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by forapurpose 2840 days ago
> 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...

1 comments

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

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