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Seattle Repeals Tax That Upset Amazon (apnews.com)
Last month, the Seattle City Council introduced a new tax that would charge firms $275 per worker a year to fund homelessness outreach services and affordable housing. This greatly upset Amazon, Seattle's biggest private sector employer, which threatened to move jobs out of the city. Today, The Associated Press reports that Seattle leaders have repealed the tax on large companies such as Amazon and Starbucks after they fought the measure. From the report: The City Council voted 7-2 Tuesday to reverse a tax that it unanimously approved just a month ago to help provide services in the city. The Seattle region has one of the highest homelessness numbers in the U.S. Amazon, Starbucks and other businesses sharply criticized the tax as misguided. The online retailer, the city's largest employer, even temporarily halted construction planning on a new high-rise building near its Seattle headquarters in protest. Mayor Jenny Durkan and a majority of the council have said they scrapped the tax to avoid a costly political fight as a coalition of businesses moved to get a referendum overturning the tax on the November ballot.
because the voters are weak minded
American cities really need to stop catering to companies that aren't willing to lift a finger to help local quality of life. Amazon raises house prices and forces the less fortunate out. Is there any net benefit to hosting Amazon at all? Are the taxes these employees are paying even adequate to build public transportation to get them from the perimeter they are forced to live into work every day?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
it wasn't just corporations protesting this. Unions didn't like it either.
Excuse me while I spend the rest of my life laughing at the irony.
The tax was poorly written. It was a tax on gross receipts over 21 million. This hit low margin businesses hard. Yeah sure, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Getty and the rest could have paid it. We have many regional businesses that would be hit very hard, likely leaving the city. We need to revisit it.
What could possibly go wrong?
It just goes to show you... in my many years of watching thing like this (and also from the accurately described observations of Milton Friedman), when you raise taxes, people (etc.) leave. Ultimately it spirals downward where there is less tax revenue, so taxes need to be raised more (or something needs to happen).
Look at the inversion which happened over time, as corporations (evil or not) moved their headquarters to other countries where the tax rate was competitive and much lower than here. Then look at what happened when the corporate tax rate was lowered.
This same thing is happening in other cities with higher tax rates, or ways that the municipality gets your money (via regulations, ridiculous fines, and so on). People will look to move to a place that doesn't nickel and dime them to death. This (obviously) isn't true for everyone, but it tends to lower the tax base if it goes on long enough and taxes, et. al., continue to increase.
Although what I am saying may not be popular, it tends to be true. Please don't blame the messenger.
Government needs to A) GET OUT OF THE WAY, and B) Actually support industry.
Does this mean that my yearly Prime subscription price will drop back to $99?
Cities all over the country are climbing over each other to get Amazon's new building, but the quasi-Marxist city council of Seattle are too stupid to see that companies already paying a shit-ton of taxes don't like to be milked even further.
-Styopa
You're right it didn't do enough. Amazon employees too many people which is slavery which is why all thinking people hate them. Bezos is acting like an 1860 Democrat in that he is enslaving people by the thousands. Adding a tax the he can afford means that people are forced to being his slave since they can't move elsewhere since most people can't afford that high tax. People like Sawant support slavery since she is so wealthy from Microsoft money.
... and they both have a good point. A tax on employment has got to be the dumbest tax, and falls heaviest on the lowest paying jobs.
If they really want more affordable housing, they could start by approving some building permits. It is idiotic to deny, deny, deny, and then declare a "crisis" because the lack of supply pushes up prices.
I don't want to pay forced charity either. Stop making me pay for everyone else's problems. Taxes are supposed to be for common resources that we need to share like roads, police, fire dept etc... Not for paying for broken homes homeless people etc... If you want to donate it has to be voluntary otherwise it's stealing.
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why not just fix it? Something stinks in Denmark.
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Companies should be required to sponsor homeless based on the ratio of employees in the area and the ratio of homeless
And shame on the states that bus their homeless to the PNW
Why not fix it? Because the politicians don't know how to.
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
US income tax also decreased from a top marginal rate of 90% in the 1950s to under 50% today. Taxes do get rolled back.
You're also forgetting the oppressive B&O taxes here that are biased against tech companies and that try to run them out of the city. We give a huge discount to manufacturing over tech, but the tech corporations hate Seattle which is why they keep stealing so many employees here from better jobs.
That's because not a single person paid 90%. The income tax was rolled back to amounts most would pay before putting 90% of their funds into making sure taking that 90% left the government with a net deficit after lawyers.
The US dollar has also lost 90% of its purchasing power since 1950. The top marginal rate is therefore extracting twice as much wealth from the top earners as before. Taxes never go down.
Nominal incomes have also gone up since the 1950s, so no. Econ 101.
City Council creates a tax 5-10 times larger than any other city who ever attempted it and is surprised that it didn't go over well.
This is their failed logic.
to reduce drinking sugar drinks they taxed those drinks
To reduce gun sales in Seattle they taxed them until all the gun stores moved out of the city.
Taxing Jobs will have no effect on businesses or jobs WTF HUH!!??
So they create the image of Amazon and only workers making over $100K will be affected. but that is not how they wrote the tax. Somehow they never thought of making it only on well-paid positions etc. It also affected Dick's Burgers a place famous for good starting wages and helping with school tuition
They were penalizing a business that was model for a good employee in fast food.] making under $20 an hour.
And they NEVER would tell anyone what they were going to do with the money that would be better than all the failed policies have only grown the problem in Seattle. It was about GREED without a PLAN.. vs people who have to plan or fail and that business planning is why Seattle's budget is already many times what other cities its size have.. but still they have no clue who to fix the roads or the homeless problem.
