6 ms·

Seattle officials repeal tax on large companies

39 points by danso 8y ago

xapata 8y ago
It upset most folks. > Teresa Mosqueda, one of the two council members opposing the repeal, said there was no backup plan for dealing with the homeless situation. There was no plan, period. The plan consisted of 1. Tax Amazon, 2. ..., 3. Get re-elected. When they realized 3 didn't follow from 1, they started grasping at straws.
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  1. Tax Amazon, great in its own right regardless of the reason. 2. How do you provide for people without money? 3. Deserve your re-election by serving the poor and vulnerable at the expense of mind-blowing historically unprecedented wealth. Great example here of managed democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy
  - daseiner1 8y ago
    deserve your reelection by nominally “serving the poor” while wasting loads of tax dollars and throwing good money after bad to retain a city council seat, you mean
  - manfredo 8y ago
    More accurately, tax Amazon and over half a thousand other employers in the city. And spend money on social services that don't have a particularly good track record of eliminating the social ills they are intended to solve. Politicians made their own judgement as to whether or not this would be beneficial to their chances of reelection. Immediately concluding that because a government didn't pass a new tax, the government is a de-facto autocracy is extremely reductive.
    - s2g 8y ago
      They did pass it, after months of review. They repealed it a day after the announcement that they were doing so. Seattle is a company town now.
- abeyer 8y ago
  > There was no plan, period. Oh really? http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2018/05/up-against-a-wall-of-if-heres-how-seattle-head-tax-money-would-be-spent-on-capitol-hill/ http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2018/05/up-against-a-wall-... Not a perfect plan, maybe not even a particularly good one, but there absolutely were plans and budgets for how the money could have been used even before it was originally approved.
  - gowld 8y ago
    Looks like a good fit for the regular budget to spend some of that property tax money Amazon and employees send it, not a good fit for blackmailing Amazon into a head tax.
    - abeyer 8y ago
      > blackmailing Amazon into a head tax That doesn't even make sense, how is blackmail involved? You may not agree with a tax, but that's what voting is for. If it passes, you pay it or you remove yourself from the jurisdiction...that's not blackmail, it's how taxes work.
      - Proven 8y ago
        It is coercion, and it doesn't actually improve living standard. > If it passes, you pay it or you remove yourself from the jurisdiction...that's not blackmail, it's how taxes work. Apparently not - you can clearly threaten to leave the jurisdiction and have the law and tax rolled back. Just need to learn how to deal with the thugs (politicians).
      - yellowapple 8y ago
        "or you remove yourself from the jurisdiction" Hopefully that move is to somewhere close by; else, that kind of black-and-white logic would directly result in 45,000 Amazon employees facing either relocation or unemployment. Even then, the added time and monetary costs of added commutes can put folks in a similar "between-rock-and-hard-place" scenario. In general, telling someone "if you don't like it, then move somewhere else" betrays a complete ignorance of the economic and psychological burden of doing so (burdens which not everyone can afford). Amazon itself can afford to move with relative ease, of course, but that doesn't hold true for the vast majority of its workers.
- beebmam 8y ago
  This is pure propaganda. There are SO many plans that many different local organizations are offering. Powerful companies who can communicate one single message backed by advertising/public appearances/media can make it appear that are no other "real" options. This is a deliberate political strategy. The reality is that there are an enormous amount of "real" options. But political will is hard to muster when there are many competing ideas as to what should be done. Without a doubt gentrification, homelessness, and housing/rental prices can all be addressed from many directions. I have my own ideas about what can be done by the city, state, and country. To say "there was no plan, period" is literal propaganda that exists to support the status quo.
  - xapata 8y ago
    You're right, that was disingenuous. I should have said that the council doesn't seem to be changing it's plans despite how ineffective they have been. Maybe it's an implementation problem instead of a planning problem. I'm extremely frustrated by the seeming tolerance for literal shit in the streets. At least put some porta-potties out for public health. If it only costs $300k for laundry, showers, toilets, and sinks (according to the plan linked in the other comment) why hasn't it been done yet?
    - electricEmu 8y ago
      > I should have said that the council doesn't seem to be changing it's plans despite how ineffective they have been. That's funny xapata. The Seattle City Council has been implementing recommendations from the Poppe report [0]. The Poppe report lays out a homelessness action plan recommendations for Seattle. The head tax was to fund some of those recommendations from the Poppe report. The Seattle Times recently covered the homelessness count [1]. It explicitly mentioned that actions Seattle has taken to combat homelessness were having a positive effect. > Compared to more rapid rises in homeless counts over the past five years, a slower 4 percent increase represents progress, said Kyra Zylstra, interim director of All Home, the county’s homelessness coordinating agency, which organizes the yearly count. > “It’s not the kind of progress we all want to see,” Zylstra said. “But our performance data shows that the resources that we are investing in are housing people faster.” The whole point of the head tax was to continue funding recommendations from the Poppe report. They're the same recommendations that are demonstrated to be working. [0] https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/BPA.pdf https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/B... [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/new-homeless-count-in-king-county-shows-spike-in-number-of-people-sleeping-outside/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/new-homel...
