‘The result of bad policy’: Jake, Spike stunned as Seattle’s JumpStart tax data rivals post-recession Detroit

Five years of data tracking Seattle’s JumpStart tax have been released, and as a result of several factors, the city has lost roughly 30,000 jobs since 2020 and suffered a 48% drop in the taxable value of office buildings, with a nearly 40% office vacancy rate.

Seattle’s JumpStart tax is a tax on the city’s largest employers based on their payroll. A business is only required to pay if its total payroll is more than roughly $9.1 million a year, and the company pays at least one employee roughly $195,000 or more annually.

Jake Skorheim and Spike O’Neill, co-hosts of “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio, compared the startling statistics to what Detroit went through during the Great Recession, though Seattle is much worse off than Detroit, in part due to what Jake and Spike believe to be the city’s JumpStart tax.

“This is exactly the result of bad policy, and it’s really interesting because I saw somebody make a comparison to how bad things are currently in Seattle with Great Recession era Detroit, which is a company town, they make automobiles,” Jake said. “During the Great Recession, back in 2008, nobody was buying cars, and they ended up doing a massive bailout of several of the largest automakers because they were in real bad shape and at risk of completely going under.”

“Detroit became a wasteland,” Spike responded. “You could buy houses for $1.”

Jake says Seattle’s decline can’t be blamed on anything but its own policies

Jake noted that in 2011, Detroit’s vacancy rate peaked at 26% following the Great Recession, but Seattle has already surpassed that pace without any outside factors other than its own policies.

“Seattle now eclipses [Detroit], and then you have to ask yourself, what has happened in Seattle?” Jake asked. “That’s the really big question, because we have not had a major industry that has gone under. We have not had anything other than policy-related issues.”

“Policy issues, taxation issues, driving companies out of town issues,” Spike added.

Jake mentioned all the thriving businesses in Seattle, but remained dumbfounded that the city still wound up worse than post-recession Detroit.

“Isn’t that wild when you look at that comparison?” Jake said. “Seattle has been kind of protected because we have all this beautiful tech industry, and we have all these other industries here. We’ve got Boeing, we’ve got your coffee, and Microsoft. How is it possible that we could be way worse off than Detroit in the aftermath of the Great Recession? It’s not a good long-term prospect. I hope that they get these things under control pretty quickly.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3