This is absurd.

"So, it's not a matter of the head tax being right or wrong, good or bad, fact or fiction, science of religion. What the chimps must do is bang and jump when any talk about raising taxes emerges from the foliage."

You're position, as a member of a voting group who torpedoed a carbon tax that would have helped your lower quintile with their massive 16% of income state tax burden, is that there's no merit to debating the merits of yet another regressive tax that will hit your state's poorest?

SF has a similar proposal on the June ballot this year. But the SF proposal isn't a regressive property tax. It's a tax on rental income from commercial properties. Companies can't dodge it by cutting employment or wages. And you're saying that ANY comparison between the 2 would amount to nothing more than chimps jumping and banging?

God bless Charles Mudede.

Every human society we know of, large or small, pre- or post-industrial, pre- or post-agricultural, has engaged in warfare.

And war is merely politics by other means.

Homo Sapiens is not only an inherently political species; it is the most political species of animal ever observed.

"I'll save you a few thousand meaningless words, Mr. Mudede.

'I'm so profoundly ignorant about economics that I have a fervent belief in a universally failed economic system. Nonetheless I'll rant about economics.' Sums up all you ever write really.

You're welcome.

@4 Yeah pretty much

Charles also seems to ignore that many companies have already said they're going to simply deduct the cost from employee salaries. IE the poorest people in Seattle will earn even LESS.

“they're going to simply deduct the cost from employee salaries. IE the poorest people in Seattle will earn even LESS.”

The poor in Seattle are not making salaries. And they can’t pay less than minimum wage so that assertion makes no sense.

The difference between humans and chimps isn't that humans have positive traits distributed more equitably than chimps do, it's just that we dislike violence and have spend tens of thousands of years trying to mitigate that value of violent potential.

But the underlying reality is that strength, brains, charm, comeliness, and health are in fact inequitably distributed among humans.

@6: Fewer hours, no pay raises.

"So, even if you do not agree with raising taxes, you have to admit that what all of the anti-tax people are offering as a solution to a brutal housing crisis is more of what has, for the most part, caused the crisis."

Actually, what the "anti-tax people" are proposing is as follows:

""The compromise we'd like to see for this additional tax, this additional funding to fight the homelessness crisis in our city...rather than the businesses having to send money to City Hall, we send the money directly to charities that have had measurable success in combating homelessness in our city," Donovan said."

http://komonews.com/news/local/dicks-drive-in-says-giving-directly-to-charity-is-better-than-proposed-head-tax

In other words, the "anti-tax people" have no problem spending money to address homelessness. They just believe that the city council isn't effective at managing its resources. Based on the fact that the city council can't seem to keep a bike lane within 1300% of the estimated budget, I think this is a pretty reasonable concern.

@5:

Your argument, such as it is, doesn't make any sense, because for one thing you can't just CUT employee salaries just to make up the difference in what the company would have to pay in taxes on this, especially given that the unemployment rate is at record lows currently, and as a result wages are starting to rise, slowly to be sure, but definitely starting to move upward. Employers are starting to get desperate, so you really think "oh, sorry. We have to cut your wages by $0.26 per hour in order to cover this" is going to be a terribly effective recruiting or retention tool for them? Think again. If anything they'll raise prices, but given the scope of companies that would be affected, it's not going to be enough to drive most of their customers away.

@8/11:

In order to cut employee hours employers would have to ADD more employees to cover the gap, so in this instance it would actually be detrimental to cut the hours of current employees and then hire more, because it's a PER EMPLOYEE tax.

Jeebuz Christ on a Ritz Cracker...

Man you can tell who owns a business and who doesn't on SLOG. Jesus.

None of this would matter if this stupid god damned state would implement in income tax and then we could dump this obscene lattice of regressive taxes that are a fiscal house of cards.

I guarantee you the big tech companies are not cutting salaries or hours in any significant way. Maybe of a few drivers and admin hourly wage people. Maybe. But I doubt it.

They CAN'T cut hours without hiring MORE people. We're below 4.8% unemployment for fuck sake. They can't fill those positions as it is. None of the big companies will even feel this.

BUUUT. Mid-sized companies? I dunno. This might be a "make or break" for slim margin companies. Which there are a quite a few in this town that will qualify.

AFAIK as a business owner my gross revenues might barely qualify for this tax in 2019 (if all goes according to plan) but my head count will make the cost to my profits equal to statistical noise.

I have yet to really look at it. That's what hire people to do. And they are not freaking out. So I'm not. The 0.7 percent payroll tax makes a great deal of sense to me.

All I really know is that if KIRO Radio, the SLOG Trolls and the Chamber of Commerce and the morons at the Tax Policy institute are against it, it must be good.

These shit sticks are the George Costanzas of policy making. Every instinct they have proves wrong 90% of the time. So. Always do the opposite of what they want.

@14 Congratulations. That was an astounding collection of dumbness.

Of course private business should pay for social services! Hey shit. For fuck sake that's who brings people here and why we have chokeing growth! That's why our social services are completely strained.