- nugget 8y ago
  The root of this problem stems from the American ideal of the primary home as an ever-appreciating investment. If you instituted a land value tax, raised property taxes overall, invested heavily in (reliable, clean, safe) public transportation to expand the commute radius, removed local authority over development, cut development approval timelines and costs, and slashed any zoning requirements that aren't directly related to individual safety, you'd nuke future appreciation and start to become the more livable, egalitarian city that many seem to want.
  - Yizahi 8y ago
    Since wealth inequality is incredibly big and continuously increasing, big land/home taxes will lead to shifting home/land ownership to the 0.1% and cause 99.9% to rent it. Prices will increase sky high partially because owners can raise them (semi-monopoly of ultra rich owners) and partially to recoup ownership taxes. The whole thing will start failing even faster than now.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > big land/home taxes will lead to shifting home/land ownership to the 0.1% Piketty's work [1] found real estate (and its favorable tax treatment) to be the largest driver of wealth inequality in America. Land taxes would be progressive. (Particularly if the first X dollars of one's primary residence were excluded.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - sitkack 8y ago
      With a slightly different split, this is already true.
    - nugget 8y ago
      There are plenty of practical policy solutions you can employ to shift more market power to lower and middle income folks; e.g. proposition 13 in California but limited to one residential property per person.
- delbel 8y ago
  they could have collected fresh underpants for the homeless for step #2, it might have worked.
- s2g 8y ago
  Huh, I gues the documents they put on were just gibberish. I’m looking forward to watching this same short of bootlicking and idiocy when Jeff comes around to extort tax breaks with the threat of HQ2.
aaronbrethorst 8y ago
The messaging on the part of the folks in favor of the Employee Hours Tax (EHT) was somewhere between terrible and nonexistent. The messaging of the anti-EHT folks was simple and persuasive. I had fully expected that the EHT would be repealed by ballot initiative come November, but didn't expect that the city council would just sort of roll over and repeal it. Erica Barnett, a local journalist, has a far more insightful look at what actually happened here than the somewhat superficial look the NYT provides: https://thecisforcrank.com/2018/06/12/todays-head-tax-defeat-has-lessons-for-both-sides/ https://thecisforcrank.com/2018/06/12/todays-head-tax-defeat...
- anothergoogler 8y ago
  Thanks, great article, the NYT piece and its headline are such garbage. The bit about this "Morning in America" lobby is interesting.
- plinkplonk 8y ago
  Great article. Much better than the New York Times article. From TFA "Is this really all about Amazon? No, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was. Council member Kshama Sawant, who exhorted her supporters to “Pack City Hall!” in a mass email yesterday, has consistently characterized the head tax as a “tax on Amazon” and Jeff Bezos, whom she described earlier today as “the enemy.” Demonizing individual corporations is rarely a path to building broad community coalitions, and that’s especially true when that corporation is Amazon, whose name many Seattleites (rightly or wrongly) consider synonymous with “jobs.” This is one reason head tax opponents were able to so easily spin the head tax as a “tax on jobs,” and to get ordinary citizens to gather signatures against a tax that would really only impact the city’s largest corporations." That seems like bad politics. Isn't it politics 101 to anticipate that the affected parties (here Amazon and Starbucks) would push back? And if enough political support to overcome this hasn't been built up in the first place, why would someone try passing the head tax at all? This is like playing chess looking only one move ahead. I don't get it. Help me understand? (Due Disclosure: Not a US citizen, nor a Seattle resident, I don't have a position, pro or anti, on the tax measure itself)
  - 8y ago
gowld 8y ago
This is a great example of the extreme left-wing destroying itself. Seattle City Council passed an income tax (that was unconstitutional, oops). This new attempt was probably legal (or could be patched). This head tax failed because the campaign in favor was driven by insane anti-capitalist ranting by Councilwoman Sawant and friends, who made it a "war on Amazon" instead of a traditional, civilized, "share some of the wealth" campaign.
icantdrive55 8y ago
I didn't expect Internet based companies, like Amazon, to fix homelessness. That said, I'm saddened that the town council caved in so quick. Our biggest problem is homlessness. All I know, is it's basically illegial to live without a perment shelter in this once great country. Yes--once great. I'm not sure what's great about it anymore. If I had a do over, I would have hightailed it to France, or Canada in my twenties. Can't sleep anywhere, including your car, without breaking some law. There's know-where to go to the bathroom once they know you are homeless. The industrious will find food. That's about all they might find. That food will eventually need to leave the body though? I just don't understand not providing bathrooms. I'm not homeless, and I have a hard time finding a restroom in San Francisco. This country was founded by in debt homeless individuals? All the settlers were basically camping out? Homelessness is our biggest problem. It's beyond debating. We need to open up available federal, state, and county land to camping. We need to repeal all laws that have essentially criminalized being without a perment shelter. I don't want to debate. I've had too many friends die on the streets. Their last days were filled with overly aggressive cops ticketing them. That whole "fix the broken window theory" is policy for most counties now. Even to those that have a home, and a good job; do you like living in a country with so many laws? Laws that are designed to trip you up if you are poor, or even middle class. I'm sick of it.
