From the Seattle Times:
Seattle City Council passes ‘JumpStart’ tax on high salaries paid by big businesses
The Seattle City Council passed a new tax on big businesses Monday that’s expected to fund economic relief and core services during the coronavirus crisis and raise more than $200 million per year for housing, local business assistance and community development in the long term.
The “JumpStart Seattle” tax championed by Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda will target companies with highly paid employees, like Amazon.
“This is a huge win,” Mosqueda said. “This is about caring for Seattleites.”
So what are we talking about? Millionaire C-suite executives at billion dollar companies?
Not if you know the types of commies that run that city.
Businesses with at least $7 million in annual payroll will be taxed 0.7% to 2.4% on salaries and wages spent on Seattle employees who make at least $150,000 per year, with tiers for various payroll and salary amounts. For example, a company with an $8 million payroll and one employee making $180,000 would pay a tax of 0.7% on $180,000 — or $1,260.
Oh… that’s a moderate sized company. That’s 70 engineers making $100,000 each. That’s not huge. That’s easily a moderate law office or medical center.
A salary of $150,000 is also not terribly high for an educated professional. A senior engineer, lawyer, doctor, physicians assistant, dentist, CPA, all could clear that by mid-career. If this includes comissions and bonuses, which it probably does, it’s going to burn realtors too.
Also, the Black Lives Matter movement has stirred up Seattle politics, and a “Tax Amazon” campaign put pressure on the council by threatening to take a proposal to the November ballot.
The JumpStart tax is tailored so that most of the money will be paid by those companies that are best able to shoulder the load, proponents said.
Sawant credited the “Tax Amazon” movement and called the measure a “victory for working people,” while Morales described Monday’s vote as “a crucial step to embrace equity and reject corporate influence” and said organizations led by Black residents should be consulted about the investments to come.
It’s sold as “fuck those millionaire and billionaire tech moguls in their huge companies.”
In reality it’s “fuck that modest architecture firm, law firm, clinic, etc. and just about every white collar professional who works there over the age of 40.”
Do you think those people are going to stay in Seattle.
The cops ignore the damage being done by the looters and not they have to pay more in taxes to repair that damage.
Nope, they are going to flee.
If you think those same people will stand to be cut free and made into contractors (the logical extension of this policy) paying self employment taxes and their own health insurance, that will make them flee twice as fast.
Watch as every educated professional in the city packs up.
I wonder how the city will feel when hospitals in Seattle are depleted of doctors and any medical staff making $150k or more?
On the heels of destroying law enforcement in Seattle, this is just another nail in that city’s coffin.
Problem will be lots of those who flee will be libtards and they will go elsewhere and enact the same bs policy’s they fled from. Insanity.
I hear Texas calling!
It’s called capital flight, and it is a feature of socialism, not a bug.
Also, isn’t Seattle the first city to require a $15 min wage? Won’t that push a lot of company’s payrolls past that threshold? Pay them more, then take it away as taxes.
Second thought….
Maybe there is an upside. If this can start Bezos down the path to conservative points of view, it could be a good thing.
Seattle turned into OCP’s Detroit so quickly everyone noticed
My brother owned a company with 60 employees. Every mandate that comes along hits businesses with more than a certain number of employees, or with more than a certain amount of payroll.
So he fixed the problem. Now he owns 3 companies: One is a real estate holding company that owns and maintains the buildings (including warehouse space) that it leases out to company number two.
The second company is the one that sells the product. It rents all of its equipment from company number three, who also maintains that equipment.
Company three completes maintenance on all of the equipment and vehicles, which it leases to the other two companies.
Not one of those three companies has more than 25 employees.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.” – RAH
Again, wisdom from Heinlein!