Posted on 05/14/2018 5:26:38 PM PDT by jeannineinsd
The council approved a tax of $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 tax Mayor Jenny Durkan had threatened to veto.
The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Monday to adopt a new tax on the city’s largest employers to help address homelessness.
The ordinance will impose a tax of $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 tax that Mayor Jenny Durkan threatened to veto.
-snip-
The tax approved Monday is much smaller than a $500-per-head proposal that had been under consideration for many weeks. Councilmember Kshama Sawant cast the only “no” vote Monday on an amendment that reduced the size of the tax.
“There is no way this tax will be a burden on big businesses in Seattle,” Sawant said, slamming the mayor for siding with “Amazon billionaires.”
-snip-
Durkan, many business leaders such as Amazon and construction-worker unions opposed it, as did Council President Bruce Harrell, Councilmembers Sally Bagshaw, Debora Juarez and Rob Johnson and some voters critical of how City Hall has been spending money.
-snip-
Seattle has been in a civil state of emergency over homelessness since late 2015. A point-in-time count last year tallied more than 11,600 homeless people in King County.
Proponents of the head tax say companies such as Amazon have contributed to homelessness because their highly-paid employees have driven up rents and home prices.
The council also approved a plan Monday to spend 66 percent of the new money on affordable housing, 32 percent on emergency shelter, trash pickup, raises for service workers and other needs and 2 percent on administration.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
The key word id LARGE. Apparently Amazon is too large.
Nature is about to occur.
Loonies! Liberals continue to help themselves to other people’s money. I predict this will cost Seattle both jobs and revenue in the future. Wonder how many employees Microsoft has and if this action will spur investors to look for another headquarters? Oh, and about Amazon, forget it. Amazon’s profit margin is too low for investors to subsidize the city of Seattle.
It’s usually the Government, either state or local, which creates the homeless problem. Let THEM deal with it! Perverse policies cause a great deal of the problem. Politicians need their a**es kicked for inviting this problem in the first place.
I look forward to an exodus of employers from that dump.
Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, not Seattle. Redmond isn’t stupid enough for this.
So... are these the same Socialist geniuses who have been demanding "living wages"? Now they got the high wages, so what do they do? Confiscate it! True Socialists.
Stoooopid libs are the cause of this problem. They made Seattle Great Again... for junkies, criminals and vagrants. First they stopped enforcing vagrancy laws, then they stopped enforcing drug laws, and pumped “services” way up. What did they expect? They made Seattle a homeless destination city.
Doesn’t this amount to a “Poll Tax”?
I thought Poll Taxes were unconstitutional?
This has nothing to do with the right to vote. It’s legal.
And it only becomes a big media/liberal problem during Republican administrations. Seattle can go pound sand.
I don’t want to work
I want to hit on the bong all day
I don’t want to work
I just want to hit on the bong all day
Two types of homeless: addict, insane.
The making of another sh##hole
It would be sooo cool If Bezos actually calls their bluff and just moves everything out of that shithole and over to HQ2....it would be poetic justice.
My dad used to always say “Work. The curse of the drinking class” at the end of vacations. I guess that is no longer true. Now the rest of us work to support the drinking and druggy classes so they don’t have to.
There is NO way that 1)emergency shelter and trash pickup will only amount to 36% of the tax, when ...
2) “raises for service workers and other needs” and the 2% spent on administrative expenses will gobble up the entire tax and then some.
The problem isn't the lack of money for the city government, it is that way that hacks like Sawant grab for budget for “her projects” and “her people”.
Politicians one and all, or I could just call them liars and repeat myself.
Now we will see is Amazon has the balls to walk away from the facility they are building there. The already put construction on hold. Dead Stop !
Somewhere an Amazon accountant is determining how many of their 24,000 employees in the state of Washington they need to lay off in order to pay for the new $6.6 million tax bill
(Roughly 150 should do the trick)
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