King County Executive Dow Constantine is expected to soon unveil a plan to close the King County Jail by 2025. The insanity just keeps ratcheting up. I hope those rumors of Eastside cities planning to form a new county are true.
"In just over a month, nearly 40 Seattle Police Department officers applied to work for the King County Sheriff’s Department. The Everett Police Department saw over 30 applications."
You know it's bad when you are losing police officers to Everett of all places.
King County Executive Dow Constantine is expected to soon unveil a plan to close the King County Jail by 2025. The insanity just keeps ratcheting up. I hope those rumors of Eastside cities planning to form a new county are true.
You know the other time the government agreed to abolish something and replace it with ineffective community programs we got deinstitutionalization. I don't see police/prison abolishment catching on the same way but if it did I guarantee if this country is still around in half a century it'd be some dystopic hellscape like the one that lead the Judges to be formed in Judge Dredd.
Microsoft is in Redmond, Boeing is in Renton. RealPlayer is Seattle, but Bungie and Valve are both Bellevue. I just want on a sperg about how it might affect them anyway, or any company in the whole world if they make the mistake of hiring a remote worker who lives in Seattle.
So everyone of them is in King County except RealPlayer and Amazon, well at least for the time being I would assume.
I have the strange feeling that the Seattle City Council's "Amazon tax" might end like this.
Microsoft is in Redmond, Boeing is in Renton. RealPlayer is Seattle, but Bungie and Valve are both Bellevue. I just want on a sperg about how it might affect them anyway, or any company in the whole world if they make the mistake of hiring a remote worker who lives in Seattle.
Who gets taxed exactly?
Employers will be taxed a percentage of the highest salaries that they pay to Seattle-based employees. If more than 50% of an employee’s work occurs in Seattle — and that employee makes more than $150,000 per year — then that their salary would be subject to the tax.
So they're trying to get their hooks into Apple, Facebook, Google, and more since those companies all have engineering hubs here. What makes them think these companies, which aren't headquartered here, won't just fuck off and leave? All their employees are working from home anyway and none of their iconic headqaurters like Apple's 1 Infinite Loop or the Googleplex are here so there's no emotional or symbolic reason for those branches or hubs to stay, they'll just rent office space in Kirkland or Bellevue or Issaquah and that will be that. And what about companies like Tableau (Seattle) which is completely owned by Salesforce (San Francisco)? What the fuck would they care about keeping Tableau in Seattle? wow
But here is where it gets really good:
What about remote workers?
Given the salary threshold, many of the employees subject to the tax will have jobs that can be done remotely. That’s even more likely now that the pandemic has many companies rethinking in-person office work. Remote employees whose work is not “assigned” to any one city will still be subject to the tax if they reside in Seattle.
If any Microsoft (HQ in Redmond) employees or Nintendo (Redmond) or Pokemon (Bellevue) or any gaming companies' employees like Sucker Punch (Bellevue, owned by Sony (NYC)) live in Seattle and are working from home now because of the coof then those companies is now responsible for paying the tax too? THe company isn't even headquartered in Seattle, it could be a San Francisco software company or a New York City finance company or some overseas logistics company and they have a highly paid employee who happens to be working remote in Seattle, and that company is now on the hook to pay the tax. The whole fucking world needs to be prepared to pay into Sawant's socialist dystopia if they make the mistake of hiring someone who lives here. Employers would benefit from leaving Seattle, and also benefit if their employees left Seattle. wow wow
And companies that are in other places that might hire a highly paid remote worker, like a database admin or a software developer, will now need to avoid Seattle residents specifically. wow wow wow
"Highly paid employees" will be encouraged to leave SEattle as well as successful business. (And 150k is not that high for Seattle. Rent and home prices are really expensive, so software devs can be making 6 figs by their mid-20s or late 20-s and if you become a lead or a a product manager or something, then you're easily in that range and any bonuses push you towards it, too. Plus, the tax is counting stock grants as income, so boom - even Amazon entry-level kids right out of college might suddenly trigger the tax. No idea if the grants count upon vesting or what, but if it's before vesting, then every Amazon employee is potentially fucked.) The "highly paid employees", which again is not that high for this area of the country, are the ones who spend money, go for exepensive latte coffee brakes, buy clothes at Westlake, do all the spending that props up the small business and therefore the service workers that Sawant and her socialist allies pander to.
But those small businesses will fail when people don't live or work in Seattle, the quirky coffee shops and happy hour dependant hipster bars and Asian-fusion food restaurants will go under. And that also means a large company like Nordstrom or a company like Starbucks, both based in Seattle, gets triple hit - it pays these extra taxes, watches as "highly paid employees" are encouraged to live/work elsewhere for hire pay in Bellevue or Kirkland and therefore suffers from brain drain, and also sees its local Seattle businesses suffer.
