Updates and Thursday Dec 4 meeting downtown

Hey folks: Please RSVP to me (yoram@smallparty.org) if you're coming to our next meeting, this Thursday Dec 4 12-1pm, in the 5th floor conference room at 1402 3rd Ave.

Agenda
* 12:00-12:10: Updates (see also below) and introductions
* 12:10-12:40: Policy options, including discussion of tax rates, low-income rebate, and spending options. A good focal point might be this spreadsheet: thenumbers.xls. The second and third sheets are mostly unintelligible, so focus on the first sheet. There are some details on low-income options &etc in a spreadsheet that Bruce has, hopefully we can post that too...
* 12:50-12:55: Next steps and next meeting downtown Th Jan 8, 12-1pm.

Updates
* I and others in the group continue to get feedback from different groups, including groups outside the traditional lefty circles. (I'm being intentionally vague here---hopefully more details coming soon.)
* On Nov 25 Catherine and Christy and I met with Jen Marlow and Jeni Barcelos, two UW law students who interned with Sightline and Washington Environmental Council to study legal issues about "cap-and-dividend", which proposes to redistribute cap-and-trade revenue to state citizens. (If you're curious they're also the main forces behind the "Three Degrees" conference on the law of climate change and human rights, coming up at UW May 28-29 2009.) My gloss on what they found was that (1) the state constitution prohibits gifts of public funds except to the "poor and infirm"; (2) there is no bright line definition of "poor and infirm", but we're almost certainly OK if we focus on the bottom income quintile (i.e., bottom 20%) or on folks below 40% of median income; (3) extending benefits above these levels may or may not be constitutional based on analysis of case law involving gifts of public funds; (4) it may or may not help to "phase out" benefits, i.e., have benefits decline slowly for folks in the 2nd income quintile so as to not have a rapid drop-off of benefits; (5) there's a wildcard if you can show that the spending furthers a "fundamental government purpose", e.g., providing daycare to single moms is legal even if the moms are not "poor and infirm"; (6) the expert on all this is UW law professor Hugh Spitzer, who teaches the class on Washington State constitutional law.