Tech corporations love Seattle, otherwise they wouldn't keep bringing people from out of the area to work here. We have cheap electricity, are right next to an IXP and have easy access to a port for those that are dealing with hardware that needs to be imported.
Rolling back this head tax was an incredibly stupid idea as it's one of the few ways we have of discouraging any one company from having too large of a say in our local economy. We had that in the past and Boeing nearly drove the city bankrupt when they did their layoffs in the late '70s. Since then we had been making massive amounts of progress in diversifying our workforce so that we couldn't be held hostage by a small number of businesses.
Yeah, because I'm going to hire 5,000 employees to the tune of $13 million in the next decade, instead of for free literally anywhere else that isn't full of retarded fucking leftists.
A lot of hate on what just happened here in Seattle, wonder how many left leaning people are not from here.
I have compassion, and I don't mind paying more to help, but some people just like it the way it is and aren't willing to go in to permanent housing
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/04/09/homeless-residents-brag-about-makeshift-mansion-near-seattles-famed-space-needle.html
They keep asking for money and there is no plan, no accountability
http://mynorthwest.com/569171/mayor-murray-homeless-seattle/?
Even the last mayor was winging it
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/clearing-homeless-from-the-jungle-may-take-more-time-mayor-says/
Seattle hired this consultant named Barbara Poppe
http://mynorthwest.com/786046/barbara-poppe-seattle-homeless-2017/?
And she had some solutions and they didn't include taxing more. From the article above there is this section
"But Seattle was slow to act, which echoes what Poppe warned about in 2016 when she told the city “you’re much more inclined toward discussion and planning and process that goes on and on and on.”"
Which feels like "paralysis by analysis" but I can't help but feel it is more sinister then that
You make Seattle a great place to come to if you are homeless
Safe Injection Site
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/seattle-king-county-move-to-create-2-injection-sites-for-drug-users/
Need more how about free heroin
http://mynorthwest.com/1014078/dori-bagshaw-government-buy-heroin/?
That will make the place grow with voters that are willing to vote left or socialist. Keeping these politicians in power.
Take that tax money and feed to homelessness machine
https://roominate.com/blog/2016/anatomy-of-a-swindle/
So you get all these out of town homeless people, and of course crime goes up
https://www.king5.com/article/news/crime/suspect-pleads-not-guilty-to-raping-woman-in-seattle-car-dealership-bathroom/281-552696410
Maybe you think I am just some AC posting random links found on the internet supporting a view, but from what I have seen over the past few years, I can tell you I hate going to downtown Seattle. My compassion has reached its limits. I still want to help people willing to help themselves, the rest... they can go to another area.
City specific laws and taxes are insanity. What other evidence do you need for a cleptocratic fiefdom than that?
We have gotten VERY far away from the basic principles this nation was founded upon. We are now in a place where the political class sees a problem and decides upon a solution THEY want, and then need to grab the money from SOMEBODY... ANYBODY (well, anybody ELSE that is). They make no real effort to solve a problem in a cost-effective way, nor any effort to undo piles of their previous bad actions that may have contributed to causing the new problem. They also give little concern to where they might have gotten the RIGHT to just grab somebody else's cash. They simply decicde on an amount of cash they need and then go looking for a targeted group who has that much cash and who they think will be unable to resist them politically.
By what right do these thugs take money from entity A and transfer it to entity B for the benefit of entity B?
This is NOT the model the nation was founded upon. The government is indeed given the power to tax for the GENERAL welfare (things that are there for everybody, like national defense, national parks, the courts, etc). This is a different thing; this is taking money from one person (or a legal entity that is incorporated and is therefore a legal person) and using it for the specific welfare of another person or a group of specific persons. This is just grubby armed robbery.
As a practical matter, it would cost the taxpayers a lot less to simply stop all the bad government behaviors that lead to such homelessness problems. There is no reason why a home today should cost more than a come 50 years ago. There are many more government regulations which have driven-up the costs to build homes, and driven up the costs to employ people, taken more out of people's paychecks (making it harder to buy a home) and so forth. Even basic inflation is an artifact of government, though that one is certainly not a local government issue. We have had many decades of politicians claiming they were doing all sorts of good by heaping rules and regulations and taxes on to the backs of the people and businesses and there has been very little consideration to all the burdens this places on sectors of the economy. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the increases in taxes, no matter how severe, cannot outpace the increases in damage done by these very same politicians.
The principle of a capitation business head count tax is what had to be stopped. It will never stop at $275. Next year it will be $295, and then it will be double the rate of inflation growth for 10 years, and then it will be really a problem.
Yes, because at that point they’ll probably start demanding the companies pay the tax with actual HEADS.
#DeleteChrome
Whilst I agree that these mega corporations should pay more tax, it seems a bit odd that they are being directly targeted with a homelessness tax proportional to their workforce. Kind of like when councils use motorists as the cash cow to fund their pet projects/pensions.
I was interested in settling down to a good read, then I suddenly realized the Seattle city gov't itself brought on and exacerbated their homless problem.
Then, they tried to strongarm everyone else to cover their bullshit.
When I realized that the Seattle city govt had fucked themselves, I began to cheer on Amazon, et al... My concern abated.
Amazon can and will leave Seattle and is making preparations to do so (HQ2 anyone?) Don't fool yourselves, they'll be gone in an instant if you try to fuck them.
No large company in the Puget Sound area needs Seattle.
Seattle, you need them. They don't need you.
"... tell us how you’re going to spend the money."
This should be the first question in American politics yet most voters are satisfied hearing the government will 'do' something (eg. war on drugs, tough on crime, build a wall). It's probably why there's so much propaganda in the USA; shouting buzzwords allows the opposition to create straw-men.
