Slashdot Mirror
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 Today, The Associated Press reports that Seattle leaders have repealed the tax on large companies such as Amazon and Starbucks after they fought the measure.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.
Also, homeless people need to go away. They will be much better taken care of when bused to San Francisco.
it wasn't just corporations protesting this. Unions didn't like it either.
Obviously the person to be concerned about is the average tax payer / employee of such a corporation.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
SFO loves them.
Having too many jobs in one place is a bigger problem right now in the US because that is what jacks up housing costs and increases commute times.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It's also the party of #BlackLivesMatter who only care when a black person is killed by a cop or someone they can label 'white', but not about the black murder rate in places like Chicago.
School of mostly white kids gets shot up? Party of "ban guns now!" Day to day gang warfare in different Democrat controlled cities... *crickets*
The schizophrenia on the left would be entertaining if it wasn't so destructive.
American cities really need to stop catering to companies that aren't willing to lift a finger to help local quality of life.
No, American voters need to stop giving power and resources to municipal politicians that seem to be doing everything possible to destroy the local quality of life (say, by making their city irresistible and consequence-free to squatters camping and shitting in people's front yards, MS-13 getting sanctuary while taking over local schools, etc). The pressure to reverse idiotic moves like the now-dead Seattle plan was as much from regular Seattle residents sick to death of the city's deliberate infliction of problems like that on them. That the city was looking to fund even more of it by milking some of the town's bigger employers shows how much they were trying to avoid confronting their own absurd policies, which caused the problem in the first place.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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?
You know, you can care about cops overstepping their authority while also caring about gang violence in cities. And yes, many, many American cops do overstep their authority.
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.
You need to grow up and join reality. Companies have no obligation to do anything except make money. They arenâ(TM)t designed to do anything else.
It is the people. A person first and foremost needs to take care of themselves. Not wait for a company to do it. They need to take care of their families and children. Not wait for a company to do it. They need to take care of their community. Not wait for a company to do it
Youâ(TM)re thinking isnâ(TM)t even that of a child. Children understand these concepts. You are mentally ill. Lazy. And of low intelligence. Like the average American. Dumb as a pile of shit.
You need to act responsibly. You. The fact you wrote a company needs to do this shows you are a irresponsible, selfish piece of shit.
How up. Look around. Clean up your own act. Fucking looser.
MS-13 "taking over schools" is Fox agitprop. Stop repeating "faux news" for the stupid.
We had to move out of a neighborhood that was being overrun by MS-13. The police would no longer even enter our street without multiple vehicles. Moms from Central America started taking out second mortgages to get their kids out of the MS-13 recruiting ground and local franchise HQ that was the area's high school, and put them in private schools. Your witless, low-information attempt to blame that reality on Fox would be hilarious to me, if we hadn't had MS-13's local troops relive us of property, threaten our lives, and run our best neighbors out of their homes. You know all of this, but are trying to wish it away because it doesn't suit your personal political narrative. Stop it.
Homeless people -- what do you propose as a solution?
There are more jobs available than there are people to fill them. There's a reason that people congregate in places like Seattle and San Francisco to camp out and set up tent cities. Because those cities encourage it, practically and culturally and financially. You also know this, but are equally annoyed on that front, because it would mean confronting the reality of which sort of monolithic partisan political establishment totally controls places where that happens.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Government needs to A) GET OUT OF THE WAY, and B) Actually support industry.
MS-13 "taking over schools" is Fox agitprop.
Actually it appears to be wapo agitprop.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Except the homeless aren't counted as part of the unemployed -- many haven't been looking for years. They need a leg up and training, and money for this doesn't come from thin air.
MS-13? Name the school and neighborhood -- you're likely exaggerating.
Why don't you have a look at the budget and answer your own question?
Amazon paid $250 million to state and local governments in Washington State alone, and it's the largest property tax payer in Seattle. You call that "not lifting a finger"?
"There's a reason that people congregate in places like Seattle and San Francisco to camp out and set up tent cities. Because those cities encourage it, practically and culturally and financially. You also know this, but are equally annoyed on that front, because it would mean confronting the reality of which sort of monolithic partisan political establishment totally controls places where that happens."
