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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 fo

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 I had fully expected that the EHT would be repealed by ballot initiative come November, but didn't expect that the city council would just sort of roll over and repeal it.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)
- Phrodo_00 8y ago
  > This is one reason head tax opponents were able to so easily spin the head tax as a “tax on jobs,” Also, the fact that it was a tax for every employee. If you want to encourage companies/people to do something (like hire people), you normally start by not adding extra taxes to that. Not that adding tax is always a bad thing, but the mechanism of this one was pretty poorly thought out.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    Payroll taxes are quite a normal thing, and it makes sense, since employees do add some non-zero amount to the amount of services that need to be provided by a given government even if they don't reside there. The stupidity was that it was a flat, $500 tax, which is not a big deal if you're paying your tech bros six figures, but becomes quite a big deal if you have a lot of minimum-wage earning grocery baggers (who were among the professions and corporations that would've been most impacted)
    - s2g 8y ago
      It raises the cost (excluding everything but salary, which is unrealistic) of a full time minimum wage worker by 0.9% per year. Add in the additional costs of an employee and that percentage drops even further. It was also targeted at the top 3% of companies or something. This was a paltry tax. If you want to convince me otherwise I want hard numbers, not "oh but the low profit minimum wage employers".
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        At the 2021 $15 min wage, it would've hiked the cost of a part time worker working 29 hours a work by 2.2%. (29 hours is the limit before one qualifies for employer health insurance under federal law, and IIRC neither Seattle nor Washington have any stricter laws.) So you'd be severely dis-incentivizing part time hiring. .9% is not a trivial tax increase. If sales taxes went up by .9%, that would be an undue burden on the poor. And a flat $500 head tax is more regressive than even a flat percentage tax on sales; making it only apply to the top X companies doesn't stop it from being regressive.

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)

Phrodo_00 8y ago
> This is one reason head tax opponents were able to so easily spin the head tax as a “tax on jobs,” Also, the fact that it was a tax for every employee. If you want to encourage companies/people to do something (like hire people), you normally start by not adding extra taxes to that. Not that adding tax is always a bad thing, but the mechanism of this one was pretty poorly thought out.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Payroll taxes are quite a normal thing, and it makes sense, since employees do add some non-zero amount to the amount of services that need to be provided by a given government even if they don't reside there. The stupidity was that it was a flat, $500 tax, which is not a big deal if you're paying your tech bros six figures, but becomes quite a big deal if you have a lot of minimum-wage earning grocery baggers (who were among the professions and corporations that would've been most impacted)
  - s2g 8y ago
    It raises the cost (excluding everything but salary, which is unrealistic) of a full time minimum wage worker by 0.9% per year. Add in the additional costs of an employee and that percentage drops even further. It was also targeted at the top 3% of companies or something. This was a paltry tax. If you want to convince me otherwise I want hard numbers, not "oh but the low profit minimum wage employers".
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      At the 2021 $15 min wage, it would've hiked the cost of a part time worker working 29 hours a work by 2.2%. (29 hours is the limit before one qualifies for employer health insurance under federal law, and IIRC neither Seattle nor Washington have any stricter laws.) So you'd be severely dis-incentivizing part time hiring. .9% is not a trivial tax increase. If sales taxes went up by .9%, that would be an undue burden on the poor. And a flat $500 head tax is more regressive than even a flat percentage tax on sales; making it only apply to the top X companies doesn't stop it from being regressive.