Fox News contributor John Stossel pointedly summed up the city of Seattle’s new ‘head tax,’ “Seattle is worried about the well-being of the poor and mentally ill people living there, so it's going to drive businesses out of town.”
There’s nothing like driving the city’s tax base out of town to increase revenue for leftist social work.
Initially the Seattle council planned to impose a tax of $500 per employee on every company within the city limits that had 50 or more workers. Amazon thought so poorly of the tax that it immediately stopped construction on a new office complex it was building within the city limits. The construction workers idled by the halt began protesting, too.
Please don’t misconstrue my point here. There is zero sympathy for Amazon among the authors of this column. The tech elite that runs the company are the same people financing the campaigns of Seattle politicians, contributing to the non-profits that push soft socialism and censoring conservative thought.
They’re learning firsthand the left has always been a cannibal philosophy.
Our sympathy is for the small businessman who is going to be hit with a new tax that is designed to penalize success. I can think of no faster way to block job creation among existing companies within the Seattle city limits than to tax them for adding employees.
City council woman Kshama Sawant, of the political party Socialist Alternative, claims the tax is more than fair because, "Housing is a human right!"
Without going that far, Stossel agrees there is a homeless problem in Seattle. “Seattle does have large encampments of street people. Some are mentally ill. Some are young people looking to get stoned and live free. Some are homeless simply because they cannot afford apartments. There are many reasons for that, but one is that Amazon and other companies have brought so many new jobs to Seattle that the demand for housing exceeds the supply.”
Normally that would mean more housing starts to meet demand, just like Ford makes more pickups to meet demand. (Well, maybe not in Seattle.) So why isn’t Seattle’s housing market working? Three words: Bureaucratic red tape.
As Stossel points out the city’s building code is 745 pages long. “If you want to build apartments, you better hire lawyers and 'fixers' to keep you on the right side of the rules.”
The majority of the city’s land is zoned for single-family housing. Apartments or condos, which would help the housing shortage in the shortest time, are banned. Stossel’s conclusion, “Seattle's big-government restrictions created a housing problem. So now they propose to solve it with more heavy-handed government.”
Sawant, a proto-fascist, called the Amazon threat to pull up stakes “extortion” and demanded the city attorney charge the company with “issuing mob-like threats.”
Slightly less nutty members of the council reduced the tax to $275 per employee just before passage.
That’s not a victory for Amazon, it’s just a temporary stay. Fiscally the company is still on tax death row — reaping the political ideology it helped sow.
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker’s bureau. Read more reports from Michael Reagan — Go Here Now.
Michael R. Shannon is a commentator, researcher for the League of American Voters, and an award-winning political and advertising consultant with nationwide and international experience. He is author of "Conservative Christian’s Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now with added humor!)." Read more of Michael Shannon's reports — Go Here Now.