And many business deliberately pay wages too low to sustain a living standard here. So we, the god damned tax payers, end up supplementing private businesses by, you know, funding poor peoples emergency room visits, food stamps, and then the resulting social problems when people can't afford to live in a city. So either THEY help pay for problems they help cause or WE pay. And ignoring these problems is just another way of forcing the tax payer to pay MORE by allaying the cost until it becomes a collapse.

Weed tax and sugar tax? What do they have to do with anything? None of the revenues from those go to housing. They are consumption regulation taxes. The sugar taxes fund things like education, food banks, and "fresh bucks" so poor people can get more nutritious food.

I mean, even if it was true that non-profit execs are these rich weasels WAS true, if you're a free market fetishist the fact that non-profoti executives make money would be a good thing? After all they will buy all those boats, and Teslas, and pool tables and bathroom remodels that keep the working class employed. Right? Isn't that trickle down?

And the head tax doesn't effect property owners at all. That's the fucking point of it. To avoid yet another property tax that will drive up property values (though they are far from the main driver). The whole point is to deal with real estate and property inflation that is driving poor people to live on the fucking streets.

There is room to argue if this tax will do what it claims it will do. But it's a desperate gambit because nobody wants to pay the REAL costs of living here. You just want somebody else to pay. Well. The bill is due. And either Amazon and the Tech companies start paying for the growth or we get to work and get an income tax for the state.

Guess which one voters don't want more?

The city's case for this tax might be more solid if it would state plainly how the money would be spent. No tax should ever be levied unless its purpose is explicit. This used to be taken for granted, but in the last couple of years, the city council prefers to levy the tax, and then decide how it revenues will be spent. Spending it on "the homeless emergency" or "housing crisis" is too general. The same happened with the soda pop tax. Each councilmember can spend the tax's revenues however they want. This isn't why municipal governments were created. Seattle can't be in the welfare business. We already voted for a tax to raise $290 million for housing. Enough is enough.

@3: Also among the most destructive, too.
@4 & @5: You might want to check the spelling of your user names.
@13 COMTE: Thank you.

@16 Dr Zaius: I'm going with Door #2, the passing of a state income tax---mainly because it keeps getting shot down every time a bill for it hits the ballots. But corporations need to pay their fair share. Agreed: enough is enough.

@16 "And the head tax doesn't effect property owners at all. That's the fucking point of it."

Did you miss the part where Amazon stated it was cancelling it's Rainier Square lease? Seems to me like loosing ~725,000 sq. ft. of tenancy might effect the building owner, but I'm admittedly not an expert on commercial real estate.

Seattlites will gladly tax themselves to build things like schools, fire stations and libraries, even if they can’t afford to keep them open or operate them properly (there’s another school levy coming up this fall, probably to rebuild schools that are closed. I have no doubt it will pass.) but they don’t like to see the local companies taxed. Maybe because they fear losing their job, or being underwater on their mortgage, or seeing their 401k or stock options take a dive. That may not be realistic, but most fears aren’t. All politics are local, and there’s nothing more local than the bank account.

As Our Dear Dr. Zaius rightly points out, this wouldn’t be an issue if we had a decent tax structure in this state, but we don’t. And there’s a lot of money being spent to keep people stupid and suspicious when it comes to taxes. The left really doesn’t do themselves any favors by blindly defending taxes, or the way that we continue to throw money at the homeless problem without making a dent.

I think this tax needs to be withdrawn and retooled, with a comprehensive plan developed that will address how the money will be spent, and define what benchmarks should be achieved to gauge success. The status quo is not sustainable from a humanitarian or fiscal standpoint. It is failing everyone, and all this tax plan seems to do is make revenue projections and vague promises about how many housing units will be built. Solving this problem involves so much more than providing housing, and it’s not a Seattle-specific issue. We need regional planning.

Since 1981, Seattle voters have approved one bond and five levies to create affordable housing.
So why not go that route again? Levy fatigue?
Without a state income tax, any proposed tax can be characterized as regressive.
But we all know that what opponents of the proposed tax really want is not a more artfully crafted tax proposal.
What they want done about homeless encampments is less carrot, more stick. A city-wide crackdown on tents, tarps, and trash.

I stomped reading after he spent several paragraphs calling his readers a bunch of monkeys. Who lives with this abuse?

You know the reason most businesses fail is that most businesses are run by incompetents. The reason they even started a business in the first place is they thought they were smarter than the guy they were working for, and weren't smart enough to realize how wrong they are. It used to be a clown couldn't start a business because the banks had a "no clowns" rule. But then they made this huge Federal bureaucracy that shovels billions in loans to the clowns whom the banks shouldn't touch.

Right up until they fail, the run around lecturing everyone on economics. A lot of halfassed businesses can go four or five or six years before finally cratering. More if you grift a little. Funny accounting. Selling off bits, buying bits of others. If you're white, and especially a white man, you get even more second and third and fourth chances. When the clown in charge finally does go under, he blames liberals and the government. If he was smart enough to recognize his own incompetence, he never would have done any of it in the first place.

Huge corporations aren't really smarter. Look at how many terrible products they sink fortunes into and sit back and watch them limp along and fail. They are good at grifting their way out of consequences for that. Write offs, selling off this or that, buying up other things and merging and mixing and matching. Business!