That's true, you don't see these tent cities going up in places like Mudville or Sticktown. I wonder why that is.
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
"Small group" doesn't mean they've "taken over a school."
Both are problems. And it's a lot easier to get people supposedly acting within the law (i.e. cops) to not be assholes.
How big does the group have to be before you take off the blinders they trained you to wear?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
How small does the group need to be to get you shaking in your suburbanite boots?
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.
Economics and history suggests that the most motivated people are the the people most willing to abandon their old lives and risk everything to establish themselves somewhere else that offers better opportunity for them to succeed.
As such, the most motivated people will relocate to be whether the greatest opportunity is.
This brings :
- Motivated people
- Opportunistic people
These people will either work as transients, meaning that they will work 2-5 years in the area, earn money and move back with their winnings to settle down. This requires strong markets. For example, if I took a job offer I have in Redmond right now, I would relocate and buy a house immediately. I would stay at my job for long enough for that purchase to show me a solid return on investment which would depend on housing prices rising and therefore screwing all the locals. Then I would sell and leave. The person I sold to would do the same thing.
Or they will settle down.
The transients will come and go and they are a burden on any local economy, but what's important is that many of them will settle in the end. Or at least they'll strengthen the market making the company the area more attractive to draw more people.
Highly motivated people who settle down will raise their children and place importance on their motivations. They'll participate more in schools. They'll provide better tutors for their children. They'll invest more in the local area and improve the infrastructure... and the values of the properties.
And that will draw more people.
The problem is, this cycle of development is excellent for the city but not for the people in the city. Prices rise, inflation is horrendous. I was in Seattle last month for a trade show and I was horrified at how cheap so many things were.
The salaries of all my peers was $150,000+ but the food and prices at Target were suitable for areas with economies closer to $40,000. That means that the people shopping at the stores should be paying more and the stores should be paying their employees more. Instead, they were very definitely minimum wage workers.
That means that the pay gap is INSANE!!! Even with $15 an hour minimum wage, the property values are so ridiculously high that people have to spend an hour commuting or live in squalor to make ends meet. $30,000 a year is simply not enough to survive in Seattle given the relatively small size of the city and the relatively high demand for real estate.
That said, homelessness in Seattle was amazing. There was A LOT of it. I grew up in New York back in the days when trying to get into Grand Central in the morning required carefully climbing over homeless people while attempting to not step in puddles of urine.... The difference is, NYC hasn't been developing... it's a lot of old buildings now. Seattle is under mass construction and is really clean. It seems and feels wrong to have massive urban renewal going on with homeless people just all over the place.
What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg. Someone explained to me that there's a possibility that the city has invested so heavily in caring for the homeless that many homeless people are attracted to the city so they won't have to beg. So it's interesting because homelessness is/was almost a fashion in San Francisco, but now that the system is even better (it seems) in Seattle, the homeless are migrating to the better system.
... 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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You'd be charged with a Haight crime.
why not just fix it? Something stinks in Denmark.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Leftist Seattle City Government: "We're going to tax all the rich big businesses a boatload of money in order to house the homeless."
Big Businesses: "Kiss my WHAT???"
Seattle: "Never mind."
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.
Yes, I understand that you want people you don't like to die. That's standard issue progressive world view stuff, of course. You'd rather see people killed by organized criminals trafficking in opioids than confront those criminals if they happen to be from another country, because you're a childish, craven fool who thinks you'll score more pandering points inside your preferred echo chamber if you signal your compassionate virtue with regard to repeat felons in the country illegally. I get it. Carry on! You're the best possible thing to help keep progressive politicians from running the entire country, because your death-wish politics is toxic to normal people. So, more, please! Be MORE shrill! Tell people who aren't racists that they're racists - they love that! It makes them want to vote they way you demand, every time.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Having too many jobs in one place is a bigger problem right now in the US because that is what jacks up housing costs and increases commute times.
