Seattle just passed an “Amazon Tax,” raiding their biggest businesses to pay for affordable housing.
Home to Amazon, Starbucks, and others, Seattle’s new tax may toe the line of driving away jobs and prosperity.
But Council leaders believe the move is necessary to address their growing homelessness problem.
CNN Money Reports:
A controversial proposal that will tax big businesses in Seattle to alleviate the city’s homelessness and affordable housing problems was approved Monday.
The Seattle City Council passed it unanimously in a 9-0 vote.
…
The newly passed ordinance, which takes effect in January 2019, will impose a “head tax” on the city’s highest grossing businesses. The tax will amount to $275 a year per full-time employee in Seattle. It would raise roughly $47 million a year on average and expire after five years, according to the Council.
That’s down from the $75 million a year the original proposal would have generated by imposing a $540 head tax per employee for the next few years, after which it would be converted to a 0.7% payroll tax.
The only question is: how much more can Seattle tax its businesses before they pick up and leave?
Starbucks blasted the decision saying “This City continues to spend without reforming and fail without accountability.”
Liberalism truly is a disease of the mind, where “spending other people’s money (OPM)” to satisfy their consistently FAILED policies, is now taking a toll on their equally sick like minded business owners. Dear Starbucks, Amazon – your foolish ideas are “coming home to roost”. Seattle will, predictably, COLLAPSE, as is San Francisco, among the other leading lights of the OPM movement are destroying their cities. The law of economics has not been repealed, even in dreamland: “You get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize”! Poverty and homelessness, COME TO SEATTLE!
Too bad they did not keep the $540 tax per employee. Seattle is run by a left wing political mafia…then the could really see the results of their extreme progressive ideas. I would think Starbucks should be happy….they are one of the corporate left wing leaders promoting this far left progressive ideology I guess the chickens are coming home to roost..
The obvious solution is for all businesses to pack up and leave Washington. There are many far better places to set up a business than there., and far better tax situations than there So, just leave.
Clearly demonstrating once again the old truism, when looneyeffin liberals get into positions of authority strange stuff happens.