That was Amazon 'employees' worried about their jobs; not the effect on corporate growth.
All taxation affects one of three things; 1) consumption (sales tax, municipal rates); 2) employment (income tax, SS contribution); 3) property (capital gains, stamp duty). This employment tax was well conceived: It didn't affect low-income (businesses) and it was easy to calculate. However, it is unusual for a corporation to pay an employment tax (eg. payroll), especially one that isn't proportional to the cost of the employee.
Like always, taxes on corporations are much harder to make stick than taxes on individuals. Mark my words, this tax will be back, just with the difference that it'll be off the bottom line of workers, not the companies they work for and companies (obviously) won't increase salaries to compensate.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
Hey, Seattle, I am also very upset with your tax.
Can I have my tax repeal, now?
No app for that?
your 100% correct there. but they do that for a reason massively over inflated property mean nice big tax income from the taxes.
You already have to pay the seattlites twice as much ($15 instead of $7.25) just so they aren't sleeping in your parking lot. A little bit extra on top of that is not going to make a difference.
Adjusted for inflation income has been flat since the late 1960's while the cost of goods and services have continued to rise. The difference was made up with debt but the interest on that debt has pushed discretionary dollars downwards. Also Econ 101.
What are you playing at posting everywhere on this story? When you are proven wrong you result to insults like a drunkard. Nothing satisfies to the unsatisfiable. Reality will be never ending suffering until you face it.
lol no. Adjusted for inflation goods are cheaper. Also better.
They need to take the "I need two marines" approach.
"I NEED TWO MARINES."
"For what, sir?"
"I NEED ONE MORE MARINE."
If companies rattle their tits against taxes, they should double it and begin enforcement immediately, as well as siccing the IRS, health inspectors, and every other agent they can find on them and rack up massive fines ASAP to make an example of them. Companies should be TERRIFIED of the government, and the government should be terrified of the people.
There's no problem at all with building permits in Seattle. Multiple new apartment and condo buildings are being constructed, planned or have just been finished. There are also several upzones and new urban villages being planned.
Seattle is not SF.
Had it gone to referendum, I'd have voted to keep it and let Seattle die. I'll take Bellevue over Seattle, for all kinds of reasons.
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Like any other third world municipality, it's run for strictly for the benefit of the moneyed elite. Not that they're alone in this. Every city crawling on it's belly to get the new Amazon HQ2 is right behind them. So is every city that subsidizes billionaire owned Major League Sports teams with tax breaks and stadiums that will never recover the investment made at the public's expense.
Remember it's not your world, it belongs to someone else, and you have to pay them for the privilege of breathing their air. You do have a choice: you can always choke to death for free.
Why is Snark Required?
Deductions massively changed over that time, too... For example, compare 1957 (top tax rate of 90%) to today (top tax rate of 37%). In 1957 the Federal Government collected $36 billion from a population of 172 million - about $209 per person. In 2012, we see it was $1.13 trillion for 314 million people - $3600 per person. Correcting for inflation we see that the Federal Government now makes about twice as much, per capita, than it did in 1957 (which was also the last year the Federal Government ran an actual surplus and paid the debt down).
Think about it - in the bad, old, high statutory rate days, the Federal Government collected about HALF of what it does today. Sure, the nominal rates are lower - but the exemptions are dramatically reduced as well, so that the effective tax rate is quite a bit higher (about 2.1 times higher, in fact).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The tax would have done nothing to alleviate the problem of homelessness in Seattle, anyway. There is already not enough housing for everyone, so providing cash benefits to pay for rent will only make rent universally more expensive for everyone, as the city would be increasing demand for an already finite and limited resource.
What the city needs to do is ease its absolutely draconian zoning laws and ordinances to allow developers to come in and build affordable housing. There is where the problem lies - the inability to create new supply to drive down prices.
I think you misunderstand supply and demand.
If supply is high enough then demand falls and prices follow. The GP pointed out that not enough permits were being issued. Your argument that because there are some, there must be enough is not convincing. The trend in the price is rising, this is a solid metric that can be used to determine that supply is low.
There may be other reasons, but you gave no data to support your position. In fact, your argument bolsters his position. Housing is in such high demand that investors are looking at multiyear projects (construction) and determining that the increase in demand will likely result in a high enough sale price that margin will be preserved even after all of the challenges of urban construction.
Hoist on your own petard, sir.
It's not just the head tax. It's all the other taxes and regulations and controls too. Just because a specific straw broke the camel's back doesn't make THAT straw the bad straw... there are many other straws there.
I love when people say that Amazon is bullying Seattle when it's Amazon that brought money into Seattle, not the other way around. Amazon created the jobs in Seattle that Seattle wants to tax, like people, if you tax too much they will leave. In what fantasy world is a person or company saying they'll leave when a city takes money by force considered the bully rather than the group taking money by force being the bully?
The money is supposed to help the homeless, great, good intentions. But that doesn't change the facts of the situation. Seattle created the housing crisis on its own by heavy handed government regulations. For example, the building code is >700 pages thick, residential code is also >700 pages... on top of the fact that high rises are banned in most of the city, only allowing construction of "single family homes". There is only so much land, so let us regulate housing out of existence and then blame private businesses for the lack of housing. Sorry, there's no reason for building regulations like "foam signs may be no more than 1/2 inch thick", or skyrise construction.
Amazon's the bully for trying to protect its interests from force? Give me a break. I guess I'm the bully when I left California because of its excessively high tax rate that kept me from being able to enjoy life.