No, what jacks up housing costs is a lack of housing. This is usually due to regulation / zoning laws preventing higher density housing from being built. If you want cheaper housing you have to build more of it. Subsidizing it without fixing the supply just jacks up the price more.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
US income tax also decreased from a top marginal rate of 90% in the 1950s to under 50% today. Taxes do get rolled back.
The availability of jobs is piss poor for certain groups outside of prime working age or those perceived as slower or needing training or presenting poorly or an insurance risk. God help those with a below average IQ or education, and those that have zero savings - that is living day to day. The rise of the 'gig' economy formerly restricted to artists, actors and journalists has now spread like a cancer. USA has not quite woken up like some parts of Europe yet. So called non-employees mean taxes must rise, or there will be a underclass of untouchables on permanent and increasing welfare. Multinationals shrug, and say not our problem.
Blah blah blah, the solution is progressive property taxes that tax really expensive real estate and boat and planes and super rich play toys, but only to the extent of cost recovery and no more. Rather than house the deplorables in their own units, the city should provide an army barracks/hostel experience with military like food, but without beer or alcohol or smoking options (and drug detector dogs). Any homeless person accepting that, is genuine.
The middle class has been murdered in recent decades. Its up to the millennials to sort out wealth hoarding , as Trumps measures to bring back offshore money has failed (it was laundered and sent back via buybacks).
Seattle has few options - do nothing, borrow, or tax or waffle. Their best option is an even more unlikable tax on property.
I think the city of Tempe should bus them to SF.
Right now they move into Papago park, leave trash everywhere (really, that place practically became a city dump until Tempe spent a few million to clean it up) and they're known to assault joggers, hikers, and bikers who come too close to their "house". I don't know how somebody can be expected to avoid that, because these "houses" in every way resemble every other trash heap in that park. They were also very aggressive towards volunteers that were helping clean it up. This is why we can't have nice things.
Bussing them to SF would be a perfect solution: The reason homeless people go there in huge numbers is because they get the most welfare there (and yes, it is draining both SF and LA, but politicians are either too afraid or too PC to bring up the fact that 20% of their population is homeless, and they won't dare propose scaling it back even one bit.) Once they arrive and you show them where to go to get welfare, they'll never leave. As another benefit, the ultra left will catch wind of it, name and shame us, tell the world about how they'll be welcoming to all homeless people, including the violent ones, which will enable us to export even more!
It's a win-win situation for all!
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.
The bulk of long term homeless are mentally ill, studies I've seen point to near 80%, the other 20% are addicts. Short term homeless are often that way because they had a financial incident while living paycheck to paycheck. This could be as simple as a hospital visit that wiped out the rent payment. Short term homelessness is generally easy to fix with a little help and a leg up getting past that financial predicament.
You can't fix long term homelessness any more than you can fix drug addiction or mental illness.
You'd never get them to stay, they're drawn to liberal paradises like San Francisco like flies to shit.
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.
Less than 1% of San Francisco residents are homeless. That's still a lot, but nowhere near 20%.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
They will be much better taken care of when bused to San Francisco.
I'm not sure if they still do, but Las Vegas used to bus them to Salt Lake City.
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
No one remembers SLU before Amazon started hiring like mad. It was empty and dead after five PM. I couldnâ(TM)t find a restaurant in walking distance. A short walk down to Bed, Bath and Beyond would reveal pan handlers sleeping on Sunday at noon because there was no one around to beg from. It was so damned closed to becoming Indianapolis. Now, itâ(TM)s a real city with a huge economy and sadly itâ(TM)s filled with whiners. The problem is the woke folk are many of the top paid idiots. Itâ(TM)s their social activity to protest and complain, but itâ(TM)s all lip service. They donâ(TM)t work in soup kitchens or hand out survival packets. They want to feel righteous without the work. Itâ(TM)s basically the new religion.
What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg.
I’ve worked in Seattle a lot of years, and I’d really like to know what part of town you were in where the homeless didn’t beg. The only homeless people I see who don’t beg are the ones too mentally ill to have any connection with reality.
#DeleteChrome
It's about 1% of their worldwide profit. In what possible way is Washington State even entitled to that much?
