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Anti-Amazon Graffiti Increasing In Seattle (with Photos) (geekwire.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader reifman writes: If you're eagerly awaiting your city's selection for HQ2, you may want to check out GeekWire's photo gallery of anti-Amazon graffiti images from around Seattle. Animosity towards Amazon has grown in the wake of its threats over a per head tax on employees, which the city council passed and then repealed shortly after. The tax would have increased the budget for services for our 12,000+ homeless. Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos also fought the state income tax on the wealthy in 2010.
Yup. I was born in Seattle, but grew up on the East Coast. For work, I have been able to travel to Seattle a couple of times and I do not recognize it. It has been many years, but the homeless problem on the West Coast is self-made.
These governments are literally encouraging it by helping the homeless in the wrong ways. Most of them are able-bodied people who managed to become homeless -- likely without intending or otherwise wanting it -- and then never worked their way out of it.
So the government's idea to fix the problem is to tax businesses to discourage hiring so that they can afford to pay for the homeless, which this problem will create more of over time as workers eventually leave without getting replaced. It's no wonder that Amazon is looking for HQ2 instead of increasing their stakes in Seattle where yet again a liberal government proves that they only know how to grow themselves by leaching off of everyone else, with no plan to be sustainable or actually improve things for anyone else. It's all just for power. (That's not to say that Republicans at the federal level are much better, especially now that so many of them hardly qualify as conservatives after passing a >$1 Trillion budget; it's just sadly a matter of pace)