even if they wore
a Thousand cameras
which'd Slow 'Em Down,
considerably, sans ACCESS
to their Contents~it's like having
the Keys to the bank but Not having
the Combination to the Fucking Vault.

so, That's an Utter Waste
of your Bargaining
chits, dipshits

it seems democracy
Dies thru feck-
lessness

I wouldn't doubt that discussions on taxes on assets over 1 million are being entertained in Olympia!

"If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I’d be pale and scared. For he’s stolen..." As is so often the case with SLOG AM's links, this one opens to a paywall.

3~thank god derr
Schlogg has
hackers

Who
DO have
The Keys!
& SHARE!

but, Yeah.

"Mayor Wilson, the gauntlet has been thrown."

To which Mayor Wilson has the gauntlet been thrown. The Mayor of Portland, which SLOG has covered, or the Mayor of Seattle, which SLOG has covered.

@3: Try it again - there's no paywall on theverge - but there is a dialog for signing in - just click 'no thanks'.

Plenty of people can afford the rent on apartments from which people are being evicted. Those apartments aren't staying vacant for longer than it takes to repair them and restore their condition for the next tenant.

@Barth,

There are plenty of people lining up to afford the apartments from which people are being evicted, so the increase in evictions tells us little about the broader economy.

The people being evicted, in the case of the non-profit or municipal corporation owned housing of LIHI, Plymouth, and the Housing Authorities, that lead in numbers of evictions, have the same income sources and amounts as those replacing them, suggesting an unwillingness to pay, because there are no consequences during the winter eviction ban periods, rather than a lack of ability.

Still no word from the progressive Stranger and it commenters on why the most extreme income inequality in the country is allowed to occur in the counties in the country with some of the most progressive voters in the country.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/how-king-county-ranks-for-income-among-large-u-s-counties/

Anyone who thinks the threshold for this tax will remain at $1M once passed is wonderfully naive.

@7 -- so it's
a Good Thing
that peeps're getting
Evicted! just as Long as there
are Plenty More who can, for NOW,
anyway, Afford skyrocketing rent increases.

oh, to be a Nihilist!

Mister Magoo,
you've Step-
ped innit
Again.

@8 -- as long as
Repressive psychotic
Billionaires OWN the fucking
Means Of Communication, WTF
do you Suppose our Future will bring?

mister magoo
your boots're
stuck in the
ma~newer.

Viv, be a dear and email Dan to put ‘Continue Reading’ links on his Savage Love posts. Thanks!

@7 Oh my god. How could you possibly need this explained to you again??

You literally asked “why is [an increasing eviction rate] bad?” and i answered. Note, the subject was not “evictions are happening” but “the eviction rate is going up” which should be your first clue this is not about evictions per se — evictions are a normal feature of the rental market — but the fact that A GROWING NUMBER OF SEATTLE RENTERS ARE NO LONGER ABLE TO MEET THE TERMS OF THE LEASE THEY SIGNED, which is a lagging indicator of things like unemployment and increases to the cost of living, or that the local housing market is not keeping up with demand. It means more people than usual don’t have enough money to meet their basic needs. This is arguably good for individuals of means who are looking for housing but it’s a bad sign for the local and/or national economy when people can’t afford to put a roof over their head.

Mind you I don’t think this is particularly interesting, informative, or groundbreaking. I also don’t think it is the best way to measure economic instability. I just gave an honest and accurate answer to the question you asked, which again was “why is [an increasing eviction rate] bad?”

@9, Correct.

That is why Republicans would be wise to trade a Constitutional Amendment requiring the income tax to offset other taxes, like Sales and Property, with an Amendment permitting a state income tax.

This will be legally challenged. Why risk the likelihood that this court, with its current composition, will overrule their precedent that income is property that must be taxed at a uniform rate, when Republican's might be able to get something in return?

If nothing else, is an opportunity to expose Progressive's supposed concern with tax fairness for the poor, as a fraud, by forcing them to turn down Constitutional measures that insure the Washington State Tax Code becomes less regressive.

@5 Willful ignorance and an inability to take context clues for the win!

If you're finding it this hard to read Slog, maybe it's just being written above your reading comprehension level. Perhaps the Dr. Seuss shelf would be more accessible to you.

@9,

Seriously, I absolutely perish the thought of someone making a scant half million dollars a year facing a tax increase. Hopefully food pantries will be able to stock up to help keep them fed.

@9 So what? If the threshold falls, so likely will the marginal rate.

Speaking of which, I do find it annoying when members of the media write things like, "The proposal would impose a 9.9% income tax on people earning more than $1 million a year," which makes it sound like if you make $1,000,001 you'd pay $99,000 in income taxes, when in fact you'd actually pay less than a dime.