pravinva 8y ago
Why is there no discussion on rezoning single home areas to allow multistorey buildings? Can someone explain how the influx of tech workers has forced out existing Seattle citizens onto the roads? Are we sure that they are not out of towners? Why don't those who can't afford the high rents move to nearby cities and counties instead of living on the streets? Would any parent want this for their child? Would they not seek to rebuild somewhere else, especially if they actually had some employable skills that allowed them to rent a 2 bed flat in the first place? Cause and effect don't make sense here
- s2g 8y ago
  There is lots of discussion of that and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous. A years long process won’t do anything to help thousands of homeless now.
  - pravinva 8y ago
    Why are there thousands of homeless now? Is it a new phenomenon or a slow brewing thing. How can you conclude that recent massive hiring in Amazon has caused homelessness?
    - aaronbrethorst 8y ago
      1. Amazon hires thousands of people for six figure salaries. 2. Rents increase. 3. More people become homeless. http://q13fox.com/2017/11/06/study-says-rising-rents-tied-to-rising-homeless-population-in-seattle/ http://q13fox.com/2017/11/06/study-says-rising-rents-tied-to...
      - pravinva 8y ago
        Illogical. People who can't afford 2 bed rentals don't move to the nearby street if rents are unaffordable. They move to another town where they can afford the rents. Correlation isn't causation
        8y ago
fluxic 8y ago
In the past 24 hours, Jeff Bezos added $405 million to his net worth. In the past year, Jeff Bezos added $41 billion to his net worth. And yet somehow, Amazon can't throw a $50 million peanut at the epidemic of homelessness ravaging their hometown.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > Amazon can't throw a $50 million peanut at the epidemic of homelessness ravaging their hometown This is an unfair framing. The tax did far more damage than impair Amazon's bottom line. Your complaint, moreover, could be leveled against every public service in the city. There are simply better ways to solve this problem. Seattle's government chose pot shots over progress.
  - fluxic 8y ago
    Sure there are simply better ways, there are always better ways, and those better ways will be likewise crushed by the muscle at Amazon who make sure the company can extract as much value out of Seattle without having to pay its fair share in taxes.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > those better ways will be likewise crushed by the muscle at Amazon This tax was predominantly opposed by small business owners. (I think it was $25,000 donated by Amazon and close to $300,000 by small businesses.) The proposed tax was a flat payroll tax. That burdens lower-wage employees and employers much more than tech companies. There is perfect being the enemy of good, and then there is cutting off the nose to spite the face. This was the latter.
  - s2g 8y ago
    > The tax did far more damage than impair Amazon's bottom line It really didn't though.
- komali2 8y ago
  Amazon is not the government. They don't have the expertise or even authority to tackle civic issues. I don't want them tackling civic issues because Amazon is a company. It is a profit algorithm in a capitalist system. Humans inside can steer it to Do Nice Things here and there but ultimately its lives because Profit. The government's ONLY job is to Do Nice Things (maintain nice status of life). Therefore, it is the government's failure to leverage its own powers to solve the homeless issue. Because it's a representative plutocratic democracy, the people are partially to blame as well, although class disparity is a major obstacle.
randyrand 8y ago
The discrimination between taxing corporations vs "people" is often a dumb one to make. Assuming low corporate profits (e.g. hardy competition), corporate taxes just get passed directly onto employees and consumers. For Amazon, it may be a "corporate" tax. But for other low margin companies its just a tax on everyday people.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
forapurpose 8y ago
The real issue is how effective the anti-tax campaign was. Based on the NY Times and other article posted here[0], they used the same mix of populism, anti-government rhetoric, outrage, and propaganda that has become widely used by the GOP. But how did they sell it in a liberal city like Seattle? What makes it so powerful? I don't think it's the content; it's the technique. I tend to assume it includes an effective social media campaign (complete with targeting), and maybe that's the core of it, but does anyone know? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17300444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17300444
- anothergoogler 8y ago
  I agree, it's freaky how quickly the opposition organized, and with the similar overtones you noted. Another user linked a better source that mentions the opposition paying a group called "Morning in America" (that's a Reagan catchphrase, for the kids here): https://thecisforcrank.com/2018/06/12/todays-head-tax-defeat-has-lessons-for-both-sides/ https://thecisforcrank.com/2018/06/12/todays-head-tax-defeat... Like in SF, there's a lot of lukewarm liberalism in Seattle, and when the rubber meets the road you can see the conservatism.