People never matter to governments, least of all to leftist governments.
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.
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."
your 100% correct there. but they do that for a reason massively over inflated property mean nice big tax income from the taxes.
with iptv hitting mainstream prices have been slashed. my tv cost 35$ a month now a far cry from the 125$ i was paying for satellite. the main reason for this is theirs competition in the iptv market. the days of the cable and satellite monopoly are fading.
Except the homeless aren't counted as part of the unemployed -- many haven't been looking for years. They need a leg up and training, and money for this doesn't come from thin air.
MS-13? Name the school and neighborhood -- you're likely exaggerating.
‘A ticking time bomb’: MS-13 threatens a middle school, warn teachers, parents, students
Gang-related fights are now a near-daily occurrence at Wirt, where a small group of suspected MS-13 members at the overwhelmingly Hispanic school in Prince George’s County throw gang signs, sell drugs, draw gang graffiti and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America, according to more than two dozen teachers, parents and students. Most of those interviewed asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by MS-13.
Gonna grow a brain and pull your head out of your partisan, smelly ass now?
Or are you going to close your already-closed mind even more and shove your head even further up your rectum until you can see your own damn molars from the backside?
Seriously? Which place is this?
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.
This sig intentionally left blank.
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!
Amazon made $3 billion in profit last year, so $250 million would be about 8%. That's not much of a round-off error, is it? For what it's worth, Seattle's annual budget is about $5.6 billion - almost twice the profit that Amazon makes.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
Just because you could probably survive giving me $1000, doesn't mean I'm entitled to force you to do that, does it?
And if your choice was to be around people who would say that it DID entitle me to force you to give me that $1000... call it, for the sake of argument, regional quality-of-life-benefits, suppose you were insightful enough to realize that there would almost immediately be another round for reduction of income disparity (which could be reduced better by fixing schools.) So I realized you STILL had another $1000, and could afford to give it, so I took that too.
Or you could move five miles, to an area with lower crime, better life quality, but a bit less central... and nobody regularly extorting $1000 payments from you because you "could afford it".
What would a rational person or business do? Just because they could afford it, doesn't mean it's something they may choose to afford or even should choose to afford.
Before you disagree, please remit that $1000. Because it's probably a rounding error on your 401K and I know you can afford it.
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.
He may be.. but he may not. There are neighborhoods where this sort of thing has happened.
There was an area in East Tulsa OK that had a major MS-13 problem. Several stabbings and shooting on a weekly basis. We just barely sold my Dad's house before it became unsellable due to the decline in the neighborhood.
In fact, for a while Tulsa,OK was used as a place to "lay low". I think MS-13 copied the Mob. (see Whitey Bulger)
This also happens in North Tulsa with various black gangs. A several block radius will become dominated by a particular gang. The male children will be run out or recruited. The girls become molls or leave.
It's an interesting process. The problem is that the paper and the news only cover the little blips that they feel will get you to notice. They don't live or work in the neighborhood, talk to the shop owners on a daily basis, know the cops.
If you want to know the real story about a neighborhood, talk to someone who has lived there 10 yrs or more... or find a property manager or the like that has had property there for 10 yrs or so. Even real estate agents are in the neighborhood for such short periods, and have an incentive to lie to you about the history of a neighborhood. The property deals with the market of the neighborhood. Rents have to adjust to accommodate the people who will live there.
You can fix long term homelessness. We as a society are just not willing to do the things that will fix it.
First of all it isn't cheap. Second of all it requires an intrusion into people's lives that is aberrant to most people on both the left and the right.
Long term homeless who have addiction problems or are mentally ill are on the streets because they are incapable of taking care of themselves and are likewise incapable of making the decisions that will allow them to take care of themselves. They are not in shelters or programs because shelters and programs have rules they won't or can't obey.
The only way to get them off the streets is to incarcerate them. This what was done previously to the 1980s. Most were incarcerated in mental hospitals, which were closed down for a combination of cost and people like the ACLU pointing out that it was wrong to lock up people just because they were mentally ill or an addict.
