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 Today, The Associated Press reports that Seattle leaders have repealed the tax on large companies such as Amazon and Starbucks after they fought the measure.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.

Comments

Amazon

[fluffernutter]

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?

Re:Amazon

[b0s0z0ku]

How small does the group need to be to get you shaking in your suburbanite boots?

Re:Amazon

[ScentCone]

Really? You think "MS-13" is a race? You're everything that's wrong with contemporary public discourse. But please, keep it up! Do it even louder! That's what cost you the 2016 election, and the more the merrier.

Re:Amazon

[ScentCone]

I know, you think that teachers getting death threats and giving up reporting to work, students being murdered for not joining the gang, and police unable to get anyone to work with them against the gang because all of the witnesses take the MS-13 death threats seriously ... you consider that to be just a bunch of scared suburbanites.

So, do tell. If your tires were slashed and your kid came home from school telling you that MS-13 has told them they'll either help them or be killed (and your local news has lots of coverage of MS-13 leaving butchered bodies lying around in local parks, or burning in their cars in local parking lots) - you'd consider that to be just some friendly cultural exchange, perhaps? Have you ever walked out your front door to find three guys covered in MS-13 tattoos on your front porch staring you in the face, and telling you that anyone who calls the cops in your neighborhood will get their heart ripped out? Followed by you reading in your morning paper about another local resident who actually had their heart ripped out? It would be lovely to hear your plan for dealing with that at your kid's school and on your own street.

Let me guess, you'd call the cops. Nope! The police tell you, in so many words, that the don't have enough people available to safely patrol your neighborhood that evening, because of threats to the officers' lives. But please, phone in a report, and they'll pass it along to the gang task force for their meeting next month.

Your fantasy world, where this isn't actually happening, and where liberal politicians aren't promising MS-13 sanctuary so they don't have to hear someone like you calling them a racist, is ... delusional. It's real. I've personally lived it. I've watched our Salvadoran neighbor discover their dog, sliced into pieces, on their front porch, along with MS-13 tags spray painted on their front door (why? because their kid wouldn't join up at the local school, and had since gone off to live with relatives in order to save his life). Ever walked out the back door of your house, for a nice stroll in the community green space, only to find that your friendly local gang franchise was running a dog fighting ring there that morning, and approaching you with machetes for stopping to look, and reaching for your phone? No? Haven't had to spend an evening looking at MS-13 mug shots to try to identify the four guys that killed the local neighborhood handyman because he wouldn't be a drug mule?

I know, you'd go all Rambo on that crew. Heck, there's only an estimated couple hundred of them living within a few square miles of your front door, so you couldn't definitely take them all out, right? Or would that be you being a racist? No, you're not a racist. You're just an uninformed idiot who prefers murderous gang members over your fellow citizens because you feel more virtuous in SJW mode, defending them - because you agree with Nancy Pelosi. MS-13 members exhibit a "spark of the devine," and shouldn't be acted against. It's mean.

Duh.

[argStyopa]

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.

Re:The party of OWS are the coproratist tools now

[b0s0z0ku]

By "being an asshole", I mean abuse of power and/or physical harm to people without good reason, which are neither legal nor ethical. BTW - in most civilized countries, a simple traffic stop isn't a reason for some overly-steroided pig in a uniform to try to kill you. Even if you're less than perfectly polite.