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by BryantD
2833 days ago
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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. |
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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.