So the only way to fix long term homelessness is to take long term homeless people off the streets against their will and place them somewhere in an institutional setting where their civil rights will be violated on a daily basis.
Pretty grim huh?
Yes. In Britain they have so much freedom that they can be arrested for protecting themselves from attack. Soon they'll not even be able to own a kitchen knife with a point, just like children or the mentally incompetent. To own a fencing foil or epee is a crime, but don't worry, by their munificence they'll let you have it because you have a 'legal defense' until they decide you don't. Yep. You sure are 'free'.
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
It doesn't count as subsisting red states when they are able to write off their taxes on their taxes (nice scam, btw).
Then let them leave and don't bitch when another city offers them the same tax breaks that Seattle is trying to take away. Instead just be happy they will drain another city.
I, for one, would welcome Amazon to San Antonio as long as they don't get voting rights - we are blue enough already. Frustrating thing is they will come here, push for it to be more "socially responsible" like Seattle then bitch when a tax actually effects them
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
They will be much better taken care of when bused to San Francisco.
I'm not sure if they still do, but Las Vegas used to bus them to Salt Lake City.
Half of Utahns are Mormons, and Mormons are well-known for their charitable donations. As someone who lives in Silicon Slopes, I can attest to the large number f pan-handlers near our on and off ramps and Walmart parking lots. A local channel did a story and discovered some pan-handlers made a 6-figure income.
Do not give pan-handlers money. Instead, take them to take groceries, food, or the bus ticket they always claim to need. Pan handlers in need will accept your generosity while those only wanting money will get the hint. BTW, it is illegal to pan handle or give money to pan handlers here. I donate to the Road Home and other charities who are better suited to sift out those in need.
Tokyo is a good example of high density housing supporting high density jobs. An apartment in Tokyo is affordable to a single middle-income individual/household. This is because every "suburban" (can they really be called that anymore?) train station is surrounded by apartment towers, with densities reducing the further from the station people get.
Compare to NYC area, where everyone fought tooth and nail to keep their suburban towns "picturesque" resulting in commuter rail stations being dominated by low density housing, single business commercial buildings, and parking lots. While Long Island has geological limitations to building height, there's no reason for Westchester County and NJ to have low density housing next to commuter rail.
If you shrink that ring down even further to only where the homeless are at the figure jumps to 100%.
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
Better cities have laws. Want to camp in a tent? Try the many wonderful RV parks. Some have tent camping, cabins too.
The better US cities have laws about their streets not getting filled up with parked RV's all day and night.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Better yet: Just don't give out anything at all to randoms who harass you on the street or sidewalk. And in that, I include those students that outfits like Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, and the HRC send out to bother people for money on the sidewalks. I use these as my examples because I actually agree fairly wholeheartedly with their agendas, but despise this method. Also included are the people who harass outside of storefronts for signatures for whatever ballot proposition committee is paying them. This particular behavior is obnoxious as all hell and should not at all be encouraged. And they won't stop until people stop handing out money, signatures, and whatever else they manage to score.
Better to decide on your own time and under no pressure what charitable causes you care about the most. Then do your research to pick a set of organizations that support those causes in a manner you find most ethical and efficient; and donate to them privately. That way your chances of getting scammed are minimized and your money will be used more effectively.
Imagine all the people...
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
When the net amount of money going into federal coffers from a state is greater than the amount coming back, and another state gets more from federal expenditures than they send in taxes, the second state is being subsidized by the first state. And guess what - most blue states send more than they receive, and most red states receive more than they send.
This is something you could use.
Salt Lake City had some success just giving homeless people apartments.
What!? You can't be serious. There was just another dust-up about something President Trump said, calling these gangs "animals". The precursor was a sheriff complaining that they were being forced to release the detainees before ICE could pick them up, because of sanctuary city laws.
Please, pay attention.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
You are correct.
So, don't complain when they decide to move out or automate jobs when you make stupid laws.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg.
I’ve worked in Seattle a lot of years, and I’d really like to know what part of town you were in where the homeless didn’t beg. The only homeless people I see who don’t beg are the ones too mentally ill to have any connection with reality.