DOUG. @17, agreed. The thing that annoys me even more about how this tax proposal is characterized in the media is when they repeatedly refer to it as a millionaires' tax when of course the definition of a millionaire is by net worth. There's only a small portion of the millionaires out there who are actually earning in excess of $1 million a year.*

Cue the trolls: "Maybe that's how YOU define 'millionaire', but nobody around here needs to be constrained by your tired, old assumptions about what certain words are supposed to mean."

Disclaimer. My pet peeve has nothing to do with the case for or against this tax.

@13, What if your unproven presupposition is not correct? It isn't, so your conclusion is not correct.

The evidence that your presupposition is not correct: The eviction leaders are the non-profits like LIHI, Plymouth Housing, and public housing authorities. Their tenants did not suddenly lose their Social Security Disability Incomes resulting in non-payment.

You also have a "small numbers" problem with the dataset. The number of evictions is in the very low thousands, out of 405,000 King County rental units. The increase in evictions is dozens to hundreds. So small numeric changes, create hugely skewed and magnified percentage changes. One eviction increase in a world where there were previously only two, yields a 50% increase. The same increase in a world of a 1,000 previous evictions is 1/10th of 1%.

Lastly, the units re-rent as quickly they can be turned around after eviction indicating there are still tons of households with the income to afford the units in question.

Vacancy rates actually tell us a good deal more. It includes units in the tens of thousands, so we don't have the small numbers problem. It includes thousands of new units, for which there are too many units chasing too few households able to afford the rent. They are concentrated across the higher end of rent rates indicating there aren't enough tenants that can afford the rent rates. It, unlike current evictions, actually tells us people can't afford the rent that owners must charge to make the loan payments on the building. It reflects layoffs at Amazon, et. al. due to A.I.

@15, Where is the geographic context to draw from? New York is equal-distant from Portland and Seattle. The SLOG has featured both Mayors recently. All three cities have city halls. No context or information is provided to indicate which have a "pit" attributed to City Hall.

I emailed the Tasveer Film Center ( info@tasveer.org ) last week for more information after seeing the updated marquee saying that films would start screening on Feb 13th but no one got back to me.

There are currently no listing on their own calendar of upcoming films ( https://tasveer.org/venue/tasveer-film-center/ ) and no third-party channels (Fandango, MovieTickets.com, Google) have any info on the theater at all.

I really want Tasveer's stewardship over the Ark Lodge to be a success, but their PR people need to get their shit together and do some work.

@20 Apparently you've never heard of the pit beside City Hall in Seattle. You know, the one where they were going to put up a building and then they didn't? You know, the one that's been there for 20 years?

https://theneedling.com/2023/02/09/giant-hole-in-front-of-seattle-city-hall-finally-converted-into-giant-ball-pit/

I was apparently right to suggest Dr. Seuss to you. If you'd tried to read Dick and Jane, you'd have been wandering around asking if it was supposed to be Dick Nixon or Dick's burgers and Jane Goodall or Jane from Tarzan. Where is the context?!?!

Hint: The Stranger is a Seattle publication. If they're talking about Mayor Wilson without any other qualifiers, it's probably the Mayor Wilson in Seattle.

@19, If you want to argue against the presupposition that it’s bad when increasing numbers of people are unable to afford housing then have at it. I will not be participating in this conversation any further and i will sleep just fine tonight knowing you don’t believe this to be true.

thumpus was spot on when he said talking to you is like arguing with a large language model. If nothing else this has been a helpful reminder to stop reading your dumb comments.

George Sorel, committed social revolutionary and leading political philosopher during the fin de siecle said this;

"Revolutions closely resemble romantic dramas: the ridiculous and the sublime are mixed so inextricably together that we are often unsure how to judge men who seem to be at one and the same time buffoons and heroes."

Of course, those engaging in "revolutionary" street action often have a need to deny buffoonery in their midst, but even the grandaddy of social revolution theory knew buffoonery is inherent to the project.

I'm beginning to understand why Charles rarely touches Sorel in his Marx lit screeds.

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

@17 Nope, they structured the tax to be a flat rate with an exemption to get around the constitutionality restriction on a progressive income tax so if they lower the bar that just means everyone below the new bar is paying that rate. The example you provide is exactly the reason why it will get lowered as well. There simply aren't going to make enough money on this for all their pet programs. There is barely anything in this to offset regressive revenue and it all goes into the general fund where they can do whatever they want with it. The $1M threshold is simply a way to get people to buy into it and once its established it will only take a simply majority in the legislature to lower this. We are all going to paying into this at some point.

