I was going to write a takedown of the No Campaign’s $107 Billion figure, but Erica C. Barnett already did one. I’d just like to make two more points about their argument that Proposition 1 will cost $60,000 per family.
1. The analysis mixes 2009 dollars and 2053 dollars.
Thanks to forty-five years of inflation, a dollar won’t be worth nearly as much in 2053 as it is now. Prices and wages will go up accordingly, but all the taxes they quote are lumped together as if they had the same value, as if voters have any inherent sense of how much a dollar will be worth in 2053. They might as well have used Mexican Pesos or Turkish Lira!
Given that the sales tax increase in 0.5% of retail spending, a family would have to spend $12 million to pay $60,000 in taxes. That’s not $12 million of income — that’s spending on taxable items inside the Sound Transit district. You’d have to be earning substantially more than that to blow $12 million in the stores, after housing costs, income taxes, groceries, purchased services, and things bought online or outside the region.
2. The analysis counts taxes that already exist and won’t be affected by Proposition 1.
When voters improved the first “Sound Move” package in 1996, the region sold bonds backed by the tax revenues collected. Those bonds are currently authorized by law, and can’t even be repealed until the last bonds are retired in approximately 2038. This will remain the case whether or not Proposition 1 passes.
However, the No campaign’s analysis included Sound Move taxes in its calculation. Therefore, by their own analysis they’ve overestimated the impact of voting YES on Prop. 1 by $52 billion.
Hi Martin. Good breakdown, as I have come to expect from this blog. I get the arguments, and as a wonky, public policy professional, I can easily process this type of information. Unfortunately, as we have seen in recent national campaign politics, this type of substantive analysis does not register with “regular” voters. It’s eyeglaze stuff to the so-called “low info” voter.
So the question is, how do you assert on behalf of the Yes campaign, “Look folks, these people are willing to (essentially) lie to get you to vote against this thing and it’s not nearly as expensive as they say it is!”?
david
By pointing out the alternative: $18bn+ out of state pockets, millions from puget sound pockets to fund projects all over the state that will do little to nothing and will cripple the eastside’s express bus service at a time Sims is contemplating jacking up prices.
Rossi’s plan is going to get legs and it’s not going to stand around waiting for him to get elected.
I think the environmental slant is perfect. “Do you think lies are worth abandoning our air quality? Do you want to be truly green?” etc.
Reminds me of one of my favorite urban architecture quotes:
“My latest strategy has been to show a picture of an old factory with five smokestacks belching out black smoke. I then ask my audience to imagine a situation in which there exists some legal loophole that allows us to heat and power our church facility by employing the device show in this picture. This setup would save us thousands of dollars in heating and power bills every year. . . . They invariably agree that we would never do this–even if we were permitted to–because of the pollution, the ugliness, and the smell. We wouldn’t want this kind of environment for ourselves, and we wouldn’t want to inflict it upon our neighbors. Why, then, is it so often considered extraneous to hire a competent architect or to use quality materials?” –Sidewalks in the Kingdom by Eric O Jacobsen, p. 114
And an interesting point. It wouldn’t be $18bn if you’re comparing it to WSDOT. That’s year of expenditure dollars for 15 years – you’re really looking at only about $10b in today’s dollars for the construction costs. Consider that even if Rossi’s plan was equivalent, you’d be spending twice as much.
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Even the ST official numbers are a mixture of 2008-ish dollars and 2023 dollars. The $18 billion (ish) number comes from that. Capital costs in today’s dollars are a lot lower – closer to $10 billion.
I believe the Sound Move Plan states that once the capital costs of the plan are complete, the sales tax rate would be reduced to pay for the operation/maintenance subsidy only. So it is fair to say they (the opponents of ST2) are somewhat right; ST2 Plan is funded by both a tax increase as well as a continuation of a tax stream that would otherwise be reduced. The voters are both approving both a tax increase as well as a capital development plan. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
The Sound Move taxes wouldn’t roll back until debt servicing is done on University Link so we’re looking at least 20 years before the tax would be rolled back.
Sales taxes will go up 0.5%, that’s the effect that that people will feel — no some economic paralysis brought on by the lack of a sales tax rollback twenty years from now.
And this isn’t a broken — any ST expansion was going to keep Sound Move taxes around. And any ST3 expansion will keep both ST1 + ST2 taxes around.
The meat of this is that nothing they *say* will change that this raises taxes for you by around $70 a year. That’s it. Frankly, nobody today is making decisions based on spending or saving that amount of money in thirty years anyway. It’s a straw man.