39 points by danso 8y ago

It upset most folks. > Teresa Mosqueda, one of the two council members opposing the repeal, said there was no backup plan for dealing with the homeless situation. There was no plan, period. The plan consisted of 1. Tax Amazon, 2. ..., 3. Get re-elected. When they realized 3 didn't follow from 1, they started grasping at straws.

jadedhacker 8y ago
1. Tax Amazon, great in its own right regardless of the reason. 2. How do you provide for people without money? 3. Deserve your re-election by serving the poor and vulnerable at the expense of mind-blowing historically unprecedented wealth. Great example here of managed democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy
- daseiner1 8y ago
  deserve your reelection by nominally “serving the poor” while wasting loads of tax dollars and throwing good money after bad to retain a city council seat, you mean
- manfredo 8y ago
  More accurately, tax Amazon and over half a thousand other employers in the city. And spend money on social services that don't have a particularly good track record of eliminating the social ills they are intended to solve. Politicians made their own judgement as to whether or not this would be beneficial to their chances of reelection. Immediately concluding that because a government didn't pass a new tax, the government is a de-facto autocracy is extremely reductive.
  - s2g 8y ago
    They did pass it, after months of review. They repealed it a day after the announcement that they were doing so. Seattle is a company town now.
abeyer 8y ago
> There was no plan, period. Oh really? http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2018/05/up-against-a-wall-of-if-heres-how-seattle-head-tax-money-would-be-spent-on-capitol-hill/ http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2018/05/up-against-a-wall-... Not a perfect plan, maybe not even a particularly good one, but there absolutely were plans and budgets for how the money could have been used even before it was originally approved.
- gowld 8y ago
  Looks like a good fit for the regular budget to spend some of that property tax money Amazon and employees send it, not a good fit for blackmailing Amazon into a head tax.
  - abeyer 8y ago
    > blackmailing Amazon into a head tax That doesn't even make sense, how is blackmail involved? You may not agree with a tax, but that's what voting is for. If it passes, you pay it or you remove yourself from the jurisdiction...that's not blackmail, it's how taxes work.
    - Proven 8y ago
      It is coercion, and it doesn't actually improve living standard. > If it passes, you pay it or you remove yourself from the jurisdiction...that's not blackmail, it's how taxes work. Apparently not - you can clearly threaten to leave the jurisdiction and have the law and tax rolled back. Just need to learn how to deal with the thugs (politicians).
    - yellowapple 8y ago
      "or you remove yourself from the jurisdiction" Hopefully that move is to somewhere close by; else, that kind of black-and-white logic would directly result in 45,000 Amazon employees facing either relocation or unemployment. Even then, the added time and monetary costs of added commutes can put folks in a similar "between-rock-and-hard-place" scenario. In general, telling someone "if you don't like it, then move somewhere else" betrays a complete ignorance of the economic and psychological burden of doing so (burdens which not everyone can afford). Amazon itself can afford to move with relative ease, of course, but that doesn't hold true for the vast majority of its workers.
beebmam 8y ago
This is pure propaganda. There are SO many plans that many different local organizations are offering. Powerful companies who can communicate one single message backed by advertising/public appearances/media can make it appear that are no other "real" options. This is a deliberate political strategy. The reality is that there are an enormous amount of "real" options. But political will is hard to muster when there are many competing ideas as to what should be done. Without a doubt gentrification, homelessness, and housing/rental prices can all be addressed from many directions. I have my own ideas about what can be done by the city, state, and country. To say "there was no plan, period" is literal propaganda that exists to support the status quo.
