5 ms·

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 situati

by 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 They repealed it a day after the announcement that they were doing so.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.

by xapata 8y ago

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.