From the NYT (I boycott quoting from the Seattle Times):
Mayor Ed Murray presented on Thursday what he described as an imperfect but workable plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage and one of the highest anywhere in the nation, through a series of complex and phased-in stages. Just as crucially, he said, the plan has broad political support, with a coalition of labor and business groups ready to push hard for it at the City Council, starting with the first hearings next week.
But the plan, which in many other cities might be seen as a liberal Democratic agenda at the frontier of social and economic engineering, was immediately attacked not from the mayor’s right, but from his left.
Kshama Sawant, a Socialist Alternative Party member who was elected to the Seattle City Council last year on a single-minded drive to raise wages, said the plan had been “watered down” by business interests on the mayor’s 24-member committee on income inequality, of which she was also a member.
It's not a done deal yet, but it probably will go forward. I worry about unintended consequences, but I endorse this primitive, but at least politically possible, strategy to help the working poor. Sawant doesn't like it, but she's done her job by pressuring from the left. She's a catalyst, not a policymaker. Such a catalyst is what's missing on the national level.
I think it's impressive that a fairly broad consensus within the business and labor community here in Seattle was developed. Hat tip to Ed Murray, for whom I did not vote.
Local is where it's at, if for no other reason than you have a better chance to know the people you are dealing with. When we send a representatives to Washington, she or he is an avatar, a virtual presence, playing a role in a political game whose rules have nothing to do with reality as people live it in the real, local world. Unfortunately the policies, or the lack of them, that flow from that national game have impacts on us in the real world--so the game must be played. But real life is lived on the local level.
I am wondering if we aren't evolving into, or have already become, a society in which the only meaningful kind of democracy is on the local level. I've argued that our democracy has become ceremonial on the national level, but it would actually be more highly functioning if that were true. Our democracy has become dysfunctional precisely because certain regions in the country can send deeply foolish and ignorant people to the national capital who insure that no consensus on practical ways to manage issues like climate change and even the immiseration of the working poor can be developed. It's hard to believe that this level of paralysis and dysfunction can continue indefinitely. We're talking 1850s levels of dysfunction here, and we all know how that turned out.
Perhaps it would be better if the country became a confederation of autonomous regional jurisdictions--the Deep South, the Pacific Coast, The Heartland, the Great Lakes, the Northeast, the Mountain West. Let each of these regions develop their own tax, healthcare, energy, economic, and regulation, etc. policies. Maybe Mark's ideas about social credit would have a shot in The Pacific Coast, if not in the Northeast. If it worked there, maybe other regions would follow.
Let Washington, D.C., become more like the U.N.--mainly about international relations--and let real decision making power devolve to regions that have a greater capacity for developing consensus and leadership on issues that most of its citizens can get behind. Let the Deep South and the other current Red States live with the consequences of its 19th century mentality without getting bailed out by the economic power of the Pacific Coast, the Northeast, and the Great Lakes. Twenty-first century reality will in due course force them to adjust because they'll have nobody to blame but themselves when that reality smashes them in the face.
Ok. Now you can tell me all the reasons why this wouldn't work.