In the case of Amazon, the primary target (the bill was written so as to target Amazon specifically, which might actually be a violation of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution), the measure would have taxed from an employment base created from money coming from outside: Amazon sells all over the nation, and flows money into Seattle. The labor wedge, thus, is somebody else's problem, and the measure would have been good for Seattle in terms of tax revenue without all of those nasty downsides of labor wedges.
For the same reason, Amazon can get up and move two towns over and absolutely destroy Seattle's economy by cutting the economic feeding tube. This is why we are, at times, nice to really, really, really huge businesses: the symbiotic relationship forms a one-way dependence.
The Federal government doesn't have to worry about business getting up and leaving because that's not feasible. You can't do business in the US without being in the US somehow. There are all kinds of tax games and outsourcing and such, and that's fine: someone always capitalizes on the labor here anyway, so we're not too concerned with all businesses fleeing the US en masse exodus. States have similar power, although businesses can move state more easily than nation; it is, of course, disruptive either way.
Washington constitutionally prohibits state income tax. They only allow all kinds of regressive taxes. There's your real problem.
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As a progressive Seattleite, I can tell you the headline is a bit misleading. The tax upset Amazon *and over 500 other businesses, many of them regional, as well as a clear majority of the voting population*.
It was repealed because it became clear that there was going to be a ballot referendum (and lawsuits) and the voters in a very progressive city would have repealed the tax at the ballot. Some of the politicians that supported it would likely have lost their seats.
There was a miscalculation on the part of the activists who pushed for the tax. They didn't think they had to convince anyone except city politicians that the tax would solve the city's homeless crisis and they didn't think that the city's own bad reputation at dealing with the homeless situation would blowback on the tax.
Seriously, the whole think was bubble think idiocy.
Amusingly, I invented a new social insurance that takes a tax that doesn't adjust year after year. I learned from Social Security's mistake: mine has a tax structure which necessarily draws revenue with increasing purchasing power. In other words: if you keep the tax rate the same, the tax revenue grows faster than inflation year after year.
As consequence, the program pays larger benefits over time without raising the taxes feeding it. It's not like Social Security where you say, "Hey, let's raise the Social Security payments by 15% along that lower end to get the elderly out of poverty!" "Oh that's great! Hmm, we'll have to increase the FICA tax yet again, perhaps to 15% this time." "Yes, and we'll have to raise the cap to take more of that tax from more income, suppressing wages while increasing the tax wedge and raising prices." You just sort of wait and watch it outpace cost-of-living adjustments on its own.
The fun part is I break another well-known, century-old, repeatedly-proven axiom in the process:
"a deficit-neutral stimulus package is an oxymoron: if the plan does not raise the near-term fiscal deficit, then it has not expanded net expenditures in the economy and will not lead to new jobs." (Mishel, et al)
I designed a deficit-neutral stimulus.
The short list is:
I designed the policy to mathematically guarantee a deficit-neutral stimulus heavily localized to recessions. As shown above, that's axiomatically-impossible.
The policy is an egalitarian social insurance and targets those areas of greatest need due to its mathematical construction. Egalitarian social insurances are inefficient because they poorly target need and instead wastefully distribute economic resources where there is less need (I didn't completely escape this; I only caused it to target by nature with perfect program efficiency, but not to target with perfect program efficiency of the theoretical ideal social insurance).
The policy increases its buying-power benefit--payments increase faster than inflation--and doesn't use tax raises or deficit spending in doing so. Typically, social insurances and welfare programs bloat: they stop working well, and then we raise taxes to shore up the budget.
The policy acts as a foundation under other social insurances, and so increases their efficiency. Those are more-targeted (unemployment, SNAP, WIC, HUD, etc.) and remain due to the above partially-violated axiom. The cost of running social programs diminishes over time due to this policy--it even lowers the cost of Social Security's OASDI program.
As you might gather from that last one, taxes would come down, all other things equal: the cost of other programs falls, so taxes also fall.
There's a compound tax effect: the program creates economic efficiency in such a way that there is greater taxable income for the same population, so you're able to supply the same services to that population for lower tax rates. That means we can lower taxes without cutting services due to secondary effects.
There's another compound tax effect: accounting the benefit as a sort of tax refund creates what amounts to a negative income tax. Beyond the threshold, income taxes are of course lower than current. There's no corresponding tax increase at the upper end because of an efficiency issue in our current fiscals which I took advantage of: this program is hugely expensive, but something else was so broken I was able to fix it and hide the expense in the noise. It pretty much looks like a tax cut; if you start with no social programs (and without their associated taxes), it's a major tax increase.
Because the benefit rises faster than inflation but the tax rates don't, there's no long-term impact on the rich (the tax rate isn't rising and the benefit is fractional compared to their incomes and taxes), whereas the poor and middle-cla
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If money was the solution to the homeless problem, then we wouldn't have homeless, because some (not all) already make more than minimum wage in tax free donations, but somehow a home doesn't appear for them. There's a lot more to it, but a tax is just money, and just like how environmental taxes don't do anything to improve the environment (because the air gets no cleaner waving $20 bills around) taxes for the homeless won't solve their problems (because rubbing money on someone's skull doesn't solve mental issues).
Whereas it's not a 100% fix, a good 90% of the "homeless" are there because of heroin addiction. Legalize the drug, register addicts, dispense pharmaceutical grade product in a clinical environment, eliminate the black market, clean up the streets. There's probably two solutions, the Amsterdam model or Mao's model.
Clean up the vicious opiate addiction cycle and the majority of the homelessness goes away. What's left is easily manageable with current resources.