@18 the real downside of this tax as it is now is that people believe it will be primarily levied on CEO's who earn that much in compensation. There are a handful who do but the large majority of taxpayers who will be ensnared by this are S corps. These are small business owners who choose to report their business income on their personal tax return, that is by far the majority of people "earning" $1M per year in WA state. These people are not making a $1M, their business is and they are then using that revenue to continue to run their business. So while this is sold as "taxing the rich" the truth is you are applying yet another tax on small business owners. There are going to be unintended consequences to this legislation and its not going to produce anywhere near what they forecast but at least we'll be "taxing the rich" right?

@26 is required reading!

@22, I am sure lots of people have never heard of the pit beside City Hall. It's a bit inside baseball, so to speak.

The Great City Hall Pit would imply that its part of, not beside, City Hall. It's dangerous, and poor writing, to assume the reader would know about the pit, to assume that Portland doesn't have one also, etc. It makes one wonder what writing and journalistic skills The Stranger requires, if any.

Why not just say, "Mayor Katie Wilson," "K. Wilson," or, "Seattle Mayor Wilson," since the SLOG keeps reporting on events surrounding both cities and mayors, has a regional following with its narrow demographic, etc?

@23, With the word "unable" you are once again supplying and relying on an unproven presupposition.

Further it isn't supported by what other reporting and data on the phenomena has previously shown, which is that its LIHI, Plymouth, and the housing authorities accounting for the largest numbers of evictions. I.e. Those that housing providers serve the poorest of the poor who's largest, and often only, source of income is Social Security Disability. So they didn't lose a job and lose income. So what changed that made them unable to pay? Nothing.

The eviction made the units available to people on those housing provider's long waiting lists, with the same income sources, who are willing to pay, and is keeping those non-profits viable by preserving a critical source of revenue to keep the housing they provide, and the non-profits that steward the housing viable.

Actually thumpus was wrong, talking to neale is worse than arguing with an llm. It’s like calling an 800 number hoping to speak to an operator only to get caught in an endless loop of menu options all leading back to where you started. At least an llm has the capacity to learn from the interaction. This is just mindless repetition purely for the sake of arguing.

@26 There's no way "we are all going to paying into this at some point" at 9.9% unless the state sales tax goes away across the board.

@28 Who could predict that a Seattle blog was talking about the Seattle mayor?!

You don't need to prove that you're a pedant who thinks he's several orders of magnitude smarter than he actually is. We know already. Just take the L, Ahab.

@30,

Yup. A few months ago Amazon or someone announced they'd be laying off a large number of well compensated Seattle area developers. Apparently thinking himself clever, Neale suggested this was a win for low wage earners, as it'd narrow the income earning gap, which is a frequent progressive talking point & goal. He kept pressing, and so I eventually took the bait and pointed out that the only reason progressives cite the wage disparity as a source of frustration is that low income folks are consistently unable to achieve a decent and sustainable quality of life, and that higher income folks losing jobs does nothing to address this. That shut him up in that thread, though there was another round of layoffs late last week and so on Friday he was right back on it with the same childish nonsense. There's absolutely nothing remotely edifying to be gained from reading or engaging with him in any way whatsoever, as it's all just a brain-deadening, pointless loop. The rhetorical parallels between him and Trump are profound.

@33, Yet people like you and other Progressives offer no qualification to the demand that income inequality end. No restrictions or qualifications are offered on the means to achieve the stated outcome.

"Tax the rich" is a frequent call on this page, not, "Tax the rich to send it to the poor," or "Raise the poor to match the top." "Taxing the rich," in and of itself, does not raise the bottom, it just make the rich less well off, to close the income gap.

So stop with the revisionist claims on your policy objective.

mike blob @33: "There's absolutely nothing remotely edifying to be gained from reading or engaging with him in any way whatsoever, as it's all just a brain-deadening, pointless loop."

mike, if this is your conclusion, then why not translate it into action--or in this case, inaction--and just DFTT? What if our resident sane voices like you and boatgeek resolved to abstain from responding to this individual for the entire brief month of February? Imagine if this individual's contributions to these threads were only answered by his personal echo chamber and enabler, barth, for that time. I think it would be quite refreshing.

District13refugee: "@17 Nope, they structured the tax to be a flat rate with an exemption to get around the constitutionality restriction on a progressive income tax so if they lower the bar that just means everyone below the new bar is paying that rate."

The question is not if it's a flat rate; the question is if it's a marginal tax rate or not. If it's a marginal tax rate, then DOUG.'s comment @17 is absolutely correct. District13refugee, care to give your yes or no as to whether this is a marginal tax rate?

