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Comment by NathanKP | Hacker News Reader

Raising money to help the homeless is needed, but I really don't understand why Seattle felt it needed an extra tax on businesses. In my mind:

1. Cost of living and property values go up in the city

2. Higher property values mean more property taxes go into the coffer

3. Spend some of that money on helping those negatively effected by rising cost of living and property value

Instead Seattle wanted both the extra property tax income and an extra business tax. Seems sketchy to me. Where is all that property tax money going and how much is being wasted that they can't put together $48 million to help the homeless?

Especially when the city is already going to be raising property taxes even more on top of the added base value of the properties. In some places the property tax is going up as much as 30% and on average 17% in 2018! King County is going to get $5.6 billion in property tax in 2018. In comparison $48 million is a tiny number.

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Higher property values (overall) doesn't necessarily mean more property taxes go into the coffer. Higher specific property values (relative to your neighbors) means you pay a larger slice of the pie. Though Seattle going up even faster than the rest of the market certainly helps conflate the two, the total tax burden is somewhat fixed in dollar amount (at the state or county level, I don't remember which), so if everybody's property values go up uniformly 10% each, everybody's taxes only go up by the actual tax revenue increase for that year (typically much lower than 10%). What really gets you is if your property value goes up faster than the average at the county/state level.

Hmm I understand what you are saying. However, as you said the overall tax revenue increase is definitely happening, conflating the two.

In 2017 the county made $4.8 billion in property taxes, and in 2018 it will be $5.6 billion. So they are already getting $800 million more in property taxes in 2018. That's a lot more money. It just feels like they don't want to spend the extra money they're already getting effectively, and instead want to ask for more on top.

It's also "a tiny number" to the big businesses. Why resist paying it so strongly? It probably doesn't seem like such a tiny number if you're homeless.

"It's OK to throw away money because a big business can afford it" is not a very compelling argument. If an increase in property tax is more than enough to cover it, what reason would you have to collect the business tax other than to spite the companies that are affected by it?

It's nothing to do with spite nor is it throwing money away. It's about redirecting money from some of the richest companies in the world to help people who have nothing.

Why would you put the taxes on the people instead of the businesses over $20 mil in revenue making record profits? It makes no sense. We have enough regressive taxes.

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