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@mekosoff I saw your Vanity Fair article about the head tax and since I work at Amazon and live here, I'd like to correct you on some points you got wrong in your article. AMZN didn't crush the tax, it was WILDLY unpopular in Seattle, over 70% disapproval when polled. Also...
This tax wasn't going to help the homeless - there was no spending plan in place by Seattle city council and we are all tired of being taxed nebulously to fix this but never having any results to show for it - no spending plan, no accountability, and also this tax targeted more..
than just amazon. It hit over 500 companies in Seattle and a lot of them are local mom and pop shops (Dicks Burgers, Trupanion pet insurance, etc) that could not pay the added tax and also avoid going out of biz or laying off workers. This is the 7th consec. tax increase to fix
the homeless issue and the city council wants to raise more? Less than 200 affordable housing units (not buildings, UNITS) would have been built with proposed ~75% of revenue going towards "admin costs". Also would have funded homeless camp sweeps and no money allocated towards..
things like shelters, drug addiction treatment, job training, expanding affordable housing, etc. There is way more to this issue than "BIG CORPORATION ACTS EVIL TO SAVE A BUCK ON TAXES" - there's a reason why this was immediately repealed and it's bc the city council...
realized that if it passed, they'd be immediately voted out of a job in response because of how historically unpopular this idea was. Even the construction unions were against it (plus other trade unions affected) - starbucks and other big companies were against it sure, but
so was pretty much everyone not named Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative. How is this fair: council voted 9-0 to pass it when it had a 20% approval rating throughout the city? That's not representative of the voters, and therefore it was rightly repealed. It was a...
shitty plan to start with and then rammed through the council for a vote less than TWO DAYS after it was first proposed. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Plus - "small tax"? It was going to cost ~$120 million per year for the largest companies but the kicker is that it converted to a higher % payroll tax over time and that % was much higher than the originally stated rate that was voted on and approved.
I realize that it might not fit the narrative being pushed to report on those facts, or maybe it was just oversight and lack of in-depth reporting on the ground, but your article was either inaccurate at best or willfully ignorant of the issue at worst.