I knew the Seattle City Council were dummies. I knew this. But I didn't know how dumb these dummies were.
wow
Edited to fix the spoiler and to add: I repeat "The whole fucking world needs to be prepared to pay into Sawant's socialist dystopia if they make the mistake of hiring someone who lives here." A few blocks in Capitol Hill for CHAZ wasn't enough, Sawant wants the entire city to be a sad wilting garden patrolled by a mag-dumping gun club.
Sawant needs to be lynched. Literally. Her and her buddies just murdered Seattle. It's dead. No coming back from this.
Sawant is just fist fucking the corpse of Seattle and parading it around like a cunt puppet now.
Companies are just going to leave, probably as quickly as they can. What do they get for these extra taxes? Their shit stolen and destroyed by terrorists supported by the same commies who are attacking them already? Yeah what a great fucking deal. Pretty sure Bellevue or Issaquah or pretty much fucking anywhere else in the state can make a better offer.
Companies are just going to leave, probably as quickly as they can. What do they get for these extra taxes? Their shit stolen and destroyed by terrorists supported by the same commies who are attacking them already? Yeah what a great fucking deal. Pretty sure Bellevue or Issaquah or pretty much fucking anywhere else in the state can make a better offer.
It speak volumes about what kind of delusional bubble these council people live in. How long will it take Amazon and Starbucks to leave Seattle when this tax really comes into effect?
A month? Maybe two? All the smaller companies like K2 who would be affected by this tax would leave even faster. It's not hard to set up a new HQ when most of your employee's are already working from home.
Companies are just going to leave, probably as quickly as they can. What do they get for these extra taxes? Their shit stolen and destroyed by terrorists supported by the same commies who are attacking them already? Yeah what a great fucking deal. Pretty sure Bellevue or Issaquah or pretty much fucking anywhere else in the state can make a better offer.
It's a nice gig if they can't leave but unfortunately for the commies they can't keep their victims from just telling them to fuck off and leaving (or structuring their operations to avoid the tax). I guess there's too much math in the Laffer curve concept where you can literally decrease your revenues by increasing taxes because people respond to your actions by decreasing their tax liabilities, or ceasing activities that are now no longer profitable.
Who gets taxed exactly?
Employers will be taxed a percentage of the highest salaries that they pay to Seattle-based employees. If more than 50% of an employee’s work occurs in Seattle — and that employee makes more than $150,000 per year — then that their salary would be subject to the tax.
So they're trying to get their hooks into Apple, Facebook, Google, and more since those companies all have engineering hubs here. What makes them think these companies, which aren't headquartered here, won't just fuck off and leave? All their employees are working from home anyway and none of their iconic headqaurters like Apple's 1 Infinite Loop or the Googleplex are here so there's no emotional or symbolic reason for those branches or hubs to stay, they'll just rent office space in Kirkland or Bellevue or Issaquah and that will be that. And what about companies like Tableau (Seattle) which is completely owned by Salesforce (San Francisco)? What the fuck would they care about keeping Tableau in Seattle? wow
But here is where it gets really good:
What about remote workers?
Given the salary threshold, many of the employees subject to the tax will have jobs that can be done remotely. That’s even more likely now that the pandemic has many companies rethinking in-person office work. Remote employees whose work is not “assigned” to any one city will still be subject to the tax if they reside in Seattle.
If any Microsoft (HQ in Redmond) employees or Nintendo (Redmond) or Pokemon (Bellevue) or any gaming companies' employees like Sucker Punch (Bellevue, owned by Sony (NYC)) live in Seattle and are working from home now because of the coof then those companies is now responsible for paying the tax too? THe company isn't even headquartered in Seattle, it could be a San Francisco software company or a New York City finance company or some overseas logistics company and they have a highly paid employee who happens to be working remote in Seattle, and that company is now on the hook to pay the tax. The whole fucking world needs to be prepared to pay into Sawant's socialist dystopia if they make the mistake of hiring someone who lives here. Employers would benefit from leaving Seattle, and also benefit if their employees left Seattle. wow wow
And companies that are in other places that might hire a highly paid remote worker, like a database admin or a software developer, will now need to avoid Seattle residents specifically. wow wow wow
"Highly paid employees" will be encouraged to leave SEattle as well as successful business. (And 150k is not that high for Seattle. Rent and home prices are really expensive, so software devs can be making 6 figs by their mid-20s or late 20-s and if you become a lead or a a product manager or something, then you're easily in that range and any bonuses push you towards it, too. Plus, the tax is counting stock grants as income, so boom - even Amazon entry-level kids right out of college might suddenly trigger the tax. No idea if the grants count upon vesting or what, but if it's before vesting, then every Amazon employee is potentially fucked.) The "highly paid employees", which again is not that high for this area of the country, are the ones who spend money, go for exepensive latte coffee brakes, buy clothes at Westlake, do all the spending that props up the small business and therefore the service workers that Sawant and her socialist allies pander to.