@33, lol yes i’ve seen that one a few times. He’s got like 5 or 6 scripts he runs through. You could have 10 people dragging him through the mud and he’ll be back at it the next day repeating himself like it’s brand new. I have to remind myself his personality defects are not my problem and to just keep on scrolling.

@31 your faith in the legislature is duly noted however there are many of us who have paid attention over the years and are jaded over the many times they have chosen to continue screwing over taxpayers rather than course correct or be fiscally responsible (see car tab valuation, the long term care tax, the climate commitment act, the massive fraud in Covid payments and DHS etc etc etc)

OK, I got confused, and I have to correct my response @35 to District13refugee @26. DOUG. did say @17: "@9 So what? If the threshold falls, so likely will the marginal rate."

Yeah, I think it's likely that the marginal rate would go down if the threshold went down, but boy, that becomes such a backdoor to just a regular, old income tax. Stupid question from someone who has demonstrated their own stupidity: doesn't this legislation patently violate the state constitution's prohibition against an income tax?

“Tax the rich” is a slogan. “Increase the top marginal tax rates and use the revenue to fund education, housing, and health care for working class americans” is only a few more words but it’s much closer to a policy proposal and it’s the kind of thing you would encounter in the real world if you actually care about this issue and aren’t pretending to have been born yesterday for the sake of tearing down a straw man.

Now hit yourself in the head with a ball peen hammer until you forget you read this and we can do this all over again tomorrow.

@38 No, because its a flat tax. Property tax (which income is considered in WA) is constitutional as long as its a flat tax and not progressive. That is why it is currently structured as 9.9% with a $1M exemption. The legislature could adjust both items (have it kick in at $100K and adjust the rate to 5%) but I really think you are giving them too much credit to assume that would happen.

If you really have doubts as to their honorability consider they have also attached an emergency clause on the bill which would prevent it from going to the voters and would require a full blown initiative effort to put it on the ballot. If this such a great thing why won't they let people vote on it? They have continually shown us who they are and yet people believe so much in "pay their fair share" they are willing to go along with it. Heck even Larry Springer has said they are full of shit and he is one of them.

@35,

Yeah, I'm becoming increasingly receptive to the realization that replying to him is utterly pointless, and as such have been mostly refraining from doing so of late. I guess I still occasionally make the mistake of thinking he must possess some modicum of dignity or self-respect, and so pointing out the obvious & obnoxious stupidity in his comments would have an effect. He obviously doesn't, and It obviously doesn't.

And with all that said, "Now hit yourself in the head with a ball peen hammer until you forget you read this and we can do this all over again tomorrow," is probably the funniest thing I've read all week. FWIW, I think I'd actually be a little bummed if barth followed through and completely stopped making fun of him.

@41

"Yeah, I'm becoming increasingly receptive
to the realization that replying to him
is utterly pointless, and as such have
been mostly refraining from
doing so of late."

I lost all faith
in 'Here are some
Cherry-picked 'facts'
to Support my tunnel
Visions,' aka Mister Magoo,
aka Myopic AF, aka Adiosa, Omarosa

after reading his 'solution'
to people with Mental
Health issues:

they
could
merely

"QUIT. ACTING. CRAZY"

as in "Heal Yourself, you IDIOT!"

and found myself,
before reading any more,
skipping ahead to see a comment's source

(which Could be alleviated
if we all* had avatars
or icons or wtv)

and the same
as with 'tentsores'
whose bilious projections
(sometimes) [oftimes] aren't
worth Wasting a moment on.

*& some're
Vastly Easier to
spot: you're welcome!

@32: Wrong. Good journalism is surveying possible confusion and being proactive. Because these mayors have the same surname, are both horrible commie leftists, it's a distinction without a difference but it's good to be precise.

@43

"Because these mayors
[the Wilsons] have the same
surname, are both horrible commie leftists... "

if Anything
they lean toward
democratic Socialist

"... but it's good to be precise."

and All in. the. SAME. comment.

gosh, KkKoolie
the Kool-Aide
has Gone to
Your brain:

I suggest a Most
Thorough colon
Cleansing, to
get to the
Heart of
the Mat-
ter. best
of Luck!

@44: Ok, so they're horrible democratic socialists. Glad to oblige.

@45

projecting
your 'horrifics'
onto those seeking
Justice for human beings

that's what's
Horrible. you
wear it, poorly,
tho your Masters
Appreciate your efforts

even if it Won't
be Enough to
spare you

maybe they'll even give you
a nice Pat on the back as
they Shove you into
the ditch.