- xapata 8y ago
  You're right, that was disingenuous. I should have said that the council doesn't seem to be changing it's plans despite how ineffective they have been. Maybe it's an implementation problem instead of a planning problem. I'm extremely frustrated by the seeming tolerance for literal shit in the streets. At least put some porta-potties out for public health. If it only costs $300k for laundry, showers, toilets, and sinks (according to the plan linked in the other comment) why hasn't it been done yet?
  - electricEmu 8y ago
    > I should have said that the council doesn't seem to be changing it's plans despite how ineffective they have been. That's funny xapata. The Seattle City Council has been implementing recommendations from the Poppe report [0]. The Poppe report lays out a homelessness action plan recommendations for Seattle. The head tax was to fund some of those recommendations from the Poppe report. The Seattle Times recently covered the homelessness count [1]. It explicitly mentioned that actions Seattle has taken to combat homelessness were having a positive effect. > Compared to more rapid rises in homeless counts over the past five years, a slower 4 percent increase represents progress, said Kyra Zylstra, interim director of All Home, the county’s homelessness coordinating agency, which organizes the yearly count. > “It’s not the kind of progress we all want to see,” Zylstra said. “But our performance data shows that the resources that we are investing in are housing people faster.” The whole point of the head tax was to continue funding recommendations from the Poppe report. They're the same recommendations that are demonstrated to be working. [0] https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/BPA.pdf https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/B... [1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/new-homeless-count-in-king-county-shows-spike-in-number-of-people-sleeping-outside/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/new-homel...
nugget 8y ago
The root of this problem stems from the American ideal of the primary home as an ever-appreciating investment. If you instituted a land value tax, raised property taxes overall, invested heavily in (reliable, clean, safe) public transportation to expand the commute radius, removed local authority over development, cut development approval timelines and costs, and slashed any zoning requirements that aren't directly related to individual safety, you'd nuke future appreciation and start to become the more livable, egalitarian city that many seem to want.
- Yizahi 8y ago
  Since wealth inequality is incredibly big and continuously increasing, big land/home taxes will lead to shifting home/land ownership to the 0.1% and cause 99.9% to rent it. Prices will increase sky high partially because owners can raise them (semi-monopoly of ultra rich owners) and partially to recoup ownership taxes. The whole thing will start failing even faster than now.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > big land/home taxes will lead to shifting home/land ownership to the 0.1% Piketty's work [1] found real estate (and its favorable tax treatment) to be the largest driver of wealth inequality in America. Land taxes would be progressive. (Particularly if the first X dollars of one's primary residence were excluded.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sitkack 8y ago
    With a slightly different split, this is already true.
  - nugget 8y ago
    There are plenty of practical policy solutions you can employ to shift more market power to lower and middle income folks; e.g. proposition 13 in California but limited to one residential property per person.
delbel 8y ago
they could have collected fresh underpants for the homeless for step #2, it might have worked.
s2g 8y ago
Huh, I gues the documents they put on were just gibberish. I’m looking forward to watching this same short of bootlicking and idiocy when Jeff comes around to extort tax breaks with the threat of HQ2.