There are some that beg and always have been (and probably will). I would say the vast majority of beggars I see are the same people I've see doing it for years. I haven't seen the guy with his cat downtown in years, but I still occasionally see the older black man that is fairly well groomed that just holds his hat out like I have for the last twenty years. When I lived on Cap Hill, those begging on Broadway were either street kids or the same few older people who probably did need the money to survive. Now that I moved to South Seattle, there are a couple of beggars that have worked their corners for at least several years now. Even that doesn't seem to match the vast numbers of small house set ups or fields of REI tents (got to love Seattle, plenty of surplus camping gear to go to all the homeless) I see on the same drive. According to the reports I've read, they are mostly people who used to live here but found themselves homeless due to losing their jobs or houses due to increasing rents. I would assume that they are finding themselves in a hard place, some services are keeping them fed, and they eventually make it off the streets after some months.
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.
Having too many jobs in one place is a bigger problem right now in the US because that is what jacks up housing costs and increases commute times.
No, what jacks up housing costs is a lack of housing. This is usually due to regulation / zoning laws preventing higher density housing from being built. If you want cheaper housing you have to build more of it. Subsidizing it without fixing the supply just jacks up the price more.
That might keep prices from rising even quicker, but as Seattle has seen, nobody is going to build new, cheap places to live. All the cheap places to live get remodeled or rebuilt as expensive places. Everybody building is doing so to make more money than can currently be made on the current supply. To get prices to drop, you need the population to actually start decreasing like it did in Seattle after the dot bust. Then rents were actually going down without asking for it for a year or two to try and keep renters as people were jumping to cheaper places.
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.
Homeless people -- what do you propose as a solution?
There are more jobs available than there are people to fill them. There's a reason that people congregate in places like Seattle and San Francisco to camp out and set up tent cities. Because those cities encourage it, practically and culturally and financially. You also know this, but are equally annoyed on that front, because it would mean confronting the reality of which sort of monolithic partisan political establishment totally controls places where that happens.
Not in Seattle. The vast majority of homeless here (85%) are people who used to live here but lost their houses to increasing rents. The city center is growing more affluent and the poor are being forced farther and farther out into the suburbs and other cities. If they can't handle a move with first/last/deposit plus relaible transportation to get around, they are ending up homeless.
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.
Tax business out of existence. Tax them so they canâ(TM)t start. Tax them so they can not expand. These low intelligence politians need to hit the bricks.
Amazon isnâ(TM)t the enemy. Itâ(TM)s an employer is a shit hole city. How about the homeless stop taking meth, stop committing crimes, stop physical assult on people, and work like every other decent human being. Stop making them everyone elseâ(TM)s problems. They are in control of their bodies. Let them work. Stop the hand outs.
sigh, ya those poor companies that can't afford tax increases but they can easily afford grotesquely excessive salaries and perks for all the executives. Sure. Oh, and perhaps if those companies paid the "workers" fairly, the workers would have the capital to be capitalists and improve their lives, and just maybe then the poor would have the resources to have hope and a reasonable prospect of a reasonable success, but I guess that's too much to ask for in your America.
Pardon me if I just see your comments as right wing fundamentalism...
Well said....damn...where are my mod points when I need them?
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Better cities have laws. Want to camp in a tent? Try the many wonderful RV parks. Some have tent camping, cabins too. The better US cities have laws about their streets not getting filled up with parked RV's all day and night.
Naw. Seattle has the laws. The homeless have tents because there are plenty of surplus camping equipment to give it to them. The police still move them here, the trouble is those people still have to go someplace, and the money to move them around quickly runs out. It's much like Trump's immigrant population problem. He's doing the same thing Obama did early in his administration (probably to try and appease Republicans), but it just ends up filling the jails and courts to the point that thing break. Things cost money. The US government can just run up debts, but cities have a harder time doing that. They can either look the other way, or continue to spend money they don't have.
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?