Conservatives can't grasp any of this. They compulsively assume life is fair. You can't possibly own a business and be a clown. An incompetent nincompoop couldn't rise to control an enterprise of any size because there are natural forces at work -- powerful forces! -- that make sure of it: Life. Is. Always. Fair. Ask any conservative. It just is.

Conservatives hate taxing the rich to help the poor because the rich deserve every dime they have and the poor don't deserve anything. They don't know that life is not fair. Babies.

This is on point. Charles has been in point lately. Which is good.

However, he should really change "racket" to "din" in paragraph three. The word "racket" has it sounding like he's about to call the tax a racket, whereas "din" avoids that problematic double meaning.

But the main point is a good one. And important. These anti-tax cats are just about making noise. And they make noise because they know it works. Anti-tax has the incumbency in American political discourse, and in American minds too. It doesn't have to make an argument to get its way. A good racket will do.

Excellent article, Charles.

Spot on!

@21, Here here.

You might have better luck convincing your eastern neighbors of the need for an income tax and the benefits they'd receive from it, if you made it a habit to shoot down regressive taxation. They have no reason to trust you. They see people who will impose an income tax on them, and keep all the regressive taxes in place.

In 2016 (i think) you had a proposal to enact a carbon tax along with tax relief for your over taxed bottom quintile. And you shot it down. This year your "inclusive" process wants to enact the carbon tax, but gives no relief to poor people paying 16% of their income to the state. To them, all you're doing is passing a new tax to fix waterfronts for rich people. They don't trust you.

I'm not sure if you've wrapped your collective minds around this yet, but to reach tax fairness, you not only need to increase taxes on the rich and on businesses (who also don't pay an income tax) but also lower taxes on your bottom earners. You have a dire progressive need to lower poor peoples taxes. You tax them too much! You should be the tax cut party!!!

Seriously. I’ve read so many times on slog this year that a $100 rent increase links to this huge explosion of homelessness (and how many people are one small emergency away from being out on the street) and yet you innovative “progressives” can’t make the connection between homelessness and your 10.1% sales tax?

That's some super educated buffalo chip writing.

FFS. If you want people to take your pseudointellectual ramblings about housing-related topics even a little seriously, learn how to spell NIMBY. It’s an acronym, Charles.

This simian comment was spot-on, Charles.

"What the chimps must do is bang and jump when any talk about raising taxes emerges from the foliage."

That's one to describe the blitzkrieg of propaganda ("tax on jobs") coming from corporate media.

@13: So, add contractors from job shops located outside Seattle city limits.

Did you know OxFam America is going to set up an office in Belltown? Enough said. #29, 30, etc., please move away.

28 LUKE JOSEF. It's "Hear, hear" not "here here" Go read a book.

@24:

I'll say it again, veeerrrry slowwwwly and VERY LOUDLY, so you can follow: It DOES. NOT. MATTER. how many hours an individual employee works, because the tax is based on the total number of hours worked by ALL EMPLOYEES. Cutting hours and then hiring more employees to make up the difference in productivity LITERALLY DOES NOTHING in terms of mitigating the amount of tax the employer would have to pay.

@35:

I can imagine a few businesses might attempt to do that, but in reality most aren't going to be in a position to transfer significant amounts of work away from the City, where it's already established; the costs of building out infrastructure to accommodate additional workforce for example, would most likely offset or even exceed the cost of the tax itself. And if their customers are here, they would also face the dilemma of adding cost to their end, as they would then be forced to travel out of the City to purchase the company's goods or services, or else there would be added costs of shipping from the outlying location back into the City.

You know the fight is well and truly lost when the proponents have nothing remaining other than to call their opponents chimps. That is called a “tell,” boys and girls.

Unless our City Council can tell us why all of our spending to eliminate homelessness has resulted in more homeless persons than ever, they have no business asking us for more money. Full stop.

In the early 90s Hollywood started filming movies in Seattle. They were calling us the new Hollywood north. Then the Brilliant Seattle government decided they could afford to pay huge amounts of taxes to fund Seattle's admittedly stupid projects like pay toilets and huge weird art projects ect. The film industry have Seattle a Big middle finger and started filming in B.C. Boeing moved its HE to the east coast and has spent the last decade dismantling and moving to other states many of its manufacturing sites. WAMU moved its HE and all its customer service which was hundreds of jobs. Verizon Wireless moved its HE to the east coast and all its customer service positions. Hundreds of more jobs gone. Anyone who does not believe that these companies will pack up and leave like the Cleveland Browns is smoking way to much of that now legal green. Also the have not been paying attention to what these CEOs are flat out telling us. People say it would be too expensive but that is a lack of math. It will be a one time expense instead of a year after year tax. Also they are looking to move to cities that will give them Tax BREAKS! They can easily actually come out ahead just by moving. And saying that their customers are here is just plain ignorant. Just Amazon alone has more customers worldwide and would have no loss from moving in customers. It would fix the housing problem though. If the employed moved to follow the big companies employing them, then there would be plenty of empty buildings to put people that have no income to pay for the housing. Do it'll take care of itself either way. And there will be all those unused bike lanes to put more tents in.