Seattle reverses course on business tax after Amazon pressure
Source: The Hill
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.”
Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/391807-seattle-reverses-course-on-business-tax-after-amazon-pressure
Thats some quick action by officials. Dont see that very often.
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Doreen
(11,686 posts)"repealing the tax on jobs gives our region the chance to address homelessness in a productive, focused and unified way." Seattle is one of the worst cities ( if not THE worst ) in Washington state when it comes to the treatment of the homeless. the only thing they would use any money for is to cruelly drive out the homeless and take as many possible assistance for them away.
liberalmuse
(18,672 posts)Are largely to blame for the homeless situation in Seattle. They’ve displaced a lot of people and caused the rents and homes for sale to skyrocket to astronomical proportions. Housing pricies are so ridiculous that the average family can’t afford to live in the city, and it’s spreading to other places. These companies source a lot of their well paid employees from elsewhere, so all they usually create are low level, low paying jobs. Corporations are allowed to drain communities resources and circumvent the laws and give very little in return. And we let them.
Doreen
(11,686 posts)We just had a couple of homeless camps here broken up and told to go elsewhere but not be anywhere. I keep getting told jobs are on the rise.....come to Lewis County and tell the people living here that. I volunteer with feeding the homeless on some Saturdays each month and the homelessness count has been rising. I really hate these corporations.
suffragette
(12,232 posts)Sums up the cruelty at the core of the situation.
vi5
(13,305 posts)...we essentially pay them for it with "incentives" and tax breaks.
This is one of those issues where the positions of the two parties at least on the local state level are barely distinguishable.
vi5
(13,305 posts)..when we have this stuff happening in the liberal Pacific Northwest, and in blue New York the Democratic Governor runs ads bragging about how businesses pay no taxes the first however many years after moving there (gee, I wonder if they'll extend it after that?) and Democrats in my own home state of NJ now getting skittish about corporate taxes despite our new Dem governor running on raising taxes (and this just a year or two after they offered Amazon everyone's first born children in exchange for moving their other hq to Newark.......honestly, what hope is there at any point that any large enough group of politicians from our party is going to have the guts to stand up to these companies?
It's not like there is not ample evidence and study after study that shows that what these states give up on tax revenue is not even close to being made up by jobs and/or increased revenue for local businesses. It just seems that nobody on "our side" wants to point that out or call anyone out for this farce.
7962
(11,841 posts)Here in Ga, the state gave tax breaks to Hollywood & now more money is spent in Ga than any other state outside Ca. Billions have been spent since the tax breaks went into effect. And whole studios are being built to fill the need. Taxes DO get collected on all the money spent by employees too.
In this case, the tax breaks are a great idea.
I dont see giving away the store for a couple hundred jobs, but a large industry is different. Because the state wouldn't get any tax revenue from a business that never opened anyway.
In the case of Seattle, the outcome would have been easy to see; large companies would just move right outside the city limits. One company had already announced they were going to do just that.
vi5
(13,305 posts)Where I live in NJ and a few other states I've seen studies from show that what gets gained back in temporary building jobs and boosts to small businesses does not even come close to making up what those big companies would pay in taxes at the standard rate in those locations for the duration of what their breaks are. In other words the benefit to builders, etc. is 1-2 years but the tax breaks are almost always at least 5-10 years minimum. So when looked at over the course of the tax break, the citizens and the states end up footing the bill and getting less than they would if the companies were made to pay their fair share.
Yes, obviously there is some specific focused benefits, but if we are talking to the state as a whole and the majority of it's citizens, it rarely works out in anyone other than the big companies favor.
The problem is that it just keeps getting deeper and deeper and companies are playing states off of one another and eventually no state is going to charge any of these companies any taxes to do anything. And in fact we'll essentially be paying them to not pay taxes.
7962
(11,841 posts)According to the Atl Journal Constitution, the industry employees over 25000 people. In FY 2016, nearly 250 film and TV projects were completed and they spent over 2 billion. Not to mention tourism. Just the "Walking Dead" set gets thousands of tourists every year. And the money paid to all the workers and suppliers gets taxed too when THEY go out and spend it.
The credit has averaged 200 million per yr.
melman
(7,681 posts)And this Bezos is treated like a hero here because Trump hates him. Well guess what. Sometimes two assholes don't like each other.
jiminvegas
(104 posts)to try to help those that have nothing!