There are always a few items we’ve read during the week that deserve more attention but don’t make it into our regular posts. So we bundle them for the Friday roundup.
Here’s this week’s bundle:
Seattle Times: Gubernatorial debate was short on education-funding specifics
THE most important work Washington’s governor will do next year is lead the charge toward reforming the way the state pays for its public schools. The first debate between Gov. Jay Inslee and his Republican challenger, Bill Bryant, gave the public few clues how either of them would do that…
The state’s paramount duty of educating its young residents needs more than a few minutes of attention. Future debates should focus more on how Inslee and Bryant can be the state leaders who would move Washington state toward education equity and full funding.
New Geography: Welcome to “Y’all Street: The Cities Challenging New York for Financial Supremacy
…if you look at where financial jobs are now headed, perhaps it’s time, as the Dallas Morning News cheekily suggested recently, to substitute Y’all Street for Wall Street. Finance, increasingly conducted electronically, is no longer tethered to its traditional centers. Large global financial companies like UBS, Deutsche Bank , Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are all committed to relocating operations to less expensive locations.
In the U.S., this has benefited the South the most.
Jon Talton, Seattle Times: Unemployment and the Governor in Washington
At 5.8 percent, Washington’s July headline unemployment rate compares with 4.9 percent nationally. From the third quarter of 2015 through the second quarter of this year, the wider U-6 unemployment rate stood at 10.7 percent, compared with 9.9 percent nationally. Only 11 states had higher rates of this measure, which includes discouraged workers and those working part-time who want full-time jobs…
One important fact is that Washington’s jobless rate has historically been above the national rate.
Scott Winship, WaPo op-ed: Inequality is a distraction. The real issue is growth.
In truth, nothing helps the poor and middle class like economic growth, and that is best pursued by policy reforms that ignore inequality.
Jared Bernstein, WaPo op-ed: Inequality is deeply entrenched. We’ll have to think big to fix it.
Inequality is high because the mechanisms meant to ensure that growth is broadly shared have either eroded or were never sufficiently in place.
Associated Press: Why it matters: Income inequality
Greater inequality has created a festering distrust of government and of corporate leaders whose promises of better times ahead never fully materialized.
..The result has been a backlash against globalization that many Americans feel tilted the economy against them.
Wall Street Journal: Seattle’s Minimum-Wage Education
…Seattle’s uptick in hourly wages is offset by a reduction in employment and hours. The ordinance “modestly held back” employment of low-wage earners, and hours worked “lagged behind” regional trends, on average four hours each quarter (or 19 minutes a week). Many such individuals moved to take jobs outside the city at “an elevated rate compared to historical patterns,” says the report.
