The Internal Revenue Service lets Real Change keep its nonprofit tax-exempt status in return for refraining from endorsing candidates. We can, however, tell you how to vote on measures that appear on your ballot.
Initiative 1033: NO
Hidden in the bottom lefthand corner of your ballot is Initiative Measure 1033, populist kingpin Tim Eyman's latest. It puts the state on a diet of bread and water. But seriously -- harmful, eviscerating, obliterative, world-destroying: Words fail to capture the detrimental effect of this measure on government's effectiveness should it pass. In keeping with Eyman's previous initiatives, it's economic redistribution in the wrong direction: upward. With our reliance on sales and property taxes, Washington state already takes three times more money from low-income residents than from the rich. Should government collect more than the initiative would require, money would be refunded only to those who own property -- not a poor renter, for example, who is already turning 14 percent of her income over to the tax man. Eyman's the only one who should be put on a diet of bread and water. Vote NO.
Referendum 71: YES
Marriage, and the rights and responsibilities it affords, has been for centuries the purview of the church. The state has used it as a convenient signifier for the family, with all the legal rights and responsibilities, cradle to grave, that family means. Marriage need not stay that way. Most civilized countries have discarded their old church-based notions of love for something that more closely accommodates the civil rights of every loving couple. Those opposed to R-71 want to reserve for man-and-wife those rights and responsibilities that people of any sexual orientation should have: among them, the right to make life-or-death decisions should their partner be hospitalized. This is a vote for civil rights. This is a vote for rightsizing the church's role in daily life. This is a vote for families. Vote YES.
City of Seattle Proposition 1: YES
Since the early 1980s, Seattleites have helped build homes for people who couldn't meet the costs of the market. Voters first passed a revenue-raising measure for senior housing in 1981; the resulting apartment buildings have kept low- and moderate-income elderly folks living freely in neighborhoods many of them would have been priced out of otherwise. The next Housing Levy will build nearly 2,000 units of housing: a durable solution to an ongoing economic crisis. To let it fail this time, to borrow a phrase from Barack Obama, would be to turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Vote YES.