> Teresa Mosqueda, one of the two council members opposing the repeal, said there was no backup plan for dealing with the homeless situation.
There was no plan, period. The plan consisted of 1. Tax Amazon, 2. ..., 3. Get re-elected. When they realized 3 didn't follow from 1, they started grasping at straws.
Powerful companies who can communicate one single message backed by advertising/public appearances/media can make it appear that are no other "real" options. This is a deliberate political strategy.
The reality is that there are an enormous amount of "real" options. But political will is hard to muster when there are many competing ideas as to what should be done.
Without a doubt gentrification, homelessness, and housing/rental prices can all be addressed from many directions. I have my own ideas about what can be done by the city, state, and country. To say "there was no plan, period" is literal propaganda that exists to support the status quo.
I'm extremely frustrated by the seeming tolerance for literal shit in the streets. At least put some porta-potties out for public health. If it only costs $300k for laundry, showers, toilets, and sinks (according to the plan linked in the other comment) why hasn't it been done yet?
That's funny xapata. The Seattle City Council has been implementing recommendations from the Poppe report [0]. The Poppe report lays out a homelessness action plan recommendations for Seattle. The head tax was to fund some of those recommendations from the Poppe report.
The Seattle Times recently covered the homelessness count [1]. It explicitly mentioned that actions Seattle has taken to combat homelessness were having a positive effect.
> Compared to more rapid rises in homeless counts over the past five years, a slower 4 percent increase represents progress, said Kyra Zylstra, interim director of All Home, the county’s homelessness coordinating agency, which organizes the yearly count.
> “It’s not the kind of progress we all want to see,” Zylstra said. “But our performance data shows that the resources that we are investing in are housing people faster.”
The whole point of the head tax was to continue funding recommendations from the Poppe report. They're the same recommendations that are demonstrated to be working.
[0] https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/B...
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/new-homel...
If this Poppe report was the purpose of the tax, why was all the messaging "Tax Amazon!" instead of, "We need money for urgent projects!"?
Despite being 70 pages, that report was quite vague. Mostly platitudes like, "Prioritize the most vulnerable!" I hope the plans were more detailed elsewhere. And how much did that report cost?
Oh really?
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2018/05/up-against-a-wall-...
Not a perfect plan, maybe not even a particularly good one, but there absolutely were plans and budgets for how the money could have been used even before it was originally approved.
That doesn't even make sense, how is blackmail involved?
You may not agree with a tax, but that's what voting is for. If it passes, you pay it or you remove yourself from the jurisdiction...that's not blackmail, it's how taxes work.
Hopefully that move is to somewhere close by; else, that kind of black-and-white logic would directly result in 45,000 Amazon employees facing either relocation or unemployment. Even then, the added time and monetary costs of added commutes can put folks in a similar "between-rock-and-hard-place" scenario.
In general, telling someone "if you don't like it, then move somewhere else" betrays a complete ignorance of the economic and psychological burden of doing so (burdens which not everyone can afford). Amazon itself can afford to move with relative ease, of course, but that doesn't hold true for the vast majority of its workers.
If anyone was engaging in extortion it was Amazon.
Great example here of managed democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy
Immediately concluding that because a government didn't pass a new tax, the government is a de-facto autocracy is extremely reductive.
They repealed it a day after the announcement that they were doing so.
Seattle is a company town now.
Piketty's work [1] found real estate (and its favorable tax treatment) to be the largest driver of wealth inequality in America. Land taxes would be progressive. (Particularly if the first X dollars of one's primary residence were excluded.)
I’m looking forward to watching this same short of bootlicking and idiocy when Jeff comes around to extort tax breaks with the threat of HQ2.