aaronbrethorst 8y ago

The messaging on the part of the folks in favor of the Employee Hours Tax (EHT) was somewhere between terrible and nonexistent. The messaging of the anti-EHT folks was simple and persuasive. I had fully expected that the EHT would be repealed by ballot initiative come November, but didn't expect that the city council would just sort of roll over and repeal it. Erica Barnett, a local journalist, has a far more insightful look at what actually happened here than the somewhat superficial look the NYT provides: https://thecisforcrank.com/2018/06/12/todays-head-tax-defeat-has-lessons-for-both-sides/ https://thecisforcrank.com/2018/06/12/todays-head-tax-defeat...

anothergoogler 8y ago
Thanks, great article, the NYT piece and its headline are such garbage. The bit about this "Morning in America" lobby is interesting.
plinkplonk 8y ago
Great article. Much better than the New York Times article. From TFA "Is this really all about Amazon? No, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was. Council member Kshama Sawant, who exhorted her supporters to “Pack City Hall!” in a mass email yesterday, has consistently characterized the head tax as a “tax on Amazon” and Jeff Bezos, whom she described earlier today as “the enemy.” Demonizing individual corporations is rarely a path to building broad community coalitions, and that’s especially true when that corporation is Amazon, whose name many Seattleites (rightly or wrongly) consider synonymous with “jobs.” This is one reason head tax opponents were able to so easily spin the head tax as a “tax on jobs,” and to get ordinary citizens to gather signatures against a tax that would really only impact the city’s largest corporations." That seems like bad politics. Isn't it politics 101 to anticipate that the affected parties (here Amazon and Starbucks) would push back? And if enough political support to overcome this hasn't been built up in the first place, why would someone try passing the head tax at all? This is like playing chess looking only one move ahead. I don't get it. Help me understand? (Due Disclosure: Not a US citizen, nor a Seattle resident, I don't have a position, pro or anti, on the tax measure itself)
- 8y ago

gowld 8y ago

This is a great example of the extreme left-wing destroying itself. Seattle City Council passed an income tax (that was unconstitutional, oops). This new attempt was probably legal (or could be patched). This head tax failed because the campaign in favor was driven by insane anti-capitalist ranting by Councilwoman Sawant and friends, who made it a "war on Amazon" instead of a traditional, civilized, "share some of the wealth" campaign.

icantdrive55 8y ago

I didn't expect Internet based companies, like Amazon, to fix homelessness. That said, I'm saddened that the town council caved in so quick. Our biggest problem is homlessness. All I know, is it's basically illegial to live without a perment shelter in this once great country. Yes--once great. I'm not sure what's great about it anymore. If I had a do over, I would have hightailed it to France, or Canada in my twenties. Can't sleep anywhere, including your car, without breaking some law. There's know-where to go to the bathroom once they know you are homeless. The industrious will find food. That's about all they might find. That food will eventually need to leave the body though? I just don't understand not providing bathrooms. I'm not homeless, and I have a hard time finding a restroom in San Francisco. This country was founded by in debt homeless individuals? All the settlers were basically camping out? Homelessness is our biggest problem. It's beyond debating. We need to open up available federal, state, and county land to camping. We need to repeal all laws that have essentially criminalized being without a perment shelter. I don't want to debate. I've had too many friends die on the streets. Their last days were filled with overly aggressive cops ticketing them. That whole "fix the broken window theory" is policy for most counties now. Even to those that have a home, and a good job; do you like living in a country with so many laws? Laws that are designed to trip you up if you are poor, or even middle class. I'm sick of it.

