Sara Nelson and "Good Governance"

Buckle up Buttercups!

When Seattle’s new Council President Sara Nelson decided to lay our her agenda in a recent Seattle Times op-ed, the Editorial Board gleefully obliged.

In this piece, as elsewhere, Nelson says she wants “good governance.” 

Conflicts of Interest and an Independent Press

But unfortunately, her foray into “good governance” starts with publishing this piece in a paper that pretends to have a real editorial board, rather than a PR team whose primary function is to cut taxes for Seattle Times owner Frank Blethen and his rich buddies.

Transparency and a press that holds politicians accountable are hallmarks of good governance. Getting the newspaper of record to feign neutrality but actually act as Nelson’s communications team is not. Nelson failed to disclose that at at her election party a few weeks ago, they toasted Seattle Times editorial board member Alex Fryer. Why did they toast him? For writing hatchet jobs against her political foes. Neither does the Editorial Board disclose that is has in the past refused to publish op-eds for other Seattle City Council Presidents.

Not exactly knocking it out of the park so far.

Still, you can’t blame Nelson for publishing an opinion piece when she can. The primary fault here lies with Frank Blethen and his lackeys’ lack of basic integrity.

But the irony that this is an op-ed about good governance from a politician and it is published by an editorial board that is actively colluding with that politician in a way that violates the basic ideals of an independent press is . . . a little much.

Ideology

But Nelson is just getting warmed up. She says her plan for good governance means the council can no longer be “ideologically driven.” She cites such ideology driven-ness as the reason “businesses are ceasing operations or leaving town.”

Never mind that employment is up almost 40,000 jobs since 2016, an era in which the council trended progressive. Never mind that the only major area of employment retrenchment in the last three years in Seattle was administrative jobs. These jobs were, according to Gene Balk (an actual reporter with actual integrity!) particularly likely to move outside the city due to remote work. Never mind that our share of tech workers is ever higher and now the highest in the country. Or that Seattle still has the most momentum for tech and other high skill job growth. Never mind that decades of research show that lower taxes on the rich do not grow the economy and instead only increase inequality. Neither do they drive millionaires to migrate, as local tech billionaire Nick Hanauer recently reminded us. And they have “no detectable impact on startup activity,” according to the Federal Reserve. 

An idealogue is someone who ignores evidence in favor of pet theories. Who again is the ideologue? How is embracing ideology and projecting your weaknesses onto others good governance? 

Now look, we do have business problems, particularly when it comes to downtown retail. But this is primarily driven by reduced foot traffic downtown as more residents work in their homes, plus high costs of commercial rent and street crime–not the taxes that drive Nelson’s backers. And Nelson and her ilk like to pretend that Seattle is the only expensive, tech heavy central city that has these problems–which is ridiculous. The Seattle City Council isn’t the primary source of those issues–a global pandemic that killed millions and market and structural forces are. We can and should address these–say, with a vacancy tax on empty storefronts to lower prices–but of course Sara’s commercial real estate bosses won’t allow for that. 

Expertise

And in terms of addressing the mayhem on our streets–we have clear evidence about how to do that too, but Sara is not interested in that evidence. As an example, when experts testified before council on what actually produces results when it comes to opiate addiction, Nelson put in airpods.

Good governance in action?

In a similar vein, Nelson also says she’ll focus on “faster progress on homelessness and public safety.” But she refuses to do what every expert says works related to homelessness and drugs. This includes her unwillingness to support funding for enough affordable housing to actually tackle homelessness. McKinsey, the world’s foremost business consultancy, laid out how to actually do it, but Nelson appears to be wedded to the same kind of magical math that has failed us again and again. In fact, Nelson implies elsewhere that massive cuts are on the horizon.

Special Interests for Me but not for Thee

Nelson continues, “Under my leadership, this council won’t externalize our policymaking authority . . . Instead of catering to special interests, we’ll focus on mission-critical work that’s responsive to our constituents.”

Shortly thereafter she cites a poll from the richest and probably most powerful special interest group in the region, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, without a hint of irony.

And mere days later, the lobbyist whose life-partner runs that same Chamber–and who organized and drove much of the PAC fundraising that bought the Seattle election–told the big money donors that buying the election earned them the right to tell the council what to do. Hypocrisy and buying votes are not good governance.

Economic Illiteracy

Last, she mentions “getting our fiscal house in order.” She claims that “we must break our reliance on new revenue (taxes) to pay our bills. That’s an unsustainable fix for the wrong problem. The real problem is spending.” Then she cites the fact that spending has increased faster than inflation and population. 

These are sophomoric statistics when it comes to how government works, and it is economic malpractice that in her years on the council she hasn’t bothered to learn this. All labor and land intensive industries–both public and private, have higher cost inflation than the average inflation rate–because you can’t automate people (at least not yet, anyway) and the amount of land can’t increase.

It’s pretty basic for government economists that the way to measure spending and whether it is sustainable is revenue as a percentage of the economy. Imagine get a big raise or a new job and over a few years you income doubles but you buy a new house and your kids start daycare and your spending increases 70%. Let’s say you have a financial planner who says, “your spending increase is financially unsustainable.” You ask why he thinks so and he says, “the number of people in you family didn’t go up 70%. Inflation isn’t up 70%. So you can’t afford it.” He’s your financial planner, remember—so he knows how much your income has gone up. You’d fire him for being financially illiterate. Watch out, though—he might run for office.

And guess what folks, according to Dick Conway, one of the leading local empirical economists (that’s an economist that measures stuff), spending as a share of our economy has gone down in Washington and Seattle over the last ten years! Usually, when economies get richer they choose to be more generous. We got richer, and a touch less generous. 

But Sara Nelson won’t be happy until we resurrect tea party economics and the ghost of former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan has hacked apart basic services for all the undeserving poor. 

So, just in her op-ed about good governance, we’ve got conflicts of interest, cronyist favoritism, disdain for expertise, dishonesty and basic economic and policy illiteracy. 

And it’s still January. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride!