In the Seattle Times today there is a chart entitled, I'm not kidding, "Washington's voter outlook plummets." The chart shows a precise jagged line with huge peaks and troughs over the last 20 years, and the past year or two it drops like a rock. Hoo, boy.
Such charts are obtained, I gather, by walking up to voters (I don't know where you find them these days) and saying, "Hail, Voter! How is your outlook?" A punch in the mouth is recorded as a zero, a "What, me worry?" gets a three, an offer to share a beer gets a five, and so forth. Scores are averaged scientifically and compared numerically with scores in other years, as if that were meaningful. Then, finally, scientific-sounding drivel is written about it.
"The poll randomly surveyed 407 Washington voters ... and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points." Really? Plus or minus 5 percentage points of what? Outlook? Can I get outlook by the ounce at Costco, or is it only traded in futures?
I want to get in on this action. So I'm looking around, trying to figure out what would be sending outlooks plummeting. I want to remind everyone how scary the world is getting so that, when I tell you all how scared you are, you'll listen up and buy more Real Changes.
This is so easy. Look at all the bad stuff that's going on. Earthquakes and hurricanes. There's a war everywhere you look. OK, not everywhere around here, and everyone fighting them is the same National Guardsman over and over again, and we're not involved unless we're him or a Libyan. But, gosh, what if Gaddafi escapes?
What if Gaddafi got loose and set up shop in Skyway? Then how would your outlook be, Voter? He would so not fit in. Skyway property values would plummet, driving out decent homeowners. Sure, down the road it would be a boon to developers, who would buy up all the undervalued property and build cheap glass boxes to put cubicles in. But we can't all be phone solicitors. Somebody has to be able to buy the life insurance, and I think you know it won't be you.
Why wouldn't I have a lousy outlook? We just learned that the FBI is trying to get stores to report people who make cash purchases, because they might be terrorists. I'm sure this doesn't apply to cheeseburgers, but does apply to electronic items. How can you not have a bad outlook, what with terrorists running around, buying cell phones and fertilizer with $10s and $20s, and then building bombs?
How can you not have a bad outlook, when terrorists have the cash to buy cell phones and fertilizer, and you don't?
Even the good news is bad news, when you scratch it. Good news: Highline School District is getting $43 million to build one high-tech high school, Aviation High School, at Boeing's Museum of Flight. That's from $32 million in public funds, around $11 million in private funds, including $4 million from Boeing alone, which can dream of getting it back years from now in the form of easily-trained off-the-shelf aviation engineers. All this for the benefit of 425 students.
The accompanying bad news comes when you compare that heroic per student investment to what Seattle delivers each year per student.
If all of Seattle's high school students could convince us that they could be promising aviation engineers or pilots, maybe private industry would fund 25 percent of our schools. Or maybe they'd look at their capacity and just stick to the cream of the crop.
But we're talking about outlook. I can't see how we can have a good outlook unless we fund our public schools the way they need to be funded.
Since we don't fund schools well enough, there you go. You have something to fear. Our lives can only get worse! Keep buying newspapers to stay up to date on news you can use -- to scare yourself!