But those small businesses will fail when people don't live or work in Seattle, the quirky coffee shops and happy hour dependant hipster bars and Asian-fusion food restaurants will go under. And that also means a large company like Nordstrom or a company like Starbucks, both based in Seattle, gets triple hit - it pays these extra taxes, watches as "highly paid employees" are encouraged to live/work elsewhere for hire pay in Bellevue or Kirkland and therefore suffers from brain drain, and also sees its local Seattle businesses suffer.
I knew the Seattle City Council were dummies. I knew this. But I didn't know how dumb these dummies were.
wow
Edited to fix the spoiler and to add: I repeat "The whole fucking world needs to be prepared to pay into Sawant's socialist dystopia if they make the mistake of hiring someone who lives here." A few blocks in Capitol Hill for CHAZ wasn't enough, Sawant wants the entire city to be a sad wilting garden patrolled by a mag-dumping gun club.
Can't help but think this might be a feature and not a bug. At this point the idea that they're just trying to deliberately crash Seattle's entire economy to Detroit-ify it doesn't really seem that bizarre.
That's literally the mindset of the city council and a shitton of the activist community. The state outlaws income taxes, which means sales taxes are the primary way the city government feeds the endlessly hungry money machine. and they've gone into overtime rationalizing how great Sin Taxes are to justify every additional tax they can already grab. The Seattle area may be the most accurate place in the country to make the case that wokies are just secular Evangelical Christians.
The result of this is that gas never went below $2.99 here no matter how much the Saudis and Russians were warring over the oil price, it's the most expensive market for alcohol in the country (Hawaii has cheaper booze, for perspective), and a pack of cigarettes drops something like 4 bucks once you get over the county line. The only "sin tax" I can think of that went down when I moved back here from California was the one for a paper bag at the grocery store, which went from 10 cents to 5.
Can't help but think this might be a feature and not a bug. At this point the idea that they're just trying to deliberately crash Seattle's entire economy to Detroit-ify it doesn't really seem that bizarre.
Can't help but think this might be a feature and not a bug. At this point the idea that they're just trying to deliberately crash Seattle's entire economy to Detroit-ify it doesn't really seem that bizarre.
It's a nice gig if they can't leave but unfortunately for the commies they can't keep their victims from just telling them to fuck off and leaving (or structuring their operations to avoid the tax). I guess there's too much math in the Laffer curve concept where you can literally decrease your revenues by increasing taxes because people respond to your actions by decreasing their tax liabilities, or ceasing activities that are now no longer profitable.
The Finance Ministry estimates the proceeds from the tax amounted to 260 million euros in its first year and 160 million in the second. That’s broadly in line with expectations, but tiny compared with a budget deficit which had reached 84.7 billion euros by the end of October.
To put that number in perspective, France’s GDP is around 2 trillion euros. The tax raised less than one one-hundredth of one percent of GDP in tax revenue. So much for the pipe dream of American progressives that we could finance a more generous welfare state with higher taxes on the rich. BTW, many people don’t realize that the top MTR on the rich in the US is already relatively high by international standards. The federal top income tax rate is 43.4%, and with state income taxes added it’s above 50% in places like California and New York City (where many of the high earners live.)
But the news is actually even worse than this, much worse. The revenues for the tax are estimated without accounting for dynamic effects. Even if you are not a devout supply-sider (and I am a moderate supply-sider, who believes tax increases usually lead to more revenue) it would be hard to deny that this particular tax increase cost revenue, after accounting for the impact of French economic growth. Even if the tax merely discouraged investment by a small amount, the impact on total revenues would almost certainly be negative, as even a very small reduction in economic growth would reduce ordinary tax revenues by far more than the extra 160 million collected by the rich. France collects close to a trillion euros in tax revenues, meaning even a 0.02% reduction in economic growth would cost their Treasury more than 160 million euros.
Come on, the answer is clearly the most common one. They dumb as fuck, that's it. There is no great plan to entice people over to rural areas, it's just a bunch of retards soaked in commie ideology and taking faith in it.
Can't help but think this might be a feature and not a bug. At this point the idea that they're just trying to deliberately crash Seattle's entire economy to Detroit-ify it doesn't really seem that bizarre.
