Dori: Repealing Seattle head tax is all about saving $630M levy

The seven council members voting to repeal the head tax are claiming that they’re finally listening to the citizens. On the other side, you’ve got Kshama Sawant saying the council is under the control of big business. You want to know the truth? You want to know what is really happening here?

As with everything, and absolutely everything, this is about one thing and one thing only — how much money government can get out of us. The head tax was supposed to raise $45 million a year. If the referendum had gone to the November ballot, the head tax would have gotten shot down. But the key part of this is that if the measure had been on the ballot, it would have motivated people to take action and actually vote.

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So the city council and the mayor had a decision to make. As you may recall from April, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced she wants to get on the ballot a $636 million property tax increase to fund K-12 education. If people had been motivated in November to go vote and go kill the head tax, they would have had that anti-tax fervor. This means that they would have voted to kill the education tax too.

The council hopes that by this November, people will forget what morons they are and will vote yes on the education levy. They desperately want to save their $636 million property tax levy. And, as I said yesterday, they desperately want to save their own skins when most of them come up for re-election next year.

This is not about listening to the citizens, which they’re trying to sell this as. None of this is about helping the people on the streets. Just like the education levy is not about educating kids. Every single thing they do is calculated to extract the maximum amount of money from people. I’m frustrated at how people don’t recognize that that is the only thing that these politicians care about.

Please, for the love of all that is good, remember this in November. You must say no to this property tax increase. You have to remember that they are getting and spending more money than any equivalent city of this size. And they are squandering it. They are blowing it. That’s why we have the problems that we have. They couldn’t prioritize money to save their lives.

Council President Bruce Harrell says it’s time to hit the “reset button.” Why do they need a “reset button” so often? Could it be because every decision they make is a poorly thought-out one?

And then there’s Sawant, who is about something besides money — she is trying to build a national brand. She wants to become a national socialist figure. That is her whole deal. I do agree with her when she says that the Democrats have ruined this city. But the fix for that is not to go even further to the left; to her socialist/communist ideology. The solution would be to elect some fiscally responsible managers of money — people who are results-oriented.

We have a critically incompetent city council and mayor. You should have figured out how much the people hated this before you unanimously voted for it. You have plenty of money. Start doing your jobs. Start cleaning up the streets. Stop trying to attract so many drug addicts from around the entire nation. As an elected body, you have done so much to cause so much grief. You nine people have done so much to destroy the city of my birth, the city that I love.

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