE allowed in for at least a year until we sort things out! … After all, we OWE them (immigrants/refugees) nothing!

Her white superiors set her straight:

[Judith Rael from Redondo Beach, CA] Lois, there is plenty of room and funding to help people like the Syrians. … Open your heart, teach your family how to give and care for the persecuted. You will be so much happier.

(“Plenty of funding”? Perhaps Ms. Rael means that if we were able to borrow $20 trillion before we started getting serious about bringing in Syrians we can easily borrow some more? And how do we know that this person speaking truth to a black woman is white? Google Image search suggests that people with a last name of “Rael” are generally white.)

There are a bunch more of these priceless exchanges. People with Hispanic names argue for restrictions on immigration while those with non-Hispanic names point out and correct their thoughtcrime.

From a careful reader of the Times:

[Const from NY] A few days ago, you had a story about how hard it is for many Californians to find affordable housing. Here, we have a story about people from Syria being given housing in that same state.

Canadians fight (politely):

[science prof from “Canada”] Private sponsorship by individuals or groups, as done in Canada, allows refugees to rapidly integrate and become part of the wider community beyond the local group of the same ethnicity.

[Danielle Davidson from “Canada and USA”] Canada has enormous problems with Muslim Syrians. Too many are on welfare. Even the NYT had an article about it. They don’t adapt, and their frustrations will affect their children. We will see too soon how that turns out. In the meantime, As a woman, I find their culture outrageous. They are prejudiced against women, gays, Christians. Why do we have to accept so many people that don’t like the American way of life.

Modest proposals from Trump country:

[Hank Batts from Lexington, Kentucky] Send a few thousand of these folks to the upper west side of Manhattan and another few thousand to Brookline, Mass. The people there just LOVE diversity.

[Jon] The frontier closed in 1898. We are the third most populous country in the world. We have plenty of people. We have no need to import people to fill up an empty country and instead should be concentrating on creating a vibrant economy for Americans not burdening our economy with millions more dependents and low-skill workers.

From a resident of a West Coast city that is way too expensive for a non-English-speaking immigrant and that has long waiting lists for free public housing:

[Blue from Seattle] If any Syrian refugees are reading this, I would like to say welcome to the United States. I am glad you are here. To the [Syrian] man [in the NYT photo] with the four daughters–your children are wonderful.

[response from a “blue state” reader] Good, please list your address so we can send them all over to your house. As a citizen who does physical labor at 58 years old, I resent my wages being taxed so we can give these people welfare, food stamps, free medical, and housing allowance.

Not everyone in Hillary country has been properly educated:

[Olivia from NYC] We need a moratorium on all refugees and all immigrants. This country cannot accept everyone in the world who can’t make it in their own country. Welfare, food stamps, section 8 housing, free health care and education for their many children at the cost to American tax payers! … How is it that liberals don’t protest the repression of these women?? These people with their 7th century mentality don’t belong in this country. Build the wall. Close the door. Deport.

[Artful Rabbit from Silver Spring [Maryland]] They have no willingness to manage the size of their families. … You are living hand-to-mouth in a war torn country, threatened by ISIS or now you are a refugee in a host country and the thinking is, yep, good time to put another one in the oven? I suppose as long as there are other people willing to pay for the needs of their huge family, why not.

How about the good citizens of Fresno themselves?

[Ryan from Fresno] Please hold all applause until the movie has ended. As a community we did not vote for this. It has been shoved down our throats by a few religious organizations. Yes these are human beings and I have a heart, but we need to be logical about this. [translation: “I don’t have a heart.”] … We have high energy cost, high unemployment, lower wages that do not match the inflated cost for housing and rent, countless gangs and homeless encampments all along the 99. … I would have much rather opened my pocket book and helped them resettle in a predominately Muslim country, where they share the same culture, language and religious values. …  we have experienced this before with the Southeast Asian and Central American refugees. Yes, there are some that become model citizens and introduce culture into our society, but they don’t tell you the other side, the ones who start gangs and form culturally isolated ghettos.

Readers: Do you agree with me that we need more of this kind of reporting? Bringing in Airbus A380-loads of immigrants from the other side of the planet is a relatively new concept. Shouldn’t we be curious about how it works out for the typical immigrant? Also, what do we make of the fact that the NYT readers, a fairly homogeneous group politically, are fighting so much in response to this article? If the above Canadian “science prof” is correct and it takes a village to welcome an immigrant, what happens when roughly half of the Hillary supporters seem to wish that the immigrant had never showed up? Could this be the issue that prevents Democrats from uniting to oppose the Trumpenfuhrer?

Related:

• “Getting deported was the best thing that ever happened to me” (CNN Money); the texture of life moving in the opposite direction.

