It will be funnier than hell if Amazon and Google, the home institutions of the worst extremists in the whole progressive movement, make themselves the instruments of destruction of the welfare state by moving out of any city that presents them with their share of the bill.

Those companies and cities deserve each other.

Maybe rather than charging a head tax cities could just stop offering to waive property taxes and other 'incentives'

Maybe rather than charging a head tax cities could just stop offering to waive property taxes and other 'incentives'

lujlp at June 15, 2018 11:03 PM

Insufficient opportunities for graft.

jdgalt is on to something.

Instead of Google et al paying the fee themselves, simply deduct the fee from their employees pay.

They're progressives, right? they're not paying their fair share, right? time to ante up.

There are about 725,000 people living in Seattle. About 400,000 of them voted in the 2016 election. If just one out of four of Seattle's voters, just the most progressively compassionate, would virtue signal a mere $2 a day towards helping the homeless, the amount would far exceed what they expected to raise from the Amazon tax.

In the Seattle Times from January: Is Seattle’s homeless crisis the worst in the country?

here are our conclusions:

1. Counting people experiencing homelessness is messy and everyone does it differently.
2. Seattle’s homelessness crisis is, by scale, worse than New York City or Los Angeles’.
3. However you count it, Seattle, King County and Washington are all in the top 10 when it comes to homelessness.

I didn't know about the legal right to shelter in D.C., Boston and New York. That helps explain why I haven't seen homeless encampments in D.C. and New York on my three recent spring visits to those cities like we have here in Seattle. In Seattle, there are tents everywhere.

But when people talk about a “homelessness crisis,” they often mean a lack of shelter — the heartbreaking number of people sleeping outside. So what if we just looked at how many people are unsheltered?

D.C., Boston and New York disappear from the top 10 entirely — and it is probably not a coincidence that those are all places with some form of a legal right to shelter. Seattle, like most West Coast cities, doesn’t guarantee access to shelter.

Seattle gets rainy... but the weather in Boston, NY and DC is something else. There's a reason there's a right to shelter in those places.

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer:

We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same.

This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

https://townhall.com/columnists/evansayet/2017/07/13/he-fights-n2354580

"The idea is to get Google to kick a little back to the town for the problems their growth has wrought." funny, I thought that is what property taxes are for....
So the city council is saying that a big company that pays well is a problem they would rather not have? It is easily solved.

I R A Darth Aggie above is on to something.

The political scam of "business taxes" must be explained. Businesses organize production. They don't pay employment taxes, but can only pass them along to customers and employees. You will be paid less if it is more expensive to employ you.

So, that head tax paid by the corporations will come out of the salaries of their workers. It must. Competition for worker productivity sets salaries, along with fluidity of investment. In effect, a tax on employees makes them less productive to the employer.

Worse, many jobs will disappear. The effect is like the minimum wage.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Economic-Effects-Of-Payroll-Taxes-(FICA-Tax-In-The-US)&id=6481844

Isab has a point about towns who offer big tax breaks to companies to get them to come to town, but then complain that the town isn't reaping the expected economic benefits. And special tax statuses often wind up causing problems down the road. Back around 1958, the city I live in granted "tax island" status to an electronic components manufacturer to get them to build a factory in town. Essentially, the property was outside of the city limits, and so could not be taxed by the city. The decades went on, the factory was bought and sold several times, although it continued to do more or less what it did to start with. In the 1990s, the city started debating under what circumstances it could revoke the tax island status. State law did not provide any guidance.

Eventually they agreed with the owner of the property at the time that the status could continue as long as the property was still being used for its original purpose. A few years ago, the factory closed down and was demolished, and the property sold. The city revoked the tax island status (by means of re-annexing the property into the city). They new owner complained about this, but the city pointed out that, if the property was not in the city limits, then the city could discontinue utility services to the property.