Seattle politicians need to focus on building business climate, not Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Taken from Tuesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.

There’s something so sad and so hilarious about the headlines on “The Seattle Times” today.

The top story is: “As Seattle incomes soar, gap grows between rich and poor.”

What it says in this story is exactly what we’ve been predicting for a couple of years on our show. We told you that in San Francisco there is no middle class and hasn’t been for years now. There are the extremely wealthy in San Francisco and there are homeless everywhere in San Francisco.

The smells of San Francisco used to be the waterfront, the fish down by the piers, and the sourdough bread. Now, there is an overwhelming scent of urine everywhere you go in San Francisco. It’s a shame, and that is what is coming to Seattle.

We’ve told you before that the Seattle middle class is disappearing, that we were going to be a city of the very wealthy and the very poor, and now this latest study confirms that.

According to The Seattle Times:

“For the 20 percent of city households at the top of the income ladder, things couldn’t be better. Their earnings averaged $248,000 in 2013 — a hefty $15,000 jump from 2012. But for the 20 percent of households at the bottom, incomes averaged just $13,000, unchanged from the previous year.”

The median income has gone up, but the number of the extremely poor has stayed exactly the same. They have not been lifted out of poverty. Now, why is this?

If you look at the rest of the headlines on The Seattle Times today, it might provide some explanation.

Right underneath this story about the income gap growing is a story titled: “Native Americans cheer city’s new Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”

We have a City Council that is more obsessed with political correctness than creating a business climate that can actually improve the middle class.

Keeping reading the news of the day: “King County home prices resume their climb.”

Why are home prices going up so much? Well look at what it costs for permits, for fees, for all of the things that government adds. Government adds to the cost of building a house and if it costs that much more to build a house. It raises the price of existing houses. So all of the middle class people have gotten priced out of the housing market.

Then when you do things like the loopy $15 an hour minimum wage, it doesn’t help the living standards of any of the people working for minimum wage. What it does is it drives rents up to where studio apartments are $1,600. So the people who got this minimum wage hike, they have zero hike in their standard of living.

And it’s spreading: “King County Council approves ‘living wage’ requirement,” reads one more headline.

So with this, they’re going to make county projects more expensive by saying we’re only going to work with contractors who pay a living wage.

And these $15 minimum wage requirements hurt those people that we need to build the middle class. I can give you the perfect example. People who own franchise restaurants, they aren’t rich, they’re middle class job creators, yet we treat them, in Seattle, like they’re the enemy. When you say you’ve got to pay everybody $15, all of a sudden it’s not worth it to that franchise owner to keep creating jobs, and not worth it to him to keep running a business in Seattle.

This gap between the rich and the poor in Seattle will keep growing until we have politicians who are more concerned with growing a business climate than they are with Indigenous People’s Day.

Taken from Tuesday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.