When and where did this event supposedly happen to you? Cause uhhh, MS-13 stopped encouraging the face tattoos over 5 years ago. Yeah there are still some MS-13 guys running around with them but most of them are older or are in prison. Unless you actually live in El Salvador? But I think it’s on the decline there, too. Face tattoos make gang members waaay to easy to identify and MS-13 has learned the hard way that it actually makes their lives of crime more difficult.
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.
How small does the group need to be to get you shaking in your suburbanite boots?
Probably not that much and will society really care? What we are seeing now is the reverse of White Flight. The affluent moved to the suburbs and the city centers got worse, society didn't really care. Now, for economic reasons, the reverse is happening, most city centers are becoming more affluent and the rich are moving back where capital and industry are, and the poor are being forced out into the meth filled suburbs. I suspect those suburbs will get the same care and concern that the inner cities got fifty years ago. Probably even less as cities still had industry and importance back then than suburbs don't now as it is all moving back to the inner cities for reasons of vertical integration, shortening supply chains, and needing large populations of skilled workers.
It was an interesting read. I feel that neither one of our posts meet the criteria in that article.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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 $88,000 a year per individual. Let that sink in for a second.
Their government is ineffective and inept, giving them more money to waste is not a practical solution.
All the cheap places to live get remodeled or rebuilt as expensive places.
That happens because the expensive places sell, because the housing supply is still low.
Fixing it isn't a small change. It needs a lot of 10+ story buildings full of apartments/condos to make supply begin coming close to demand.
The people who already own houses don't want that. Some because of aesthetics, but most because it would slow/stop the appreciation of their house.
Generational money hoarding problem is easily solved. Abolish social security and medicare and use the trust fund to pay off everyones college debt. That will kick the Boomers in the nuts and equal things for the millenials having to deal with a world destroyed by the boomers. For the rich f*cks abolish estate taxes retroactively to the last 20 years and tax all the inheritances to setup a fund to pay for free college for generations going forward. Abolish trusts and make any money going out of the US taxable at 30%. Also abolish all tax exemptions for businesses. Give them a 20% rate and be done with it. Put in a cap of CEO compensation can only be 1000 times more than the salary of the lowest paid employee, contractor and subcontractor. For all practical purposes there will be one janitor paid the minimum wage so CEO compensation will be capped at 15 million a year. Anything beyond that tax it at 100%. Either the CEOs raise wages at the bottom or give all their incremental wages to the govt. Their choice. Also tax companies on revenue not just profit. 2% on revenue and 20% on profit (same deal PE fund managers get)
**Life is too short to be serious**
Doesnt really matter to me if I make 10 dollars each on 10 100$ widgets or 100$ one $1000 widget. Its still a 10% return on capital. If land is available to build 10 houses I will build 10 houses. its only because there are artificial zoning regulations restricting land access that I am building the 1000 dollar widget.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Don't know why this was marked down, San Jose and surrounding cities experiencing the same problem. Google given tax breaks to build up more, the common argument is if they are not given these breaks they will go someplace else. In meantime the city struggles to make ends meet (they've done a little better). However, like all tech areas there are immense wealth and dirt poor. Brand new high tech companies surrounded by tent cities. Oh the latest news Bezos earns a few billion more while many Amazon gig workers earn below $40K a year.
Something is seriously out of balance, any solutions presented are shouted down as "socialism" or "communism."
mfwright@batnet.com
Taxes are an operating expense; profit is what's left after all operating expenses are accounted for, and only accounts for a portion of corporate income.
What was the company's total income for FY2017? That would give you a more accurate figure on what they actually paid in taxes.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Rural cops tend to be poorly trained, have an inbred culture (hired because of family), and no media oversight.
... and yet, most shootings are committed by urban cops.
Maybe you're just a bigot.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
No it doesn't. That's absolute fucking rubbish.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't believe you. You are lying.
You foolishly assume that the militia wouldn't immediately and loudly excoriated by the media and militant left (but I repeat myself) as a bunch of right-wing racist gun-nuts who just don't want brown-skinned animals in their neighborhoods.
