I signed the petition to put I-77 on the ballot. I wish I hadn't and I am going to vote against it when it appears on the ballot.

I-77 would impose a ten cent tax on espresso beverages sold inside Seattle, to fund childcare and early learning operations whose programs include at least ten percent of children from low income families.

One problem that I have with the initiative is that there is already an opportunity for Seattle coffee drinkers to pay a little more to help low income families. It's called Fair Trade coffee. Unlike the ten percent threshold of I-77, Fair Trade helps families who are 100% low income. It benefits the families of coffee workers and small coffee farmers, who not only don't have adequate childcare and schooling, but who lack potable water, decent nutrition and medical care, and live in leaky, drafty homes. Fair Trade gives the money to the people who produce our coffee and who use that money directly to improve their own lives and strengthen their communities. Fair Trade is not a tax that provides subsidies to these low income families, it lessens the subsidies that third world coffee workers provide to us privileged first world coffee drinkers.

I don't know what position, if any, Fair Trade advocate organizations have on I-77. But I worry that Seattle espresso sellers will use the tax as another excuse why they can't afford to use and promote more Fair Trade coffee in their products. While places like Starbucks offer Fair Trade beans, they don't sell it out of their espresso machines, and they've already got lots of excuses why they can't. They don't need another one. And while many of the small business espresso stands aren't any better on this issue than Starbucks, outfits like the Still Life Cafe have switched to Fair Trade, and shown that it can be done--and those few righteous places don't need it to become harder to continue.

I-77 is just plain poorly conceived. It would tax "espresso"--defined as "coffee brewed by forcing steam through ground coffee beans." It wouldn't tax other preparation methods like drip or "French press" or whatever because, according to the initiative "espresso beverages, as distinguished from other forms of coffee, are luxury items." Same beans, same business establishment, but one is a "luxury," because of the machine used to make it. It's just absurd.

Quality childcare is important. But I can't figure out why I-77 proponents chose such an irrelevant method to address it. Maybe it just seemed easier than confronting the real issues.

The initiative itself provides one place to look other than espresso to fund childcare, and one that is directly relevant. According to a study "cited by the State of Washington Early Childhood Education Assistance Program (ECEAP), for each dollar invested per child at risk of school failure, there is a potential savings to taxpayers of seven dollars in special education, crime and public assistance costs."

That is to say, money invested in kids' education saves money spent on prisons and other law enforcement later on--that's where the money should come from. A good start would be diverting dollars currently spent on after-the-fact law enforcement and incarceration. That means criminal justice reform, curtailing the counterproductive drug war, and jettisoning dumbass "civility laws."

I realize that faced with options like that, it seems easier to try to tax espresso. But us progressives, leftists, and radicals can't afford the luxury of half-baked stopgap measures to the many crises that confront us. We've really got to start looking at whole systems, and acting on those systems. Otherwise we're just going to keep wasting time and losing ground--and that's ultimately not good for the children, or their future.

And if Seattle's caffeine addiction represents a revenue stream just too tempting to pass up, how about a five cent tax on paper cups? And using the money to fund recycling programs and encourage the use of alternatives to wood pulp for making paper. That at least would have some relevance between the tax and the use of the tax money.