[etaty]

All hail to Bezos...

Earlier this year, under pressure from Amazon and other large employers, Seattle’s City Council repealed an employee head tax designed to provide housing and services for the homeless. In a statement, Amazon called the vote “the right decision for the region’s economic prosperity. We are deeply committed to being part of the solution to end homelessness in Seattle and will continue to invest in local nonprofits” that work with the homeless.

Oligarchy?

[pinewurst]

Speaking as a Seattle resident, and despite my dislike for Bezos, this was a stupid tax - more connected to Seattle's dysfunctional politics than solving our bad homeless problem. Among other things, it was keyed to revenues not profits (specifically to target Amazon) but it ended up burning the likes of grocers who provide decent jobs but don't have a lot of margin even with large revenues. Good riddance to it and a pox on our local Pol Pot that drove it.

[BryantD]

Let's go back a little bit further in the history. In 2010, Washington took a shot at an income tax for individuals making over $200,000 a year. Bezos spent $100,000 to oppose that (along with a lot of other wealthy Washingtonians). Bezos also didn't support the Seattle income tax, although as far as I know he didn't spend money to oppose it.

The head tax was suboptimal and, yeah, stupid. Nobody would have proposed it if Seattle didn't have a regressive tax system. Compare us to Texas, another state with no income tax -- our property taxes are substantially lower. Seattle's infrastructure problems will continue because the city is underfunded to deal with them.

Anyhoo, I'm glad Bezos is spending this money on the homeless. I would recommend that he divert some of it to a deep dive into Seattle's problems. I think that committing to solve the problem in one city would yield insights that would be very valuable when he expands the program elsewhere.

[FireBeyond]

Oh yeah, just like Prop 1 in Olympia WA in 2016/2017.

Prop 1 is an initiative to "help educate the children of Olympia", using a little tax to help pay for college tuition. So noble!

Except: it proposes a levy on households of $200K or more (not constitutional in Washington), is an income tax, also not constitutional in Washington, requires the city of Olympia to fund the administration with no enforcement clauses, and multiple groups have already announced that they intend to sue the City if it's passed (which it will, because it's a 'think of the kids' measure), and the City knows it won't win but could not get the measure struck off so is already budgeting for constitutional lawyers. Hell, the City doesn't have the authority to see these people's tax statements, so it'd rely entirely on self-reporting. It's just a mess.

So you look a bit closer, and who is pushing this bill? A group of locals just concerned about local education?

No. A bunch of multi-millionaires from Seattle who want to use this as a proving ground for their challenges to state taxation law. Of the top ten donors, not one has ever lived in the County, let alone the City, nor does any of them have any children who attended school in either. (Olympia, like most state capitals, is far smaller than the largest city in the state), which makes you wonder why they're not pushing this in Seattle/King County - probably because they don't want their own taxes going to fund the defense of a proposition that's very specifically unconstitutional.

"Think of the kids" at its worst.

[forapurpose]

> Bezos also didn't support the Seattle income tax, although as far as I know he didn't spend money to oppose it.

He did; Amazon was among the primary opposition (if we're talking about the same tax):

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/technology/seattle-tax-am...

[seltzered_]

The nytimes article you linked is about the 2018 head tax. There were earlier initiatives:

- 2017 - Seattle approved an income tax for high incomes, but was removed six months later after a court dispute - https://www.mossadams.com/articles/2017/december/seattle-inc...

- earlier years - there have been Washington state income taxes proposed over the years, which have been usually shut down. googling shows the last might've been Senate Bill 6559 in 2016 - https://www.theolympian.com/news/politics-government/article...

The inability to pass a city income tax or a state income tax has been part of the arguments for why a head tax was proposed in 2018 - it's not ideal, but everything else in the past has been rejected.

Yanis Varoufakis (fmr greek minister of finance) gave a talk in Seattle a few months ago talking about the head tax: https://youtu.be/Z0M24CEEMFk?t=2m16s

[ctchocula]

Thank you for this video. The anecdotes about Obama and the German finance minister are excellent!

[dunpeal]

As a Seattle resident, what do you think of the argument that Amazon greatly contributed to homelessness in Seattle?

I read somewhere that Amazon's explosive growth raised the property values in Seattle, which in turn caused a surge in homelessness. Is that true?

[pinewurst]

My 2 cents is that Amazon isn't a major cause. There's a few things going on(1):

- exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues

- Seattle does a remarkably crappy job of assigning the low income housing we build and/or contract for. Too many people get it who shouldn't qualify. Too many non-profits cherry pick their clients. Etc, etc.

- It's super hard to get coherent services out of the system. Which makes it self-selecting in the sense of concentrating the worst cases.

Amazon, to a certain degree, was/is part of running up the price of apartments and homes. Some homelessness is a consequence, but mostly that pushed people further (or totally out) of the area.

I'm not at all convinced that if we raise 2x the money, we'll spend it intelligently enough to make a difference here.

(1)My partner worked in the area homeless system and I'm getting a lot of my info from that.