pravinva 8y ago

Why is there no discussion on rezoning single home areas to allow multistorey buildings? Can someone explain how the influx of tech workers has forced out existing Seattle citizens onto the roads? Are we sure that they are not out of towners? Why don't those who can't afford the high rents move to nearby cities and counties instead of living on the streets? Would any parent want this for their child? Would they not seek to rebuild somewhere else, especially if they actually had some employable skills that allowed them to rent a 2 bed flat in the first place? Cause and effect don't make sense here

s2g 8y ago
There is lots of discussion of that and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous. A years long process won’t do anything to help thousands of homeless now.
- pravinva 8y ago
  Why are there thousands of homeless now? Is it a new phenomenon or a slow brewing thing. How can you conclude that recent massive hiring in Amazon has caused homelessness?
  - aaronbrethorst 8y ago
    1. Amazon hires thousands of people for six figure salaries. 2. Rents increase. 3. More people become homeless. http://q13fox.com/2017/11/06/study-says-rising-rents-tied-to-rising-homeless-population-in-seattle/ http://q13fox.com/2017/11/06/study-says-rising-rents-tied-to...
    - pravinva 8y ago
      Illogical. People who can't afford 2 bed rentals don't move to the nearby street if rents are unaffordable. They move to another town where they can afford the rents. Correlation isn't causation
      - 8y ago

fluxic 8y ago

In the past 24 hours, Jeff Bezos added $405 million to his net worth. In the past year, Jeff Bezos added $41 billion to his net worth. And yet somehow, Amazon can't throw a $50 million peanut at the epidemic of homelessness ravaging their hometown.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Amazon can't throw a $50 million peanut at the epidemic of homelessness ravaging their hometown This is an unfair framing. The tax did far more damage than impair Amazon's bottom line. Your complaint, moreover, could be leveled against every public service in the city. There are simply better ways to solve this problem. Seattle's government chose pot shots over progress.
- fluxic 8y ago
  Sure there are simply better ways, there are always better ways, and those better ways will be likewise crushed by the muscle at Amazon who make sure the company can extract as much value out of Seattle without having to pay its fair share in taxes.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > those better ways will be likewise crushed by the muscle at Amazon This tax was predominantly opposed by small business owners. (I think it was $25,000 donated by Amazon and close to $300,000 by small businesses.) The proposed tax was a flat payroll tax. That burdens lower-wage employees and employers much more than tech companies. There is perfect being the enemy of good, and then there is cutting off the nose to spite the face. This was the latter.
- s2g 8y ago
  > The tax did far more damage than impair Amazon's bottom line It really didn't though.
komali2 8y ago
Amazon is not the government. They don't have the expertise or even authority to tackle civic issues. I don't want them tackling civic issues because Amazon is a company. It is a profit algorithm in a capitalist system. Humans inside can steer it to Do Nice Things here and there but ultimately its lives because Profit. The government's ONLY job is to Do Nice Things (maintain nice status of life). Therefore, it is the government's failure to leverage its own powers to solve the homeless issue. Because it's a representative plutocratic democracy, the people are partially to blame as well, although class disparity is a major obstacle.

randyrand 8y ago

The discrimination between taxing corporations vs "people" is often a dumb one to make. Assuming low corporate profits (e.g. hardy competition), corporate taxes just get passed directly onto employees and consumers. For Amazon, it may be a "corporate" tax. But for other low margin companies its just a tax on everyday people.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

forapurpose 8y ago

The real issue is how effective the anti-tax campaign was. Based on the NY Times and other article posted here[0], they used the same mix of populism, anti-government rhetoric, outrage, and propaganda that has become widely used by the GOP. But how did they sell it in a liberal city like Seattle? What makes it so powerful? I don't think it's the content; it's the technique. I tend to assume it includes an effective social media campaign (complete with targeting), and maybe that's the core of it, but does anyone know? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17300444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17300444

anothergoogler 8y ago
I agree, it's freaky how quickly the opposition organized, and with the similar overtones you noted. Another user linked a better source that mentions the opposition paying a group called "Morning in America" (that's a Reagan catchphrase, for the kids here): https://thecisforcrank.com/2018/06/12/todays-head-tax-defeat-has-lessons-for-both-sides/ https://thecisforcrank.com/2018/06/12/todays-head-tax-defeat... Like in SF, there's a lot of lukewarm liberalism in Seattle, and when the rubber meets the road you can see the conservatism.