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s won both “A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015” and “A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015”. There is a lot of great material in the book, though it would be stronger if the author let the material speak for itself rather than saying, essentially, “it is bad when innocent people spend 100 percent of their assets on a criminal lawsuit defense, are imprisoned for five years, and finally released.”

Much of the book concerns a California case:

In the late summer of 1983, residents of a beachfront city in southwestern Los Angeles began to suspect that their children were in danger. In August, the mother of a child who had attended the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach told the police that her two-year-old son had been molested by one of his teachers. In September, police arrested the accused teacher and charged him with three counts of child abuse.

More than seven years of criminal prosecution was kicked off by the reports of a single woman:

In March of the previous year a woman named Judy Johnson had called the McMartin Preschool to ask about enrolling her two-and-a-half year-old son. She was told the school could not accept any new children for the time being, but Johnson was determined and a little desperate. She had recently separated from her tax auditor husband, leaving her to look after the boy full-time. On March 15 she put a note in her son’s lunch bag explaining who he was, dropped him off at McMartin, and drove away. Peggy McMartin hadn’t previously known Judy Johnson or her son, but she decided the woman must have been under enormous stress to do something so rash. She let the boy stay.

Things briefly calmed down for Judy Johnson. She and her husband made their separation permanent, and she also found a job in retail. In the summer of 1983, however, Johnson became concerned about the condition of her son’s anus. One day in July she took Matthew to the emergency room and told the doctor that her son’s anus was itchy. The doctor wasn’t terribly concerned. Judy and Matthew went home. A month passed. On August 12 Johnson called the Manhattan Beach police. Her concerns were the same as in July, except that now she suspected criminal rather than strictly medical causes. She told police detective Jane Hoag that when she had sent Matthew to school the previous morning his anus had been normal, but when she had brought him home at the end of the day it had been red. There was only one male teacher, Ray Buckey, working at McMartin. Johnson said that Matthew had recently begun to play doctor, running around pretending to give people shots or check them for fever, which Johnson found very alarming. Repeated questioning finally induced Matthew to reveal that he had learned this behavior from Ray Buckey. Johnson believed the “thermometer” had been Ray’s penis. Detective Hoag advised Johnson to take her son to the hospital, and at 8:30 that evening, after examining Matthew at the Kaiser Hospital in Harbor City, a doctor filed a suspected child abuse report. Over the weekend Johnson further questioned her son about what had happened at school, and then on Tuesday she called the police to provide Detective Hoag with two names; Johnson said Matthew had identified these other children as victims of Ray Buckey. On Wednesday Matthew was examined again, this time by two pediatricians at the Marion Davies Children’s Clinic at UCLA. His examining physicians filed a second suspected child abuse report.

Around this time, Judy Johnson began to reach out to other parents whose children attended McMartin. She called the parents of one of the children Matthew had named to inform them of her suspicions. The parents talked to their son and then called Judy back: the boy didn’t like Ray, but he denied having been molested at preschool.

Detective Hoag, by this point, was making inquiries of her own. In the space of two days she called the parents of five other McMartin children, all of whom reported back that nothing had happened to their children. None of this eased Judy’s mind. She was disturbed by an incident in which Matthew had wandered into her room while Johnson was partially undressed. The boy looked at his mother and said, “Matthew wear bra.” Johnson told the police that Matthew had eventually revealed that Ray made him wear women’s underwear at McMartin.

On the afternoon of November 30, Judy Johnson called Detective Hoag again. She said Matthew had revealed more details of his abuse and that McMartin teachers other than Ray had been involved. Babette Spitler, Johnson said, made Matthew vomit by stepping on his stomach, and there was a stranger, an old woman, who came to the school and held Matthew’s feet down while he was sodomized. Matthew had also been forced to perform oral sex on Peggy McMartin Buckey, the school’s administrator. According to Detective Hoag’s report on the call, Matthew also told his mother about “being taken to some type of a ranch far away where there were horses and he rode naked.” Ray took pills. Ray gave himself a shot. Ray killed a dog and put a cat “in hot water.”