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This was an end run around Washington States constitutional restrictions on income taxes. It starts out as a fixed fee per employee applicable only to large corporations. Next, it creeps down scale and applies to more companies. Also, it develops a tiered structure, based on income. Pretty soon the city is taking a percentage with all the tax brackets and other features of a plain old income tax.
The $50 million it was supposed to raise could easily have been found someplace else. Perhaps a little belt-tightening and more efficient city operations. You can't dig a hole in Seattle without blowing millions on bureaucracy and public hearings. The city probably blew millions on this (now failed) attempt to expand taxing authority.
Have gnu, will travel.
For the same reason, Amazon can get up and move two towns over and absolutely destroy Seattle's economy by cutting the economic feeding tube. This is why we are, at times, nice to really, really, really huge businesses: the symbiotic relationship forms a one-way dependence.
That's parasitism, not symbiosis. Symbiosis is, by definition, 2 way.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If I was going to say something stupid and patently false, I'd probably post as A/C as well.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Not really. Parasites harm the host: they remove and do not give back. Amazon provides Seattle with income brought from outside, making Seattle a wealthy and powerful city able to support high standards-of-living and a great many jobs. The wages for those jobs come from selling a bunch of stuff to wealthy Seattle inhabitants, ultimately using money paid out in taxes to Seattle and in wages to Seattle residents by Amazon and its local employees. Seattle gives Amazon a favorable location with infrastructure and skilled labor.
Amazon can pick up and move, bringing its benefits to someone else. Seattle can no longer derive the benefit Amazon has provided if it does that.
You're trading with someone. You build tables and chairs, you give them to people who need tables and chairs, those people give you apples. You don't have the time to grow apples and build chairs; they don't have the time to do so either. While you could do both, you'll get more apples and more tables and chairs if you do one job and they do the other and you trade. That's beneficial to both parties.
It's also a fact that if you overcharge them and the next guy sells them tables and chairs cheaper, you won't get any food and then you will die.
If Seattle lets its infrastructure decay, stops producing a good skilled labor force, or raises taxes in some way Amazon doesn't need to deal with, Amazon can do the same: they can go somewhere else. If the Federal government does it, of course, Amazon is kind of stuck dealing with it. Amazon is getting a benefit from being in Seattle, and Seattle is getting a huge benefit from having Amazon; Amazon can move to another host city, and Seattle will have to attract a replacement or it will collapse. The worker bees decide they like the next meadow over and nothing pollinates.
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Surely if Amazon didn't benefit from being in Seattle, they would have left.
... and they both have a good point. A tax on employment has got to be the dumbest tax, and falls heaviest on the lowest paying jobs.
If they really want more affordable housing, they could start by approving some building permits. It is idiotic to deny, deny, deny, and then declare a "crisis" because the lack of supply pushes up prices.
Please research before you try and speak. SF may be deny, deny, deny, but Seattle has been approve, approve, approve for the last twenty years. Except for some a few well publicized cases of historical old buildings, everything old and cheap is being torn down. Even then, they usually allow for a new building if the original facade is preserved. I can walk outside my place of work and see five different cranes working on new buildings. It's been like that for years and certainly haven't been the same buildings. This also extends many miles outside of the city center, usually following the newish light rail. Main trouble is that nobody (besides the city) is building new, cheap places to live. Housing prices have been going up 10%/year for the last twenty years (except for a bit after the dot bust). Rents are raising. I checked out some of the new apartments that were being built, but nobody is building cheap crap, they're all very expensive studios that cost twice as much as the place I was already renting. If they could build more, they would be but construction is the current bottleneck.
Now, plenty os studies have come out and they pretty much show that this is keeping prices down to less than they would be if they weren't building. The population of Seattle has doubled in that last twenty years which is the problem. Not only are rents higher, but the infrastructure including the highways were built in the 60's and hard to upgrade, especially in such a short time. It's causing growing pains and if there is too much a of a good thing, it is probably the economic boom that Seattle has been seeing. Plenty of people who grew up here are being forced out. A vast majority of the homeless here were living here, but some people are marginal and can't just up and move at the drop of a hat when rent literally doubles from one month to another (Seattle has never liked leases, so most places are month to month, and rental owners are doubling rent so the can kick people out and remodel to charge more). This all puts more load on the city who have to do something even if they ignore the people who live here and go for the top dollar. I have no doubt that one of the goals of the head tax was to slow down economic growth a bit so the city can try and get control on things.
All that being said, WA has no state income tax and is mostly replaced by property taxes, so when comparing the price of housing in Seattle, it really needs to be compared to the price of housing plus state income tax in other cities like SF.
There may be other reasons, but you gave no data to support your position. In fact, your argument bolsters his position. Housing is in such high demand that investors are looking at multiyear projects (construction) and determining that the increase in demand will likely result in a high enough sale price that margin will be preserved even after all of the challenges of urban construction.
Not quite so simple. There is plenty of new supply in Seattle, but nobody is building cheap places to live. Even the new artist living pods places that have gone up that are glorified dorm rooms were more expensive than the older apartments in the city. Studies have shown that the new building has kept prices down from what is seen in places like SF, but Seattle's population has also doubled in the last twenty years. Another thousand people move in every week currently. Quite simply, Seattle mostly gentrified in the late 90's and not it is growing more affluent and even white people who had nice jobs are being forced out of their houses. Neighborhoods that used to be sketchy now have trendy nightlife and expensive artisan restaurants. Wouldn't be so bad but Seattle is another peninsula city that doesn't have space to provide more highways so traffic keeps getting worse. Lightrail is being built as fast as they can, but it's not really fast enough.
Not quite so simple. There is plenty of new supply in Seattle, but nobody is building cheap places to live.
