The Binary Circumstance

In a special one-day session Democratic legislators re-instated the 1% cap on projects funded by property taxes that was recently ruled unconstitutional by the Washington State Supreme Court. Gov. Christine Gregoire hastened to sign the bill.

OLYMPIA — Gov. Christine Gregoire and the Democrat-led Legislature on Thursday saved another Tim Eyman tax-cut initiative from a court-ordered death.

Eyman showed his gratitude by calling the Democrats panderers and accusing them of cheating the voters.

Meeting in a rare one-day special session marked by bickering and occasional name-calling, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to reinstate a 1 percent cap on annual property-tax increases that was tossed out by the state Supreme Court earlier this month.

Only a handful of Democrats opposed the measure. It passed the House 86-8 and the Senate 39-9. Gregoire signed the legislation Thursday night.

The cap doesn’t apply to individual homes but rather limits increases in total property-tax collections by a taxing district to 1 percent a year.

“This bill makes things exactly the way they were prior to the Supreme Court’s decision,” said Rep. Christopher Hurst, D-Enumclaw, the bill’s lead sponsor. “It does nothing more and it does nothing less.”

Because the cap is not on individual property taxes, many individuals get stuck with a disproportionate share of the increase. My property taxes, for example have gone up much more than 1% per year over the five years I’ve lived in WA even with the limit in place. It also does not stop special levies for education or other projects.

The Legislature also approved a measure that allows homeowners earning less than the median state income — currently $57,000 a year — to defer up to half of their property taxes.

They’ll have to pay the taxes — with interest — when the house is sold.

Supporters said the bill could help financially strapped homeowners keep their homes. But critics called it a form of predatory lending that would trap homeowners with a large debt owed to the government.

Such a debt could quickly gobble up all the equity in a home, especially in today’s soft market. What happens when all the equity is gone?

For all their talk about fiscal responsibility, the Democrats have no problem forcing the taxpayers to pay subsidies to wealthy farmers. The Washington Post comments:

Under current law, the sky is pretty much the limit when it comes to who can receive crop subsidies and how much they can get. On paper, no one is allowed more than $360,000 in federal farm benefits per year, but the provision is riddled with loopholes. The upshot, according to the Agriculture Department, is that some 570 farms, concentrated in the cotton- and rice-growing regions of the Deep South, received $250,000 or more each in 2005. Two-thirds of all crop subsidies go to just 10 percent of farms.

To his credit, President Bush proposed making the $360,000 limit a real cap. More important, he wanted a means test barring payment to any producer whose annual adjusted gross income exceeds $200,000. Even this is pretty generous, considering that the president just vetoed a child health-care bill on the grounds that it would have provided medical insurance to some American families making more than $83,000 per year. But in the cloud-cuckoo land world of agriculture, Mr. Bush’s idea was radical — too radical for the House of Representatives, which brushed the administration proposal aside. The House version of the farm bill would allow full-time farming households earning as much as $2 million per year to collect payments.

Plenty of Republicans like subsidies as well, but they don’t control the Congress anymore so they can’t be blamed as much as the Democrats.

It still amazes me that writers like Joel Connelly of the Seattle-PI can’t grasp why the taxpayers have had it and every chance they get they’re going to say, “enough!”

Seattle’s housing prices are still going up but have slowed each month for the past 19 months.

In addition to Seattle, Charlotte and Portland, only Atlanta and Dallas posted year-to-year price increases on S&P’s 20-city list, while all 20 declined from August to September. The 20-city composite dropped by 4.9 percent from the prior year and 0.9 percent from August.

S&P’s quarterly national index was down 1.7 percent from the second quarter and 4.5 percent from the third quarter of 2006. The quarterly decline was the largest in the index’s 21-year history and the yearly drop was the second consecutive record low.

“Consistent with prior 2007 reports, there is no real positive news in today’s data,” Robert Shiller, chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC and one of the indexes’ creators, said in a statement accompanying the numbers.

Shiller put the odds of a nationwide economic recession at “over 50 percent” as the economy contends with falling housing prices, spiking foreclosures and turmoil in financial markets.

Other economists have put the chance of recession at one in three. National Association of Realtors chief economist Lawrence Yun said at his organization’s annual conference in Las Vegas this month that the economy has strong fundamentals and this year’s housing market resembles the decent market of 2002.

But Shiller said the current housing situation is unlike anything that’s come before.

“We’re in the aftermath of the biggest housing boom in history, so how do we use historical data to judge the outcome?” he said. “We’re out of the range of the normal variation in the data and I take that as very significant.”

From the Seattle Times:

A former University of Washington AIDS researcher committed scientific misconduct by altering images and fabricating data, a UW investigation found.

Investigators recommended that Scott J. Brodie be banned from future employment at the university. All his research is now “viewed with suspicion” and subject to independent verification, according to a UW Investigation Committee Report.

“Accepted scientific practices do not allow a scientist to falsely label an image as suits his or her fancy simply because such work is conducted in the scientist’s lab; to do so is instead a gross deviation of accepted scientific practices,” the investigators wrote.

Investigators found that Brodie falsified data in 15 instances — in published and unpublished journal articles, and grant proposals. The research in question included cellular responses to the HIV virus.

The 16-month investigation of Brodie was unusual and disheartening, said Denny Liggitt, chairman of the UW’s Department of Comparative Medicine and one of the three investigators who reviewed Brodie’s work.

Not only did it cast doubt on Brodie’s own work, but it also created problems for many other researchers who relied on his data, Liggitt said.

“The problem with things like this is that people build on someone else’s knowledge. It wastes money, it wastes time and it can lead science in a wrong direction,” Liggitt said. “Even the smallest misguidance can cripple a very large investigation.”

[…]

Liggitt said scientific-journal editors have become increasingly concerned about the ease with which images can be manipulated through computer programs such as Photoshop. He said an image can often impress a reviewer or make a point that a lot of narrative cannot — and the old adage that an image is worth a thousand words rings true.

He said medical research and HIV research in particular is highly competitive, with the National Institutes of Health making cutbacks and many researchers competing for limited funding. Getting published can help bolster a researcher’s push to land the next grant, he added.

“It’s ugly out there,” Liggitt said. “There are a lot more desperate people because of the cutbacks.”

Even worse, when so much research money in controlled by the government, it causes the entire scientific community to tailor their work to give the government what it wants. That will ultimately skew science to support a political agenda.