I should have put on Jimmi Hendrix or The Doors this morning; it would have matched the sunrise perfectly. I love the picture below. The smoke stack goes well with the skyline in a William S. Burroughs sorta way.
I was once asked the following question in a job interview, "You are stuck in traffic and are running late for a meeting with 'the big boss'. You are a key presenter in the meeting. The HOV lane is wide open, what would you do?" The interviewer said that the best answer he ever got for this question was "Find a homeless person and offer to hire them as a carpool buddy"! We agreed that it was a pretty good answer.
If the state of Washington they are considering turning the HOV lane on i405 into a HOT lane. I've read some of the articles on the proposal and I'm baffled. I can't help but see this as yet another effort by the state to use their new favorite phrase, "Generate Revenue". The recent economic woes caused our state's lawmakers to go into immediate Eeyore mode predicting the worst possible scenarios as certainties. They looked at the books and said wow we are going to come up short. I don't know about you, but when facing a shortfall in our home budget, the first thing we do is look for ways to cut back on the non essentials.
Luxuries go first, followed by comfort, and then necessities. There are a range of possible cutbacks in each one of those buckets, but you get the idea. We don't go after essential services first, what kind of sense would that make? Yet, across Washington State, and I'm betting much of the country as well, that's exactly what our Government appears to be doing. They start out with "Well, we'll just have to let inmates go free" or "I guess we'll just layoff some police". Shortly after publishing these doomsday proclamations we began hearing wild rumors like taxes on gum, candy and bottled water. Not much time passed before I-960 was suspended and it is now open season on "Revenue Generation" tactics.
Ok, so $.01 tax on each ounce of bottled water, cutting into my Juicy Fruit addiction, and raising prices on my Mars Bar, all exceedingly silly but manageable. It will only amount to people cutting back on those purchases, harming the industries that produce them (damn those bottled water companies!!!) and in the end the reduction in revenue from the commerce will outweigh the taxes raised, but ok, I can set that aside. Here's the piece I don't get about converting the HOV to HOT. One of the suggestions is increasing the requirement to 3 people to use the lane without a fee.
We (Tammy and I but really all of us who live in the Puget Sound and commute) re-arrange our lives around those HOV lanes. We chose the times we travel, where we live, and ultimately what jobs we pick. Screwing around with those lanes hits too close to home. For folks that are closer to the margin than Tammy and I, these changes might be devastating. How does that possibility balance with the kinder, gentler, group hug politics we practice in this state? The truth is, the economy is bad, and money is tight all around. If the people have less money, guess what? The government has less money. It sucks, but that's what it is.
The bottom line is that everything I've seen so far targets those folks closer to the margins. That being said, there aren't any other revenue generating solutions that make sense either. That's the root of the problem here. Our elected officials need to stop talking about "Generating Revenue", stop threatening us into compliance by holding up the specter of cuts to core services, and start dealing with reality.
I'm going to make a suggestion here, radical as it is, but perhaps we need to prioritize until the tax system we already have in place recovers along with citizen's incomes? So before we talk about programs like emergency response and road repair we make sure that we pause spending on non essentials like
- Parks
- Art (Like the fine shovel in dirt statue)
- Landscaping (not talking about erosion control)
Deep breath now, I know some of you would die for art and parks. I'm just asking that for now you not make that choice for the rest of us. Things will get better, and the money will return. When it does we can go back to spending money on square rocks. In the mean time perhaps the folks in Olympia might turn off their cell phones, send their publicists and campaign managers home, get a white board and make a some lists. In the end I bet there's a whole mess of things that could be shelved for a while in lieu of sending Troopers to the unemployment line or jacking up the price of my Cheetos.
Don't drive angry. Drive weird!
PS – Resusci Annie, or Rescue Annie is the CPR dummy I used to learn to inflate people made of plastic and rubber. We are considering a recycling program for these devices that allow them to be used as a 3rd passenger in case they up the number needed for the HOV lane.
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