If there were plenty of supply, prices would not increase. If there were oversupply, prices would fall. The law of supply and demand is not hard to grasp. It is not a surprise that no one is building any place cheap to live, I imagine the building code in Seattle continues to grow in size, complexity and demands on the builder. Evicting delinquent or bad tenants has most likely become more difficult. To adjust to the new reality, developers build to attract affluent tenants that are less likely to trash a place or be late on the rent. Don't blame developers for adjusting to what the Seattle City government is throwing their way. If Seattle (or any large city) wants cheap housing, the need to make cheap housing something that can realistically be built and managed.
If supply is high enough then demand falls and prices follow.
That's ... not how it works at all. If supply is high enough, prices fall and demand rises. If supply is too low, prices rise and demand falls. If supply is low, and demand is high, prices rise.
The real issue is that there is sufficient demand for high end luxury housing that it is crowding out lower-margin housing that middle income people can afford. That, too, can be addressed with changes in permitting, but that runs into two problems: 1) It faces opposition from "free market" purists, who insist we accept market failures as a price of "free" markets, and 2) Permitting is handled at the local level, so if Seattle requires construction of more affordable units than investors want to build, they will simply build their luxury units elsewhere to get the higher return on investment dollar.
It's just another example of how markets can fail when dealing with necessities, or when dealing with something that the wealthy can pay a lot more for.
Offtopic, but is there any word on when they will announce their second HQ city? They announced way back in January the 20 finalists, but have been pretty mum since. All the armchair quaterbacking and guessing is becoming tiresome and I'd wish Amazon would just announce the damn city already.
which was also the last year the Federal Government ran an actual surplus and paid the debt down
FY1999 and FY2000 would like to remind you they exist.
I cant even enter a Safeway without feeling a pressure to buy overpriced cookies from young girls. its difficult to say no to children which is why gangs in third world countries kidnap children to use for begging. Here the Girl Scouts use the same technique.
**Life is too short to be serious**
which is an extension of trickle down economics.
Yes, there is a point where people leave. But there's also a point where required services crumble and people leave. Settle is nowhere near the former. Neither is most of California. What's driving people out isn't taxes, it's the cost of housing.
What you're saying isn't popular because, well, it's made up poppycock that originates with right wing think tanks trying to get low taxes for the billionaires that fund them.
The biggest growth in American history was at a time when the top marginal rate was 90% for Pete's sake. If you want the economy to grow you've got to Invest in America (remember that slogan?). We need healthcare for all so our people can be productive and infrastructure they can use to get to and do work. We need schools for them to learn too (or we need to import more H1-Bs, that works too).
In short, if we want a functional civilization we have to pay for it. Civilization's like any other nice club. You have to pay your dues.
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Seattle already spends more than a billion dollars on "solving the homeless crisis": https://www.bizjournals.com/se...
This is on an estimated homeless population of roughly 12,000 individuals: https://www.seattletimes.com/s...
This works out to around $88,000 a year per individual. Let that sink in for a second.
Their government is ineffective and inept, giving them more money to waste is not a practical solution.
No it doesn't. That's absolute fucking rubbish.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Looking at the Federal debt from the very beginning until present, you'll see the last time the debt went down was in 1957. Note that a "budget surplus" applies ONLY to items on-budget; it does not include trillions of off-budget spending. The US has increased its Federal debt every year since 1957 - and the only way a debt increases is if you borrow more money. And the only time the US Federal Government borrows money is when it is out of money - meaning, it ran a deficit.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This is the one big problem we have with raising taxes or creating new taxes. Government always puts itself in the position of being the "forced wealth redistributor" .... taking some income from successful people who actually do something to earn it, and handing it back out elsewhere for some proposed idea to make things better for another group.
Now, granted -- the REALLY wealthy have reached a point where they really don't have to earn additional income anymore. Instead, they just let their money do the work for them by way of investments. That, too, involves some risk of losing it -- but obviously, it's still quite effective when done intelligently.
I've never really seen a problem that was fixed by just throwing money at it though. What usually happens is that money obtained with little or no effort is spent rather foolishly,and the original problem never gets solved.
Take the public school system as a prime example, No matter how much they claim they need more funding? I've never seen a tax increase voted in for them that notably improved the level of education students got from the school. They might get that new digital scoreboard over the football field they had their eye on, or administrative staff finds a way to get a raise from it. But the core problems with the educational system rage on..... (Funny how in "days of old", people got a perfectly acceptable basic education from those little log cabin school houses where they had nothing but a few books and a teacher lecturing to the class, with maybe a chalk board or something? Not a lot of cash outlay to make that work.)
I think the housing issues are the same way. Government can step in and try to fund "affordable housing" -- but at some point, you're just trying to subsidize a bunch of neighbors who are technically priced out of the area in all other respects. They're not likely to take good care of the properties the funding allows them to use, and they really don't usually make the effort to get the higher level skills needed to stay employed with the companies in the area who pay better wages. Meanwhile, they live under that stigma of being the ones in the subsidized housing area, which isn't so great either. It'd do them more of a service to cover their moving expenses to help them move out to parts of the country with cheaper costs of living -- if you were going to insist on paying them to assist them!
