Dori: Durkan’s ‘grand compromise’ still a crazy idea

This head tax vote is going to make or break our region’s economy in so many ways. The Seattle City Council just voted down Mayor Jenny Durkan’s compromise proposal of a $250 per employee per year tax, half of the original proposal.

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This whole thing is insane. Either the head tax is a good idea or a bad idea. Jenny Durkan once again shows that she is not working as a leader of this region. First she won’t share how she feels about the head tax, then her big idea is to just cut it in half. Councilmember Kshama Sawant, maybe you should have proposed $1,000 per employee per year — then Durkan would have just cut that in half as her compromise.

The fact is, head taxes kill jobs. We are proposing 10 times what Chicago did and abandoned because it was a job-killer.  Durkan’s grand compromise is still five times that amount. This notion that Durkan is somehow a great compromiser is totally false — all she did is take a crazy idea and cut it in half so it is slightly less crazy. It is still a crazy idea to tax employers for providing jobs. Taxes are a drag on whatever is taxed. The sugar tax is designed to get people to consume less sugar. Alcohol and cigarette taxes are designed to get people to drink and smoke less. The job tax will have the same effect — it will mean fewer jobs. If we do this in our booming economy, it will be disastrous for the entire state.

The head tax is bad no matter how much it is. It’s bad at $50 an employee a year. It’s a bad idea — compromiseeconomically — to punish employers for providing jobs. Durkan is spineless. The five people who rejected Durkan’s idea did so because they want more. What I hope happens is that those five greediest council members — Sawant, Mike O’Brien, Lisa Herbold, Lorena Gonzalez, and Teresa Mosqueda — take their proposal for more money to Durkan, she vetoes it, and then they end up with nothing. This would be the best outcome for the region.

There should be no head tax. Did the construction workers chant, “Cut it in half?” No. They chanted, “No head tax.” Giving incompetent people more money to spend when they have squandered $200 million a year in Seattle and King County does not work. Homeless addicts come here from across the country because they know you can shoot up heroin in front of a cop and you won’t get arrested. In fact, the taxpayers will build you a home. And you can continue to use heroin in it. That sounds like heaven if you’re a heroin addict sitting in Bloomington, Indiana — why wouldn’t you come out to Seattle?

We shouldn’t give them one more penny for all of this. The council members do not want to help lives. They want to use the sad plight of heroin addicts so that they can collect hundreds of millions of dollars more. What an absolutely devoid-of-compassion bunch the Seattle City Council is.

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