Dori: Amazon pause is the beginning of the end for Seattle’s economy

News broke today that Amazon is putting a pause on the 8,000 new jobs and on a million square feet of new office space it had been planning on, pending a decision by the Seattle City Council on its proposed head tax on business — the tax that will affect Amazon far more than any other business.

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Amazon is a business that has been built on efficiency. I owned a bookstore back in the ’90s and saw what was coming — my little bookstore couldn’t survive once Amazon came to be and once the book industry changed. I evolved and we moved on from that.

Now it is absolutely incontrovertible that Amazon is the biggest driver of our regional economy. I have believed from the very first second that they announced they were building another headquarters, that that was going to be the beginning of a pullout of Seattle by Amazon. They are too efficient of a company to have two equal but separate headquarters. That’s just not the way the most efficient company imaginable would operate.

I’ve thought all along that that was the first official step toward an eventual pullout because of the absolute lunacy of our city council’s policies. I don’t think they want to operate in a city where there are heroin addicts shooting up on the street outside their headquarters; where there are tents and tarps and cardboard boxes littering every open square inch of the city; where tourists have all of their belongings stolen out of a car parked in front of high-class hotels in the middle of the day.

If Amazon were to pull out, it would have an even more disastrous effect on our economy than the Boeing bust in the early 1970s, because the real estate prices of this entire region are dependent on Amazon’s presence — on all the six-figure workers who drove up the prices. You would have tens of thousands of people holding mortgages for $800,000 who are all of a sudden upside-down. We would see a real estate market crash. We would see a commercial real estate collapse. We would see our entire economy collapse worse than any city in our nation’s history — worse than Detroit when the auto industry crashed.

Brier Dudley, author of today’s Seattle Times op-ed piece on the Amazon suspension, told me that this news is “pretty scary if it has a ripple effect.”

“If the development economy gets spooked by Amazon pausing, who knows what could happen around here?” he said.

Why is this happening? Because we have insane politicians who have put in all of this wack-job, leftist stuff, and now there are businesses that are teetering on the brink in a booming economy. When this economy starts to go south, you are going to see a regional collapse of business.

“It’s scary, people should be concerned … each of those jobs creates other jobs, and each of these buildings that they’re working on creates all kinds of jobs,” Dudley said.

There is only one way to stave this off. If you live in Seattle, you must get rid of Kshama Sawant, Mike O’Brien, Debora Juarez, Bruce Harrell, Sally Bagshaw — the entire city council. You have to get rid of all of the nut-jobs. What do you think Jeff Bezos thinks when he hears Kshama Sawant screaming about his company, the company that has created so many jobs in this city?

Other cities are saying, “We’re going to learn from Seattle’s mistakes.” Why is that? Because in Seattle you have lying con artists on the Seattle City Council. We’re all affected by the loons that Seattle puts in office. And if you keep them in power, you are going to see a city collapse unlike any collapse in our nation’s history.

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