It's about Dick's Drive In, wholesale warehouses with thin margins, and regular businesses who would literally be driven out of town. Amazon is just a convenient target everyone loves to hate so tat was the PR campaign: "Tax Amazon" and never mind that Dick's Drive In would get hit, too. This repeal happened because of a grass roots movement of people largely not at all associated with Amazon who were headed for the ballot with a repeal initiative. The more money Seattle spends on the homeless, the worse the problem becomes. Once you start providing "services" to the homeless, the more convenient homelessness is. Seattle already spends millions on the homeless, which is why it has become a Homeless Mecca. Walk down the streets blocked by tents from REI and smell the urine while avoiding the needles. Seattle had no plans at all for how to spend this head tax. They just said it would go "towards the homeless." If the past is any indication, what this means is more civil service positions for bureaucrats who don't actually DO anything. Seattle is now a place to be avoided for any pedestrian. Never go there.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
There are some who believe that increasing supply creates dynamic and active neighborhoods that increase demand even further. Toronto is building high-rise housing faster then anywhere else in North America, yet demand has only grown. A tax on foreign investors was added, but prices have merely leveled off.
> Once a new tax is invented, it doesn't just go away.
But it did. You might want to rethink that position.
Not quite so simple. There is plenty of new supply in Seattle, but nobody is building cheap places to live.
If there were plenty of supply, prices would not increase. If there were oversupply, prices would fall. The law of supply and demand is not hard to grasp. It is not a surprise that no one is building any place cheap to live, I imagine the building code in Seattle continues to grow in size, complexity and demands on the builder. Evicting delinquent or bad tenants has most likely become more difficult. To adjust to the new reality, developers build to attract affluent tenants that are less likely to trash a place or be late on the rent. Don't blame developers for adjusting to what the Seattle City government is throwing their way. If Seattle (or any large city) wants cheap housing, the need to make cheap housing something that can realistically be built and managed.
Well, plenty of supply is not the same as oversupply. But to make things more pedantic there is plenty of expensive supply, and little cheap supply. And I can tell by the way you are talking you don't quite understand the situation. By cheap supply, I'm not talking about people who like to trash places or are late on rent, I'm speaking of typical office people not making more than $60k a year being forced out into the suburbs, or at least not able to afford any of the new places that are being built. I make six figures and moved out several years ago because my rent was a mortgage and a fixed rate mortgage doesn't go up (except due to property taxes, which it is) and rent will. The city is currently rebuilding Yesler Terrace for low rent housing, but that's just a few thousand households which won't meet demand for that price range. More expensive apartments are plenty while older places that are paid off are all full. Ever since I've moved here and well before the current property boom, there have been a large number of conspicuously empty buildings in high rent areas, presumably also high taxes also. I'm not familiar with real estate details, but I bet there is some tax write off or other way for Seattle property owners to defray the cost of empty space rather than lower rents.
I live in Seattle and you gotta laugh at liberals who love taxing everyone else but scream when taxed themselves.
+100 INSIGHTFUL
Adjusting for inflation, the economy is much smaller now though...
Maybe your adjustments are nonsense.
You don't have to play stupid. You know why you were called out. Whatever the fuck it is we're talking about is irrelevant. When the name ScentCone is attached to a post, we know with 100% certainty that whatever you're typing is "unadulterated bullshit". We are not arguing your points. We're just telling you to shut the fuck up because we're tired of you. Post under a different UID and you'll see the difference. You type vile things daily. You lack empathy, sympathy, respect, or common decency. Whatever the extreme position is, that's the one you're taking simply to piss people off. You may not necessarily be a bad person IRL, but you do get off on stirring up shit. My internet diagnosis says you probably have Assburgers. If it's not that, and you aren't putting on an act, then you truly are a shitheel. You will reap what you sow whether you like it or not.
Why don't you list off the "basic principles" and "the model the nation was founded upon", please. I've read the Constitution, ya know the LEGAL document (as opposed to Ben Franklin's diary), and I have failed to find a specific mention of the countries ideals or model. The closest is the Preamble talking about Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
I think one of the biggest issues here is that you and your fellow conservatives DON'T know what the Constitution actually says and are just making shit up. If you aren't, you'll have no problem laying out this "model" you guys are so fond of talking about.
Agreed, Seattle is definitely a parasite.
It's likely that the benefit is that it's cheaper to stay than to move. For now.
Those cities have only "proved" that the drug isn't actually legal. As long as something is illegal, there is a black market for it. It's kind of the definition of black market.
You aren't very good at this cause and effect stuff. You should probably just sit back, smoke a phatty, and let someone who knows what they are doing get some work done.
"if your argument is based on the notion that corporate entities are legally people, your argument immediately fails..."
um... it's a basic concept that to "incorporate" (study the root words, in Latin, since you seem a tad illiterate) is to make an entity a "person" for legal purposes. Without this concept, a business could not be sued in court, could not sue, could not be prosecuted, could not sign contracts, etc. You lefties who have been brainwashed into hating the concept do not seem to understand that without this concept, none of your lefty ideas (like consumer protection laws for example) would be enforceable against a business AND your big labor unions would also be crippled as THEY TOO are incorporated.
"One, homeless people sleeping and defecating in public is harmful to the general welfare, which the constitution of the united states explicitly empowers government to tax for."
Nope. If bums are harmful to the general welfare, then local governments can make it illegal to be a bum on the street - as it used to be in America. There is ABSOLUTELY NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT for a bum to have the government rob productive citizens of parts of their property or income and give that money to specific bums. Even if this were a "general welfare" matter, the solution (as a "general welfare", rather than "individual welfare" matter) would be to use taxes to pay for the street cleaning and the arrest of bums NOT providing stuff to the bums thereby incenting even more people to become bums.
"Two, businesses generally enjoy a tragedy of the commons, in which the costs of running the business are inflicted on the society they live in, while the profits are kept for the business owners."
Ha! The bums also have the benefit of the commons, yet THEY choose to waste those benefits and simply be bums!. The local hardware store has no more benefit of the existence of the street and the local fire department than does the average citizen or the drunk or drugged-out bum; the store owner simply is a more productive person making better use of the same resource.