As the litigation wore on, the woman kept up her reports:

“I don’t want to hear any more ‘no’s,’” [investigator Astrid Heger] told one girl who had refused to disclose. “Every little boy and girl in the whole school got touched like that.” By this point investigators believed that almost every teacher in the school had been involved as well. Judy Johnson was still making regular calls to the Manhattan Beach police, reporting what she claimed were allegations made by her son, Matthew, who was now three years old. The police reports that document these calls, however, suggest either that Judy was dutifully and neutrally reporting her son’s increasingly surreal allegations, or that her mental health was deteriorating: Matthew feels that he left L.A. International in an airplane and flew to Palm Springs. . . . Matthew went to the armory. . . . The goatman was there . . . it was a ritual type atmosphere. . . . At the church, Peggy drilled a child under the arms, armpits. Atmosphere was that of magic arts. Ray flew in the air. . . . Peggy, Babs and Betty were all dressed up as witches. The person who buried Matthew is Miss Betty. There were no holes in the coffin. Babs went with him on a train with an older girl where he was hurt by men in suits. Ray waved goodbye. . . . Peggy gave Matthew an enema. . . . Staples were put in Matthew’s ears, his nipples, and his tongue. Babs put scissors in his eyes. . . . She chopped up animals. . . . Matthew was hurt by a lion. An elephant played . . . a goat climbed up higher and higher and higher, then a bad man threw it down the stairs. . . . Lots of candles were there, they were all black. . . . Ray pricked his right pointer finger . . . put it in the goat’s anus. . . . Old grandma played the piano . . . head was chopped off and the brains were burned. . . . Peggy had a scissors in the church and she cut Matthew’s hair. Matthew had to drink the baby’s blood. Ray wanted Matthew’s spit. The Manhattan Beach police do not seem to have dismissed these claims entirely. They may not have gone looking specifically for goat men or decapitated infants, but by March detectives believed that the case involved not only teachers at McMartin but other adults in the area as well, and they executed search warrants on eleven residences across the South Bay.

Prosecutors were not dissuaded by apparent credibility problems with their first witness:

Reading [Judy] Johnson’s FBI statements, it is apparent that the investigation was taking a toll on her mental health. She said her other child had also been molested, years earlier, at a different preschool.

The italicized sentence is an example of where the book could have used an editor applying the mantra “show, don’t tell.” Judy Johnson’s behavior and statements should let a reader judge for himself or herself the state of her mental health.

But those effects may have been most pronounced in the case of Judy Johnson, who ultimately found the investigation too much to bear. As her mind deteriorated over the course of 1985, so did her drinking increase. She once threatened a relative on her doorstep with a shotgun, after which she was hospitalized for a voluntary psychiatric evaluation.

Two weeks after she testified, Judy called to report that her home had been burglarized. “Nothing was taken,” Stevens remembered her saying. “However, Matthew was sodomized.”61 Judy said the perpetrator was an AWOL Marine who had removed a window screen from outside and then entered the house. Judy didn’t see the man commit the act, but Matthew’s butt was red—the police needed to come immediately.

He recounted one episode with Judy Johnson in especially vivid detail. At some point in the second half of 1984, Stevens said, Judy Johnson called from Seattle. She was in the hospital, and she didn’t know why. “All she knows,” Stevens said, “is that she was in her Volkswagen bus, and she was with the kids, and, ah, she was driving up to Seattle, and, ah, that they were being followed by a car with the Marine in it.” Then Stevens didn’t hear from her for a few days, and then she called to say that actually she had not been at the hospital—she had been staying with friends the whole time. On the way back to Los Angeles she called Stevens again from somewhere in Northern California and said the Marine was following her. Would Stevens please send an investigator to help? “Judy, you know, why don’t you just get back to Los Angeles,” Stevens told her, and she did. Then she called again to report that her son had been molested by Roberta Weintraub, a member of the Los Angeles County school board. “Matthew saw her on TV,” Stevens remembered Johnson saying, “and said, ‘Mom, she molested me.’” Stevens didn’t explain exactly what it was that set this particular phone call apart from all the others, but it made Johnson’s mental condition real to him for the first time. “All of a sudden,” he told the Manns, “I just wanted to stuff a sock in her mouth.”64 The conversations between Glenn Stevens and Abby and Myra Mann wrapped up by midsummer.

Were prosecutors concerned by this key witness?

“It slipped through everybody’s analytical process,” [Deputy District Attorney Glenn] Stevens [one of the original prosecutors] said, “to sit down and wonder exactly what kind of woman this is and what is going on here.” The Manns asked Stevens whether he and [lead prosecutor] Lael Rubin ever discussed Judy Johnson’s mental health. “Sure, we got a good laugh about Judy,” Stevens said, but he claimed they never discussed any of what Judy’s mental decline meant for the case, the McMartin children, or the defendants.

The prosecution outlasted the key witness:

Half a year later, on the same day a judge denied another of Ray Buckey’s bail requests, police entered Judy Johnson’s home and found her body in the bedroom upstairs [contemporaneous NYT story]. She died of internal hemorrhaging—friends said she had suffered from ulcers for years, and these may have been exacerbated by her alcoholism, which, in the last months of her life, became severe. “She made the McMartin case,” said Bob Currie, one of Johnson’s close friends. When they found her there was food in the cupboard, an empty bottle of rum in the trash, and a subpoena from [defense lawyer] Danny Davis