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Originally posted by Scoutmaster:

quote:

Originally posted by tanner:
Just wow! Talk about killing the golden goose.

https://www.seattletimes.com/b...seattle-politicians/....
Amazon’s economic footprint was no less impressive. From 2010 to June 2017, HQ1 brought $3.7 billion in capital investment, $25.7 billion in employee compensation, $43 million paid for employee transit benefits, and 53,000 additional jobs as a direct result of Amazon direct investments. Hundreds of millions of dollars went to the city treasury thanks to construction fees and taxes.

And Seattle got this windfall with no demand for billions in incentives.....

Bingo, bullseye, homerun. This will likely do significant harm to Seattle's economy as Amazon "divests" a lot of business away from Seattle. But the self-serving Seattle politicians will deny it's their own fault.

Another Seattle Times article estimates about 585 companies will be affected including the Seattle Times. It will be real interesting what that number will be a couple years down the road.

https://www.seattletimes.com/b...facing-the-head-tax/

I accepted a job at Amazon today, suck it Kshwarama Savaunt!

Seattle is a GOD DAMN FUCKING JOKE!!

I went back to Seattle
But my city was gone
There was no South Lake Union
There was no downtown
Pine Street had disappeared
All my favorite places
My city had been pulled down
Reduced to camping spaces
Ay, oh, way to go, Seattle

Well, I went back to Seattle
But my family was gone
I stood on the back porch
There was nobody home
I was stunned and amazed
My childhood memories
Slowly swirled past
Like the wind through the trees
Ay, oh, way to go, Seattle

I went back to Seattle
But my pretty countryside
Was littered with needles
By a government that had no pride
The parks of Seattle
Had been replaced by homeless camps
And urine filled the air
From Ballard to Capitol Hill
Said, ay, oh, way to go, Seattle

Seattle City Council votes 9-0 for $275 head tax.. per employee, per year. I hope Seattle pays a big price for this.

Look at the bright side... maybe Seattle will help with the homeless problem .... in San Francisco. They can bring their used needles with them!

https://www.zerohedge.com/news...-crisis-grips-norcal

With all of this new money Seattle should be able to one-up the libs of SF and hand out free needles... AND free heroin.
Let them die. Darwin at work.

quote:

Originally posted by Scoutmaster:


Bezos may be a quite liberal in his political views, but I think he is a hard capitalist in how he runs Amazon.

You can't really be both though. These companies get to learn that they can't play both sides of the coin forever. They can't continue to run a company designed to make as much profit as it can when at the same time they constantly work to get politicians who hate profit elected. There is no honor among thieves and liberals are the biggest thieves of them all.

Bezos probably thought that his money and his support off liberal assholes would buy him out of anything like this. That he could continue to support politicians that wanted to raise taxes on middle class but that he would be insulated. That he could call for higher taxes on the top 1% but somehow avoid paying them himself if only he made the right friends.

Fuck him and fuck Starbucks and fuck every other company or CEO who decides to support leftist politicians and their causes and then whine when the taxman they want to come for me comes for them instead. You wanted taxes on the rich? Fuck you rich guy. You got them.

And yeah I understand how it works so I don't need a lecture. I know the real loser, as always, is the middle class. Bezos will be fine and he will let go of people, stop hiring and raise prices to cover his losses. But still, fuck him.

Seattle, these are the dumb asses who passed the Seattle Gun and Ammo tax. How'd that work out?.....

Seattle passed a gun tax in August 2015. It was aimed at funding gun-violence prevention, research and other programs to mitigate the public costs of gun-related crimes. The effort was spearheaded by Councilmember Tim Burgess. It places a $25 tax on guns sold in Seattle, as well as up to a 5-cent fee on each round.

Under Seattle’s gun tax:
A year and nine months later, Seattle is experiencing a considerable rise in gun violence. There were 36 shootings and four fatalities in the first five months of 2017. Reports of shots fired rose to 155 by May 15 – 11 more than the same time in 2015, and 23 more than this time last year.

Seattle never took in the projected revenue it expected from the tax – as much as $500,000. The city won’t say how much money its gun tax has produced.

Time for a FOIA to find out what they collected on the gun tax nonsense.

And apparently this is getting beaten down:

http://thehill.com/homenews/st...fter-amazon-pressure

Seattle reverses course on business tax after Amazon pressure BY REID WILSON - 06/12/18 10:41 AM EDT

Just weeks after passing a new tax on big businesses, Seattle political leaders signaled late Monday they would reverse course and repeal it.

Mayor Jenny Durkan and city council President Bruce Harrell said in statements that they would end the tax, initially meant to combat rising homelessness in a city where housing prices have soared.

“We heard you,” Durkan and seven of the nine city council members said in a statement. “This week, the City Council is moving forward with the consideration of legislation to repeal the current tax on large businesses to address the homelessness crisis.”
Business groups, led by the city’s largest employers like Amazon and Starbucks, had raised $200,000 in just a few weeks to gather signatures for a referendum challenging the new tax. They had planned to submit those signatures on Tuesday in an effort to place the referendum on the November ballot.

“The announcement from Mayor Durkan and the City Council is the breath of fresh air Seattle needs,” said Marilyn Strickland, who heads the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce. “Repealing the tax on jobs gives our region the chance to address homelessness in a productive, focused and unified way.”

The tax would have fallen on businesses that generated more than $20 million in revenue. The 585 businesses in the city that qualified would have faced a $275-per-employee tax, money that would have gone to pay for affordable housing and programs aimed at curbing homelessness.

A study commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce, however, found the tax would have cost Seattle about 14,300 jobs and $3.5 billion in economic output. The council expected the head tax to raise $47 million in revenue.

Several big businesses, led by Amazon, which employs 45,000 workers in Seattle, objected to the tax. Amazon put a hold on projects that would have added another 7,000 new jobs in the city, and began exploring options to sublease thousands of square feet of downtown office space.

Angry constituents also shouted down city council members at a public forum, a shocking departure for a city known for its cordial politics. At a rally meant to back the tax at Amazon’s headquarters, construction workers shouted down a pro-tax member of the city council.

City council member Lorena Gonzalez, who said she would vote to overturn the tax, pinned the blame on the business community.

“I am deeply troubled and disappointed by the political tactics utilized by a powerful faction of corporations that seem to prioritize corporations over people,” Gonzalez said in a statement. “It was my sound belief that a compromise on this policy had been reached with business, and as an elected official representing all of Seattle, I am deeply disappointed that certain members of the business community did not engage in good faith with the City of Seattle.”

The decision to reverse the tax came together over the weekend, in conversations between Durkan and Harrell.

Kshama Sawant, the most liberal member of the council, called the decision a “backroom betrayal.”

The pressure brought to bear by Amazon raised eyebrows among cities vying to compete for the company’s massive HQ2 project. The 20 finalists have offered billions in incentives to attract the project, which the company says will ultimately bring 50,000 high-paying jobs to a region.

But along with those new jobs will come a company that is increasingly willing to flex its political muscles.

“I think this is problematic enough and Amazon has shown enough troubling behavior that I would drop out” of the running for HQ2, said Richard Florida, an urban expert at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute. “If you’re smart, you certainly wouldn’t offer incentives to a company that’s going to squeeze you."

Fantastic news! I just saw it on TV.

quote:

“Repealing the tax on jobs gives our region the chance to address homelessness in a productive, focused and unified way.”

Meaning...We don't have a f*cking Clue on what to do.