"Three, it is therefore meet that the government should tax the businesses, in order to promote the general welfare by dealing with the homeless people living in the parking lots for those same businesses."
Only a moron proposes penalizing the person properly using the common shared resource and rewarding the completely dysfunctional bum who is abusing the common shared resource. You are PERFECTLY illustrating why all the big leftist-run cities are having problems with homeless bums and crime: the leftist hates the self-regulating decent hard working citizen and prefers to transfer wealth (the the point of a government gun) from the productive person to the uncivilized unkempt incompetent unproductive people. It's a basic economic principle that you get more of what you reward with money and you get less of what you deprive of money.
You should not have advertized your ignorance so boldly. Try reading The Federalist Papers and The Anti Federalist Papers then try reading the works of Ben Franklin, John Adams, etc. This may not be as fun as playing video games, but it will cause you to see how bright our founders were, how deeply they thought about these matters, and just how far we (and certainly you, given what you have typed) have strayed. The United States was designed by our founders as a system, and we have been operating it further and further out from the design specs - so it should not surprise us that it is developing cracks.
Our founders absolutely knew what they meant by "the general welfare" and that DID NOT include any forms of wealth re-distribution. Not onlyu tdo their voluminous writings make this clear but also their actions confirm it. Indeed, neither the congress nor the courts have even tried to argue this point - nearly every expansion of the welfare state is justified in the legislation by quoting the "commerce clause" of the constitution. Just read the actual texts of ANY of your fave social program bills and you will find language tying it to "interstate commerce"
Transfer payments are NOT "general welfare" by definition and no, Ayn Rand has nothing to do with the matter. Her "objectivism" may well include this concept, but the concept (unlike some of her other ideas) goes all the way back to the founders who rejected such transfers.
Your park rangers example is the sort of simple-minded garbage I would expect from an eight-year-old trying to impress a six-year-old. You confuse (intentionally, I'd bet) [1] government spending for the general welfare (operating a park open to all Americans and the cost of making it so available) which incidentally means paying employees, contractors, suppliers, etc with [2] the idea of operating an entity for the purpose of putting money into the pockets of specific individuals (and paying them as park rangers to achieve that goal - the almost universally-rejected bad idea called a "make work project"). By the time a person is twelve or thirteen years old he or she should be able to understand the difference between these concepts.
Republicans expropriated my bowl of oatmeal.
You have missed the very premise upon which the founders based the Constitution and you have fallen into the same trap Obama did.
The founders explicitly wrote in multiple works that they presumed that all rights belonged to the individual and were given to man by God. Those individuals came together to form communities and those individuals lent SOME of their rights to those communities. Those communities grouped together into colonies (later, "states") and a subset of the rights of the people lent to the communities were in-turn lent to the states. The states the wrote the Constitution and formed the Federal government (that's what the "constitutional convention" was all about - it was representatives of the states designing the federal government and lending it a portion of the rights of the people which had been lent to the states. IN THAT CONTEXT: The Constitution explicitly says the few things the Federal Government is authorized to do (with the rest assumed to be left with the states and the people who were choosing not to lend any further authority). Some of the founders were worried this was not explicit enough, so the 10th amendment explicitly says that all powers not given to the federal government by the Constitution are left to the states and to the people.
Our founders saw this as a positive thing (keeping most rights in the hands of the people themselves, where God put those rights). Progressives like Obama see this as a document of "limited rights" (limitations on the possibilities of a utiopian super-government).
Nobody on the conservative side needs to show where the Constitution specifically bans a type of tax or regulation - that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution. The Constitution presumes all rights are with the individual, and thus people who want the government to have a particular power are the ones who have the logical burden of having to show which article empowers the federal government to be involved in the thing being considered.
I have read many of the writings of the Founders, including the Constitution, as have most of the conservatives I know. I have met very few leftists who have read the Constitution and very few indeed who have read any of the other writings of the founders. Most progressives/leftists seem to hold the view that anything they like is "Constitutional" and anything they do not like is "Unconstitutional" with no specific reference to how they get there intellectually (how they get there EMOTIONALLY is usually quite obvious).
Seattle Repeals Tax on Amazon
FTFY
Just another day in Paradise
Aside from the low-margin, mid-size businesses that would be severely stressed by this tax, the main opposition to this tax is the lack of a plan on how to use it. The city council has claimed they absolutely need this tax, and others, to combat homelessness but, they have no plan for how to spend it. So, how do they even know how much they need?
Seattle's approach to the homeless crisis -- and it is a big problem in the city, that is not in dispute -- has been manic, at best. They need to sit down and do the hard work of understanding the range of issues that cause homelessness and design plans for addressing those. And, most importantly, they then need to share those plans with the public.
It's a really simple problem-solving exercise. However, there are special interest groups that oppose that sort of approach. For example, almost all the churches in the city are suffering from dwindling attendance which makes it hard to keep their doors open. If they open a homeless shelter, or offer services in aid of the homeless, they can get enough money from the city to keep their lights on. However, a comprehensive, city-wide approach to solving the homeless problem wold likely not include them because of the lack of efficiency and control. The churches know that. So they, and similar groups, oppose a sane solution because it would cut off their gravy trains.
(Seriously, the church across the street from my house has grown so fat on the city's homelessness payments that they've been able to afford a major landscaping project. They have this ridiculously over-the-top garden, now. All paid for by tax dollars that were meant to help the homeless.)
It's more likely that they receive a tax abatement.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It's not a business. Would the people living there be better off or worse off?