Posted on 05/14/2018 10:38:16 PM PDT by qaz123
After a weekend of high-stakes negotiations between Seattle City Council members and Mayor Jenny Durkan, the council voted unanimously Monday to tax the city’s largest employers to help address homelessness.
Starting next year, the tax will be $275 per employee, per year on for-profit companies that gross at least $20 million per year in the city — down from a $500-per-head proposal that Durkan threatened to veto.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Having paused construction planning on an office tower over the larger proposal, Amazon now will move ahead with it, a spokesman said after the vote. But the company’s plans to occupy a skyscraper under construction are still up the air, he said.
“We are disappointed by today’s City Council decision to introduce a tax on jobs,” spokesman Drew Herdener said in a statement
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
I left Seattle for rural KY seven years ago. My oldest daughter and her husband just visited and found a rental in Louisville. They’re moving here from Ballard in two months. They want to start a family and that was the final straw that convinced them to get out of that hell hole.
It’s a shame. Seattle used to be a nice place.
A lot of my LIBERAL friends in Seattle are complaining all over FaceBook, btw. The town has gone full leftist, which does not please thinking liberals. I suspect we are going to see a very serious downturn there in the next decade.
Then fact that this was a 9-0 decision tells us all we need to know. This will not go well for that town.
Amazon needs to move to Tacoma. Or maybe Bellevue or Issaquah.
That is my take as well. I think Amazon sees the writing on the wall. The only way I see them staying is if they cut a special deal with the city, like Boeing did with the state a couple of decades ago. And that won’t sit well with everyone else.
The city is becoming an experiment in fascism in a world where everyone is free to move away. This will leave a mark.
Kinda like that Walmart store in Montreal that voted to join the union. The next day, the store closed...permanently.
Most CEO’s, even the liberal ones aren’t stupid.
They move.
Maryland instituted a Millionaire’s tax years ago. It was an extra tax on high earners, most of whom just changed their citizenship to their homes in low tax states or just moved.
Amazon is basically offices, servers and warehouses. It’s not like they own manufacturing plants with millions of dollars of infrastructure.
Moving can literally be done over the weekend if they put their minds to it.
I work for a manufacturing company. Moving the plant would be nearly impossible. Between the specialty equipment and the skilled labor, the disruption would be massive. I think the only way would be to build a new one, run them concurrently then when the new one is fully up to speed in a few years, shutter the old one.
I wonder if it’s constitutional (state constitution).
I just perused the 700+ comments on the times article. You’d think the people there are all far right conservatives. They are not happy. None of them.
This reminds some of them of the ridiculous and failed soda tax there.
HQ2. Is about to become HQ1.
Do liberals care about laws or Constitutions. They make everything up as they go along, according to how they felt when they woke up that morning.
You’re talking sane, rational thinking. Neither applies to anything on the Left.
So this is a tax on being alive and working. Great.
Let’s fund homelessness because that won’t encourage more of it ;p
Besides, it really does show that liberals are very caring when they get to spend other peoples money but can only accomplish this by creating a new tax.
Next will be a state provided job with guaranteed income, that will eliminate the problem ;p
When obamacare hit everyone, a definitely remember a woman who supported it, during an interview. That is, until she realized that she had to pay for it. She, being the absolute moron that she is, thought it was all free and the world would be nothing but rainbows, unicorns and lollipops from that point on.
No different than those 700+ comments you read. It’s all great when someone else is paying for it, or at least that’s what they think. But, when it hit them in THEIR wallet, hold on a minute, Big Guy, that’s my money your playing with. And, they are probably just smart enough to realize that this will force companies to move or cut jobs.
Again, those same “far right comments” could be applied if Seattle, instead of imposing the tax, decided that shelters would be opened all over the city, in the trendiest, hipsterish, upper liberal middle class, rich liberal neighborhoods. Those people would be storming city hall with pitchforks and torches.
Everyday, they are the poster children for hypocrisy.
And we both know, that when it fails, they’ll just shrug their shoulders and say they meant well. And that it’s a shame that all the greedy business owners and workers were too selfish to help out their fellow man.
Then the “Good Idea Fairy” will show up again and come up with another disastrous idea.
One of these areas is on the walk to the Ballard locks. This is a tourist area. It is a very trendy area. My daughter and her husband paid, for an old, small three bedroom on a postage stamp lot with no parking and iffy street parking, $3400 a month. They are looking at a five bedroom home in a beautiful neighborhood in Louisville with a sound proofed theater room and two car garage with LOTS of parking in the driveway and street, $2200. And no traffic hassles.
It’s downright comical as more and more people in Seattle realize just how much they are paying and what they are getting for it, they are wondering why they are there.
One of my other daughters lives about 30 blocks north of the U-district and they are stuck there because her husband started up an internet company that has become quite successful, but he can’t just move his employees out of the area. But I just found out he is working toward selling the business (Apparently it was his goal from the beginning) and then they are OUT OF SEATTLE.
Pretty soon all they will have in that city is street people and college students.
Don’t give them any ideas. My next door neighbor, now deceased, took in a drug addict. It was a 7 year nightmare. I tried to talk to my neighbor and she kept saying; “where is she going to go?”. I kept thinking that I moved out of the city, bought an expensive house in the suburbs only to relive the city again. Why??
Boeing eventually left.
Yes but they still employ a lot of people within the Seattle city limits.
I work for a manufacturing company as well. Trust me moving it can be done. It takes a couple of years but I have seen it done before.
>Once it falls apart, the morons in charge, voted into office by the morons who dwell in Seattle, will blame Trump, and the moron voters will believe it.
Seattle voters deserves what is coming to them, and I hope they’ll get it, good and hard<
What’s so funny—and well deserved—is that Seattle voted in a city council member who’s a native East Indian. And of course a woman.
And there is another woman with a foreign sounding name who is, as the Brits have it, “mentioned in dispatches.”
And the black council member who says its racist when the police and others hose the shit off of the sidewalks because Bull Conner used fire hoses on blacks back in the early or mid 1950s.
And, of course, the Chinese are buying up all the real estate in Seattle because they know the value of American land an property far more than the Seattle “natives” do.
Yes, we are seeing a Pacific Northwest Detroit blossom like a skunk cabbage flower.
That quote is in the excerpt of the article. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.