[emodendroket]

> - exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues

I think cause and effect are backwards here. Low wages and high housing prices seem like they'd naturally lead to homelessness and rates of drug addiction and mental illness among the homeless, although very high compared to the general population, are nowhere near as high as people would like to think.

[hfdgiutdryg]

rates of drug addiction and mental illness among the homeless, although very high compared to the general population, are nowhere near as high as people would like to think.

Probably because nobody notices the clean, sane person living out of their car. We probably need better terminology, like functional vs. dysfunctional homeless, or something.

[emodendroket]

I feel like the reason it's so prevalent is less a question of terminology and more a question of absolution -- if, after all, the homeless have some immutable characteristic that makes them homeless, there's nothing society could have done for them.

[lostmsu]

We are talking about sentient people. Wages and housing prices may be an excuse, but they don't shove drugs down people's throats.

Mental illness - may be. But one needs to know if it's the cause, or simply an exposing factor.

[midwestcode]

I think these people are referring to those visible on the streets, and not living out of their car or in the shadows of homelessness. Oftentimes in Seattle the people who are visible are unfortunately in the worst shape, mentally or otherwise.

[throwaway2048]

You don't have to be a drug addict to be homeless, the majority of homeless people are not, nor are the majority (or even a substantial minority) seriously mentally ill.

[emodendroket]

I don't think it's even controversial to say that people can turn to substance abuse due to adverse exogenous circumstances.

[rifung]

> - exploding drug addiction and related mental health issues

Unless there's another reason we would expect mental health issues to increase I don't see why this would lead to more homelessness.

I also talked to one of the people in charge of a non profit for providing housing to the homeless and he was saying how the longer people stay homeless, the less likely it is that they will ever be able to integrate with society again.

I am much more inclined to believe homelessness is causing the mental health issues than vice versa. Or at least I don't see why Seattle's homeless problem would be caused by greater rates of mental illness than previously seen and compared to that of other cities.

[blang]

As a fellow Seattle resident the arguments seem to break down this way: (From the left) 1) Amazon contributed to homelessness by increasing property values by paying too many engineers too much money 2) We don't have an income tax, so that increase in wealth does not come back to pay for services (From the right) 1) Enforcement of laws about sleeping in public spaces is very low so people feel comfortable being homeless here. 2) Increases of property taxes have increased rents leading people to not be able to afford rents (From both left and right) Housing developers are buying up as many cheap places as possible and turning them into high end houses that only the rich can afford muscling out people that could have both those cheaper places.

My take: If you isolate and fixated on one variable being the only cause of a problem, it's pretty easy to create a narrative, but the answer is probably more complicated and the solution is probably even more complicated.

[SilasX]

What a bizarre world, when you're a villain for paying good wages.

[BryantD]

It's a little tenuous to blame Amazon for this. Yes, the growth of Amazon raised demand, but the city's zoning laws are also to blame.

https://medium.com/@15kwhm2a/a-brief-history-of-seattles-ant... is very good. The Mises Institute has come to similar conclusions. When those guys and leftists agree, you gotta think there's something to it.

[rifung]

I recently moved away from Seattle but that seems correct to me.

I don't think the problem is REALLY Amazon's fault per se, since they are just paying people more than other companies in the area which I think most people would agree is a good thing.

I think the problem is more that we in the US treat housing as an investment which makes people more willing to pay higher prices and to borrow money to buy a house. When people see the housing prices increase then that further raises housing prices.

The issue is that housing prices, and subsequently rent, increasing is not a good thing for society. Even though the value of the house has changed, the house itself hasn't changed at all, and yet people now have less money to spend on other things. The only thing it really does is make banks and people who were already well off enough to buy a house wealthier.

Sadly I have no idea what we can do to solve this that isn't communist.

[rstupek]

Homelessness is typically a mental health problem, not a property value problem

[emodendroket]

People always say this, but the problem is that it's not true. A majority of homeless people are not mentally ill.

[lostmsu]

This statement contradicts parent's. What is your source?

[emodendroket]

Here's one: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-mentally-ill-homeless-201...

> A relatively small percentage of all homeless people nationwide — 13% to 15% — are mentally ill, but their symptoms — paranoia and delusions — draw attention and mislead others into thinking their numbers are greater, Culhane said.

> However, Los Angeles’ homeless population skews heavily to single adults who have lived in the streets a year or longer — a subgroup with a high incidence of mental health issues. Local authorities estimate that 30% of the county’s homeless people have serious mental illness.

[filoleg]

you might want to check up on the actual breakdown of that specific head tax bill, there is a bunch of fairly neutral and level-headed discussions of it on Seattle subreddits. Tldr, it was really bad, as it hurt a bunch of small to medium sized local businesses that everyone uses, but somehow no one thought of when crafting the bill, and they were among the ones spearheading the repeal.

The only thing that bill illustrated to me personally is how ineffective and ridiculously bad Seattle government officials are. Passed with a 9-0 vote, repealed extremely shortly after with 7-2.

[sdinsn]

A head tax affects people other than Bezos too. It was not a popular tax, not surprised it was repealed.

[baron816]

I’m not opposed to new taxes, but that was a really poorly designed tax.

[genericone]

One is a decree, the other is a choice.