The salaries of all my peers was $150,000+ but the food and prices at Target were suitable for areas with economies closer to $40,000. That means that the people shopping at the stores should be paying more and the stores should be paying their employees more. Instead, they were very definitely minimum wage workers.
That means that the pay gap is INSANE!!! Even with $15 an hour minimum wage, the property values are so ridiculously high that people have to spend an hour commuting or live in squalor to make ends meet. $30,000 a year is simply not enough to survive in Seattle given the relatively small size of the city and the relatively high demand for real estate.
How much do you pay your employees?
Exactly. people don't just want to own a house, they want to own the last house.
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!
, the solution is progressive property taxes that tax really expensive real estate and boat and planes and super rich play toys, but only to the extent of cost recovery and no more.
The problem for the non-rich is it starts with the rich and then works it way to everyone else.
The city has a ton of power in these matters. My house is in worse shape than it was 5 years ago when I bought it but according to San Antonio, it is worth nearly double what it was worth when I bought it. My escrow is more than my mortgage (and that's with getting the Homestead reduction Texas offer to first time home owners.)
It's crazy. The city is going to out price me out of a home.
You could look at the link and see that income before taxes was about $3.8 billion. About 2/3rds of the Seattle city annual budget. Amazon paid about $770 million in income taxes.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
No one moves to get a high paying job to live in an apartment. Huge buildings aren't a solution, they are a band-aid. I know kids do get raised in apartments, but they shouldn't be.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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.
Re "... has the laws." Then its just local politics using selective enforcement. The better quality cities keep their streets clear and attract investment.
A clean city with no RV's and no new taxes?
A city with an RV problem, tents and new taxes?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So in other words, you don't like my tone, but of course agree on the substance. When all you've got is angry, vitriolic ad hominem, that pretty well covers it. Thanks for the vote of support! Your empathy, sympathy, respect and common decency are always on cowardly display - especially notable because you never, once, ever manage to constructively address the topic at hand. Thanks for being a consistent little obsessive - it's like clockwork.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I don't believe you. You are lying.
You wouldn't last a week in what's left of the neighborhood we used to love. It turns out that not believing in the guys who use machetes to kill people, and burn the cars and smash the windows of people who call in the cops ... not believing in them doesn't make them go away. Glad you get to live in whatever nice gang-free gated community you're enjoying. Congrats! Our HOA ran out of money to keep paying the off-duty cops we had parking at the entrance to our neighborhood, and they refused to risk their lives getting out of their cars to deal with the guys who simply cut open every security fence we all paid to put up, week-in, week-out. The hood was just too perfect a cross-roads and enclave for MS-13 to operate from, and they won. What's interesting is that you know perfectly well this happens in spots all around the country, and you're the one lying when you pretend it doesn't because that fits your political narrative better, somehow.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You should not have advertized your ignorance so boldly.
There's a common thing you can frequently see on the Internet. The more condescending and pseudo-intellectual the poster, the more wrong they are. It's an obvious attempt to deflect.
Our founders absolutely knew what they meant by "the general welfare" and that DID NOT include any forms of wealth re-distribution
And here's where you're utterly wrong. Wealth redistribution would be literally giving the money to the homeless.
The city buying stuff in order to provide services to the homeless is no different than the city buying stuff to build a road. In both cases, only a small portion of the population gains the main benefit. And in both cases, it's perfectly legal and within the founder's vision - the government is supposed to maintain the commons. Homeless people covering the commons is just as much a problem as anything else covering the commons.
What makes your position Randian bullshit is you are only incensed because the city is providing a service to poor people. It wouldn't have even crossed your mind to be bothered by construction of a dead-end road to a wealthy neighborhood, despite the spending only providing a benefit to an even smaller fraction of the population.
Seattle Repeals Tax on Amazon
FTFY
Just another day in Paradise
Then the states should tax their citizens appropriately. The more they tax them, the less those citizens need to send to the feds...tax away. See how that works for you.
Just another day in Paradise
Sorry, Google is not in San Jose, it's in a neighboring city called Mountain View, which is doing just fine. Whether San Jose is struggling has nothing to do with them.
It's more likely that they receive a tax abatement.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese