Seattle Repeals Tax That Upset Amazon (apnews.com) 335
Last month, the Seattle City Council introduced a new tax that would charge firms $275 per worker a year to fund homelessness outreach services and affordable housing. This greatly upset Amazon, Seattle's biggest private sector employer, which threatened to move jobs out of the city. Today, The Associated Press reports that Seattle leaders have repealed the tax on large companies such as Amazon and Starbucks after they fought the measure. From the report: The City Council voted 7-2 Tuesday to reverse a tax that it unanimously approved just a month ago to help provide services in the city. The Seattle region has one of the highest homelessness numbers in the U.S. Amazon, Starbucks and other businesses sharply criticized the tax as misguided. The online retailer, the city's largest employer, even temporarily halted construction planning on a new high-rise building near its Seattle headquarters in protest. Mayor Jenny Durkan and a majority of the council have said they scrapped the tax to avoid a costly political fight as a coalition of businesses moved to get a referendum overturning the tax on the November ballot.
RTFA Misleading Title (Score:5, Informative)
The tax was poorly written. It was a tax on gross receipts over 21 million. This hit low margin businesses hard. Yeah sure, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Getty and the rest could have paid it. We have many regional businesses that would be hit very hard, likely leaving the city. We need to revisit it.
Instead of repealing it (Score:2)
Because the politicians don't have a clue (Score:2)
Why not fix it? Because the politicians don't know how to.
Re:Because the politicians don't have a clue (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not fix it? Because the politicians don't know how to.
No, that's not it. It's not complicated. "Fixing" it would mean actually recognizing that people who own and operate successful businesses aren't evil villains that should be torn down through taxes in order to subsidize (rather than fix) the problems that plague the cities in which they operate. They don't want to fix a bill like that (in the sense that rational people would consider it fixed). They think the bill didn't go far enough. So any movement the opposite direction is just caving in to Eeeeeevil Capitalists who should be treated like revenue dairy cows to throw some day-to-day cash at the social paradise of tent cities and rampant drug abuse.
What they don't know how to do is to sufficiently hide what they're trying to do, so that the lawyers at Amazon can't see they're about to be punitively taxed for the sin of being successful and employing thousands and thousands of people.
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Many of them are, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
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You...probably wouldn't wanna study politicians.
They are congenial not because they are the most empathetic. In fact, the opposite is true. It is the shy folk who care what others think about them.
Outgoing types don't care what you think about them. Shame runs low on these folk.
This is why the common feature among top politicians is the abilitu to lie convincingly. There's no concern in there if caught, so they can look you right in the eye and tell you what you want to hear, so you will like it and get
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people who own and operate successful businesses aren't evil villains that should be torn down through taxes in order to subsidize (rather than fix) the problems that plague the cities in which they operate
This is important. Societal issues which are caused by society should be fixed by society... not businesses.
How does society pay to fix something? Taxes.
So the point isn't that taxes are the problem, it's who bears the tax burden. The progressive structure of income tax places the highest burden of funding social programs on those who have benefited the most from their place in society. Business taxes don't just get passed to the rich owners and management, but also to the low-wage employees and low-inc
Re:Because the politicians don't have a clue (Score:5, Interesting)
if they are SUCCESSFUL, its entirely because of the infra that they received FOR FREE from america.
therefore, they should pay their fair share; their success is based on the ability to do business here and not worry about electricity, workers strikes, invading wars, crime like africa has, etc.
they are freeloaders and they NEED to pay their share.
else, it will continue to fall on the poor and middle class. and we're fucking tired of paying for EVERYTHING in this country; while watching the land owners laugh all the way to the bank.
amazon will not move. they know better. but our lawmakers, sigh, they only know how to accept suitcases of cash ;(
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Whats going to be taxed next to what amount? Thats the only question.
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"Not us, you ingrates," say businesses as they leave the city they're guilty of bringing jobs to.
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Low cost energy.
Educated population who passed exams on merit.
Fast ISP products and services ready to connect.
Land ready to expand onto. Services are ready.
Nice parts of a city ready for workers and owners to buy/rent in.
That friendly welcome to people who work to create jobs.
No "outreach" tax once a productive and creative brand grows.
A city that will welcome and listen to investors. Not on ways to tax th
Re:RTFA Misleading Title (Score:4, Interesting)
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You mean it doesn't make sense to combat homelessness by creating incentives for companies to leave town? One might think that the payroll taxes would be enough.
Or maybe Seattle could divert some of that public art funding towards the homeless?
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This hit low margin businesses hard.
There are a lot of fixed costs that apply to businesses - rent, property taxes, wages, materials... A business that can't cover its fixed costs and make a decent margin isn't a business, it's simply a poor choice of how to make use of the associated labour and capital.
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Grocery stores are all low-margin businesses. Your view, that if a business can't afford to pay the tax, they shouldn't be in business, sounds like the petulant socialists here (Seattle.) You should WANT jobs and businesses, rather than making it harder for them or pushing them over into Bellevue, Renton and Lynnwood.
Taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
It just goes to show you... in my many years of watching thing like this (and also from the accurately described observations of Milton Friedman), when you raise taxes, people (etc.) leave. Ultimately it spirals downward where there is less tax revenue, so taxes need to be raised more (or something needs to happen).
Look at the inversion which happened over time, as corporations (evil or not) moved their headquarters to other countries where the tax rate was competitive and much lower than here. Then look at what happened when the corporate tax rate was lowered.
This same thing is happening in other cities with higher tax rates, or ways that the municipality gets your money (via regulations, ridiculous fines, and so on). People will look to move to a place that doesn't nickel and dime them to death. This (obviously) isn't true for everyone, but it tends to lower the tax base if it goes on long enough and taxes, et. al., continue to increase.
Although what I am saying may not be popular, it tends to be true. Please don't blame the messenger.
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You're talking about the Laffer curve (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, there is a point where people leave. But there's also a point where required services crumble and people leave. Settle is nowhere near the former. Neither is most of California. What's driving people out isn't taxes, it's the cost of housing.
What you're saying isn't popular because, well, it's made up poppycock that originates with right wing think tanks trying to get low taxes for the billionaires that fund them.
The biggest growth in American history was at a time when the top marginal rate was 90% for Pete's sake. If you want the economy to grow you've got to Invest in America (remember that slogan?). We need healthcare for all so our people can be productive and infrastructure they can use to get to and do work. We need schools for them to learn too (or we need to import more H1-Bs, that works too).
In short, if we want a functional civilization we have to pay for it. Civilization's like any other nice club. You have to pay your dues.
Re:Taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
when you raise taxes, people (etc.) leave
The problem with these observations is they don't quite fit reality.
If this overly-simplistic observation was true, CA would be losing population. It isn't. It's one of the fastest-growing states in the country. New York City would be losing population and lower-tax upstate NY would be gaining it. The opposite is happening. Kansas would be getting flooded with people moving in, thanks to the huge tax cuts Brownback passed. Instead, it's hemorrhaging people.
So like almost everything in reality, it's quite a bit more complicated than a short statement can encapsulate.
Money-grabbing government parasites (Score:4, Insightful)
Government needs to A) GET OUT OF THE WAY, and B) Actually support industry.
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What would your grand plan consist of, rainbows and puppy dogs?
Duh. (Score:2, Troll)
Cities all over the country are climbing over each other to get Amazon's new building, but the quasi-Marxist city council of Seattle are too stupid to see that companies already paying a shit-ton of taxes don't like to be milked even further.
From Someone in the area (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of hate on what just happened here in Seattle, wonder how many left leaning people are not from here.
I have compassion, and I don't mind paying more to help, but some people just like it the way it is and aren't willing to go in to permanent housing
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/04/09/homeless-residents-brag-about-makeshift-mansion-near-seattles-famed-space-needle.html
They keep asking for money and there is no plan, no accountability
http://mynorthwest.com/569171/mayor-murray-homeless-seattle/?
Even the last mayor was winging it
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/clearing-homeless-from-the-jungle-may-take-more-time-mayor-says/
Seattle hired this consultant named Barbara Poppe
http://mynorthwest.com/786046/barbara-poppe-seattle-homeless-2017/?
And she had some solutions and they didn't include taxing more. From the article above there is this section
"But Seattle was slow to act, which echoes what Poppe warned about in 2016 when she told the city “you’re much more inclined toward discussion and planning and process that goes on and on and on.”"
Which feels like "paralysis by analysis" but I can't help but feel it is more sinister then that
You make Seattle a great place to come to if you are homeless
Safe Injection Site
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/seattle-king-county-move-to-create-2-injection-sites-for-drug-users/
Need more how about free heroin
http://mynorthwest.com/1014078/dori-bagshaw-government-buy-heroin/?
That will make the place grow with voters that are willing to vote left or socialist. Keeping these politicians in power.
Take that tax money and feed to homelessness machine
https://roominate.com/blog/2016/anatomy-of-a-swindle/
So you get all these out of town homeless people, and of course crime goes up
https://www.king5.com/article/news/crime/suspect-pleads-not-guilty-to-raping-woman-in-seattle-car-dealership-bathroom/281-552696410
Maybe you think I am just some AC posting random links found on the internet supporting a view, but from what I have seen over the past few years, I can tell you I hate going to downtown Seattle. My compassion has reached its limits. I still want to help people willing to help themselves, the rest... they can go to another area.
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the National Coalition for the Homeless estimated in 2012 that "only one-tenth of unhoused persons actually exercise the right to vote".
https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com]
Wanted: First principles (Score:3, Insightful)
We have gotten VERY far away from the basic principles this nation was founded upon. We are now in a place where the political class sees a problem and decides upon a solution THEY want, and then need to grab the money from SOMEBODY... ANYBODY (well, anybody ELSE that is). They make no real effort to solve a problem in a cost-effective way, nor any effort to undo piles of their previous bad actions that may have contributed to causing the new problem. They also give little concern to where they might have gotten the RIGHT to just grab somebody else's cash. They simply decicde on an amount of cash they need and then go looking for a targeted group who has that much cash and who they think will be unable to resist them politically.
By what right do these thugs take money from entity A and transfer it to entity B for the benefit of entity B?
This is NOT the model the nation was founded upon. The government is indeed given the power to tax for the GENERAL welfare (things that are there for everybody, like national defense, national parks, the courts, etc). This is a different thing; this is taking money from one person (or a legal entity that is incorporated and is therefore a legal person) and using it for the specific welfare of another person or a group of specific persons. This is just grubby armed robbery.
As a practical matter, it would cost the taxpayers a lot less to simply stop all the bad government behaviors that lead to such homelessness problems. There is no reason why a home today should cost more than a come 50 years ago. There are many more government regulations which have driven-up the costs to build homes, and driven up the costs to employ people, taken more out of people's paychecks (making it harder to buy a home) and so forth. Even basic inflation is an artifact of government, though that one is certainly not a local government issue. We have had many decades of politicians claiming they were doing all sorts of good by heaping rules and regulations and taxes on to the backs of the people and businesses and there has been very little consideration to all the burdens this places on sectors of the economy. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the increases in taxes, no matter how severe, cannot outpace the increases in damage done by these very same politicians.
For once I agree (Score:2)
It'll be back (Score:3)
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Under normal conditions, you might be right. But Seattle ain't normal. "Individuals" are so heavily taxed in Seattle that they have to get creative. Hence this, and a pseudo-income-tax that wasn't, that both happened this last year.
Washington State can't have an income tax, but the property tax is extremely high. There's a high-ish sales tax. Refinancing an average property results in over $15K of state taxes. Seattle has a high "soda tax"... which Costco protests on their pricing placards. Seattle a
They lucked out reversing it. (Score:3)
Had it gone to referendum, I'd have voted to keep it and let Seattle die. I'll take Bellevue over Seattle, for all kinds of reasons.
Time to change the city name from Seattle (Score:2)
Like any other third world municipality, it's run for strictly for the benefit of the moneyed elite. Not that they're alone in this. Every city crawling on it's belly to get the new Amazon HQ2 is right behind them. So is every city that subsidizes billionaire owned Major League Sports teams with tax breaks and stadiums that will never recover the investment made at the public's expense.
Remember it's not your world, it belongs to someone else, and you have to pay them for the p
Fix homelessness easily (Score:3)
Whereas it's not a 100% fix, a good 90% of the "homeless" are there because of heroin addiction. Legalize the drug, register addicts, dispense pharmaceutical grade product in a clinical environment, eliminate the black market, clean up the streets. There's probably two solutions, the Amsterdam model or Mao's model.
Clean up the vicious opiate addiction cycle and the majority of the homelessness goes away. What's left is easily manageable with current resources.
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Look at the legalized POT market studies on its effects on the black market.
if anything, the black market is now stronger.
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All that gets replaced by a city working with a new low cost clinical environment.
Where will that police budget go if the overtime is not needed?
Wont someone think of the decades of overtime at risk.
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Many heroin addicts started out as legitimate opioid users, whose supply was cut off as part of "reducing the opiod epidemic". The safer, less potent pharmaceutical types (Oxycodone, Vicodin) are more expensive on the black market than heroin. People turn to heroin because it's cheap - try legalizing the schedule II stuff first and see where that leads.
$1.06 Billion a year is not enough (Score:4, Insightful)
This is on an estimated homeless population of roughly 12,000 individuals: https://www.seattletimes.com/s... [seattletimes.com]
This works out to around $88,000 a year per individual. Let that sink in for a second.
Their government is ineffective and inept, giving them more money to waste is not a practical solution.
Re:This is lies from Trump (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is lies from Trump (Score:5, Informative)
... and they both have a good point. A tax on employment has got to be the dumbest tax, and falls heaviest on the lowest paying jobs.
If they really want more affordable housing, they could start by approving some building permits. It is idiotic to deny, deny, deny, and then declare a "crisis" because the lack of supply pushes up prices.
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In the case of Amazon, the primary target (the bill was written so as to target Amazon specifically, which might actually be a violation of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution), the measure would have taxed from an employment base created from money coming from outside: Amazon sells all over the nation, and flows money into Seattle. The labor wedge, thus, is somebody else's problem, and the measure would have been good for Seattle in terms of tax revenue without all of those nasty downsi
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For the same reason, Amazon can get up and move two towns over and absolutely destroy Seattle's economy by cutting the economic feeding tube. This is why we are, at times, nice to really, really, really huge businesses: the symbiotic relationship forms a one-way dependence.
That's parasitism, not symbiosis. Symbiosis is, by definition, 2 way.
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Not really. Parasites harm the host: they remove and do not give back. Amazon provides Seattle with income brought from outside, making Seattle a wealthy and powerful city able to support high standards-of-living and a great many jobs. The wages for those jobs come from selling a bunch of stuff to wealthy Seattle inhabitants, ultimately using money paid out in taxes to Seattle and in wages to Seattle residents by Amazon and its local employees. Seattle gives Amazon a favorable location with infrastruc
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Surely if Amazon didn't benefit from being in Seattle, they would have left.
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... and they both have a good point. A tax on employment has got to be the dumbest tax, and falls heaviest on the lowest paying jobs.
If they really want more affordable housing, they could start by approving some building permits. It is idiotic to deny, deny, deny, and then declare a "crisis" because the lack of supply pushes up prices.
Please research before you try and speak. SF may be deny, deny, deny, but Seattle has been approve, approve, approve for the last twenty years. Except for some a few well publicized cases of historical old buildings, everything old and cheap is being torn down. Even then, they usually allow for a new building if the original facade is preserved. I can walk outside my place of work and see five different cranes working on new buildings. It's been like that for years and certainly haven't been the same buildi
Re:This is lies from Trump (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you misunderstand supply and demand.
If supply is high enough then demand falls and prices follow. The GP pointed out that not enough permits were being issued. Your argument that because there are some, there must be enough is not convincing. The trend in the price is rising, this is a solid metric that can be used to determine that supply is low.
There may be other reasons, but you gave no data to support your position. In fact, your argument bolsters his position. Housing is in such high demand that investors are looking at multiyear projects (construction) and determining that the increase in demand will likely result in a high enough sale price that margin will be preserved even after all of the challenges of urban construction.
Hoist on your own petard, sir.
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There may be other reasons, but you gave no data to support your position. In fact, your argument bolsters his position. Housing is in such high demand that investors are looking at multiyear projects (construction) and determining that the increase in demand will likely result in a high enough sale price that margin will be preserved even after all of the challenges of urban construction.
Not quite so simple. There is plenty of new supply in Seattle, but nobody is building cheap places to live. Even the new artist living pods places that have gone up that are glorified dorm rooms were more expensive than the older apartments in the city. Studies have shown that the new building has kept prices down from what is seen in places like SF, but Seattle's population has also doubled in the last twenty years. Another thousand people move in every week currently. Quite simply, Seattle mostly gentrifi
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Not quite so simple. There is plenty of new supply in Seattle, but nobody is building cheap places to live.
If there were plenty of supply, prices would not increase. If there were oversupply, prices would fall. The law of supply and demand is not hard to grasp. It is not a surprise that no one is building any place cheap to live, I imagine the building code in Seattle continues to grow in size, complexity and demands on the builder. Evicting delinquent or bad tenants has most likely become more difficult. To adjust to the new reality, developers build to attract affluent tenants that are less likely to trash a
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If supply is high enough then demand falls and prices follow.
That's ... not how it works at all. If supply is high enough, prices fall and demand rises. If supply is too low, prices rise and demand falls. If supply is low, and demand is high, prices rise.
The real issue is that there is sufficient demand for high end luxury housing that it is crowding out lower-margin housing that middle income people can afford. That, too, can be addressed with changes in permitting, but that runs into two problems: 1) It faces opposition from "free market" purists, who insist
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:This is lies from Trump (Score:5, Informative)
Deductions massively changed over that time, too... For example, compare 1957 (top tax rate of 90%) to today (top tax rate of 37%). In 1957 [taxfoundation.org] the Federal Government collected $36 billion from a population of 172 million - about $209 per person. In 2012, we see it was $1.13 trillion for 314 million people - $3600 per person. Correcting for inflation [saving.org] we see that the Federal Government now makes about twice as much, per capita, than it did in 1957 (which was also the last year the Federal Government ran an actual surplus and paid the debt down).
Think about it - in the bad, old, high statutory rate days, the Federal Government collected about HALF of what it does today. Sure, the nominal rates are lower - but the exemptions are dramatically reduced as well, so that the effective tax rate is quite a bit higher (about 2.1 times higher, in fact).
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If I was going to say something stupid and patently false, I'd probably post as A/C as well.
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The principle of a capitation business head count tax is what had to be stopped. It will never stop at $275. Next year it will be $295, and then it will be double the rate of inflation growth for 10 years, and then it will be really a problem.
Yes, because at that point they’ll probably start demanding the companies pay the tax with actual HEADS.
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Amusingly, I invented a new social insurance that takes a tax that doesn't adjust year after year. I learned from Social Security's mistake: mine has a tax structure which necessarily draws revenue with increasing purchasing power. In other words: if you keep the tax rate the same, the tax revenue grows faster than inflation year after year.
As consequence, the program pays larger benefits over time without raising the taxes feeding it. It's not like Social Security where you say, "Hey, let's raise t
Re:This is lies from Trump (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just the head tax. It's all the other taxes and regulations and controls too. Just because a specific straw broke the camel's back doesn't make THAT straw the bad straw... there are many other straws there.
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This was an end run around Washington States constitutional restrictions on income taxes. It starts out as a fixed fee per employee applicable only to large corporations. Next, it creeps down scale and applies to more companies. Also, it develops a tiered structure, based on income. Pretty soon the city is taking a percentage with all the tax brackets and other features of a plain old income tax.
The $50 million it was supposed to raise could easily have been found someplace else. Perhaps a little belt-tigh
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American cities really need to stop catering to companies that aren't willing to lift a finger to help local quality of life.
No, American voters need to stop giving power and resources to municipal politicians that seem to be doing everything possible to destroy the local quality of life (say, by making their city irresistible and consequence-free to squatters camping and shitting in people's front yards, MS-13 getting sanctuary while taking over local schools, etc). The pressure to reverse idiotic moves like the now-dead Seattle plan was as much from regular Seattle residents sick to death of the city's deliberate infliction o
Re:Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
MS-13 "taking over schools" is Fox agitprop. Stop repeating "faux news" for the stupid.
We had to move out of a neighborhood that was being overrun by MS-13. The police would no longer even enter our street without multiple vehicles. Moms from Central America started taking out second mortgages to get their kids out of the MS-13 recruiting ground and local franchise HQ that was the area's high school, and put them in private schools. Your witless, low-information attempt to blame that reality on Fox would be hilarious to me, if we hadn't had MS-13's local troops relive us of property, threaten our lives, and run our best neighbors out of their homes. You know all of this, but are trying to wish it away because it doesn't suit your personal political narrative. Stop it.
Homeless people -- what do you propose as a solution?
There are more jobs available than there are people to fill them. There's a reason that people congregate in places like Seattle and San Francisco to camp out and set up tent cities. Because those cities encourage it, practically and culturally and financially. You also know this, but are equally annoyed on that front, because it would mean confronting the reality of which sort of monolithic partisan political establishment totally controls places where that happens.
Re:Amazon (Score:4, Interesting)
Except the homeless aren't counted as part of the unemployed -- many haven't been looking for years. They need a leg up and training, and money for this doesn't come from thin air.
MS-13? Name the school and neighborhood -- you're likely exaggerating.
Re:Amazon (Score:4, Insightful)
The bulk of long term homeless are mentally ill, studies I've seen point to near 80%, the other 20% are addicts. Short term homeless are often that way because they had a financial incident while living paycheck to paycheck. This could be as simple as a hospital visit that wiped out the rent payment. Short term homelessness is generally easy to fix with a little help and a leg up getting past that financial predicament.
You can't fix long term homelessness any more than you can fix drug addiction or mental illness.
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You can fix long term homelessness. We as a society are just not willing to do the things that will fix it.
First of all it isn't cheap. Second of all it requires an intrusion into people's lives that is aberrant to most people on both the left and the right.
Long term homeless who have addiction problems or are mentally ill are on the streets because they are incapable of taking care of themselves and are likewise incapable of making the decisions that will allow them to take care of themselves. They are not
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Salt Lake City had some success just giving homeless people apartments.
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He may be.. but he may not. There are neighborhoods where this sort of thing has happened.
There was an area in East Tulsa OK that had a major MS-13 problem. Several stabbings and shooting on a weekly basis. We just barely sold my Dad's house before it became unsellable due to the decline in the neighborhood.
In fact, for a while Tulsa,OK was used as a place to "lay low". I think MS-13 copied the Mob. (see Whitey Bulger)
This also happens in North Tulsa with various black gangs. A several block radius will bec
Re:Amazon (Score:4, Insightful)
"There's a reason that people congregate in places like Seattle and San Francisco to camp out and set up tent cities. Because those cities encourage it, practically and culturally and financially. You also know this, but are equally annoyed on that front, because it would mean confronting the reality of which sort of monolithic partisan political establishment totally controls places where that happens."
That's true, you don't see these tent cities going up in places like Mudville or Sticktown. I wonder why that is.
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The better US cities have laws about their streets not getting filled up with parked RV's all day and night.
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Homeless people -- what do you propose as a solution?
There are more jobs available than there are people to fill them. There's a reason that people congregate in places like Seattle and San Francisco to camp out and set up tent cities. Because those cities encourage it, practically and culturally and financially. You also know this, but are equally annoyed on that front, because it would mean confronting the reality of which sort of monolithic partisan political establishment totally controls places where that happens.
Not in Seattle. The vast majority of homeless here (85%) are people who used to live here but lost their houses to increasing rents. The city center is growing more affluent and the poor are being forced farther and farther out into the suburbs and other cities. If they can't handle a move with first/last/deposit plus relaible transportation to get around, they are ending up homeless.
Re:Amazon (Score:4, Insightful)
What!? You can't be serious. There was just another dust-up about something President Trump said, calling these gangs "animals". The precursor was a sheriff complaining that they were being forced to release the detainees before ICE could pick them up, because of sanctuary city laws.
Please, pay attention.
Re:Amazon (Score:5, Informative)
MS-13 "taking over schools" is Fox agitprop.
Actually it appears to be wapo agitprop [washingtonpost.com].
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How big does the group have to be before you take off the blinders they trained you to wear?
Re:Amazon (Score:5, Informative)
Why don't you have a look at the budget and answer your own question?
Amazon paid $250 million to state and local governments in Washington State alone, and it's the largest property tax payer in Seattle. You call that "not lifting a finger"?
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Big Businesses: "Kiss my WHAT???"
Seattle: "Never mind."
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It's about 1% of their worldwide profit. In what possible way is Washington State even entitled to that much?
People never matter to governments, least of all to leftist governments.
Re:Amazon (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you could probably survive giving me $1000, doesn't mean I'm entitled to force you to do that, does it?
And if your choice was to be around people who would say that it DID entitle me to force you to give me that $1000... call it, for the sake of argument, regional quality-of-life-benefits, suppose you were insightful enough to realize that there would almost immediately be another round for reduction of income disparity (which could be reduced better by fixing schools.) So I realized you STILL had another $1000, and could afford to give it, so I took that too.
Or you could move five miles, to an area with lower crime, better life quality, but a bit less central... and nobody regularly extorting $1000 payments from you because you "could afford it".
What would a rational person or business do? Just because they could afford it, doesn't mean it's something they may choose to afford or even should choose to afford.
Before you disagree, please remit that $1000. Because it's probably a rounding error on your 401K and I know you can afford it.
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Re:Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
Having too many jobs in one place is a bigger problem right now in the US because that is what jacks up housing costs and increases commute times.
No, what jacks up housing costs is a lack of housing. This is usually due to regulation / zoning laws preventing higher density housing from being built. If you want cheaper housing you have to build more of it. Subsidizing it without fixing the supply just jacks up the price more.
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Tokyo is a good example of high density housing supporting high density jobs. An apartment in Tokyo is affordable to a single middle-income individual/household. This is because every "suburban" (can they really be called that anymore?) train station is surrounded by apartment towers, with densities reducing the further from the station people get.
Compare to NYC area, where everyone fought tooth and nail to keep their suburban towns "picturesque" resulting in commuter rail stations being dominated by low
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Having too many jobs in one place is a bigger problem right now in the US because that is what jacks up housing costs and increases commute times.
No, what jacks up housing costs is a lack of housing. This is usually due to regulation / zoning laws preventing higher density housing from being built. If you want cheaper housing you have to build more of it. Subsidizing it without fixing the supply just jacks up the price more.
That might keep prices from rising even quicker, but as Seattle has seen, nobody is going to build new, cheap places to live. All the cheap places to live get remodeled or rebuilt as expensive places. Everybody building is doing so to make more money than can currently be made on the current supply. To get prices to drop, you need the population to actually start decreasing like it did in Seattle after the dot bust. Then rents were actually going down without asking for it for a year or two to try and keep
Re:Amazon (Score:5, Interesting)
As such, the most motivated people will relocate to be whether the greatest opportunity is.
This brings :
- Motivated people
- Opportunistic people
These people will either work as transients, meaning that they will work 2-5 years in the area, earn money and move back with their winnings to settle down. This requires strong markets. For example, if I took a job offer I have in Redmond right now, I would relocate and buy a house immediately. I would stay at my job for long enough for that purchase to show me a solid return on investment which would depend on housing prices rising and therefore screwing all the locals. Then I would sell and leave. The person I sold to would do the same thing.
Or they will settle down.
The transients will come and go and they are a burden on any local economy, but what's important is that many of them will settle in the end. Or at least they'll strengthen the market making the company the area more attractive to draw more people.
Highly motivated people who settle down will raise their children and place importance on their motivations. They'll participate more in schools. They'll provide better tutors for their children. They'll invest more in the local area and improve the infrastructure... and the values of the properties.
And that will draw more people.
The problem is, this cycle of development is excellent for the city but not for the people in the city. Prices rise, inflation is horrendous. I was in Seattle last month for a trade show and I was horrified at how cheap so many things were.
The salaries of all my peers was $150,000+ but the food and prices at Target were suitable for areas with economies closer to $40,000. That means that the people shopping at the stores should be paying more and the stores should be paying their employees more. Instead, they were very definitely minimum wage workers.
That means that the pay gap is INSANE!!! Even with $15 an hour minimum wage, the property values are so ridiculously high that people have to spend an hour commuting or live in squalor to make ends meet. $30,000 a year is simply not enough to survive in Seattle given the relatively small size of the city and the relatively high demand for real estate.
That said, homelessness in Seattle was amazing. There was A LOT of it. I grew up in New York back in the days when trying to get into Grand Central in the morning required carefully climbing over homeless people while attempting to not step in puddles of urine.... The difference is, NYC hasn't been developing... it's a lot of old buildings now. Seattle is under mass construction and is really clean. It seems and feels wrong to have massive urban renewal going on with homeless people just all over the place.
What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg. Someone explained to me that there's a possibility that the city has invested so heavily in caring for the homeless that many homeless people are attracted to the city so they won't have to beg. So it's interesting because homelessness is/was almost a fashion in San Francisco, but now that the system is even better (it seems) in Seattle, the homeless are migrating to the better system.
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What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg.
I’ve worked in Seattle a lot of years, and I’d really like to know what part of town you were in where the homeless didn’t beg. The only homeless people I see who don’t beg are the ones too mentally ill to have any connection with reality.
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What was worse is that they weren't begging. I've never seen anyplace where homeless people don't beg.
I’ve worked in Seattle a lot of years, and I’d really like to know what part of town you were in where the homeless didn’t beg. The only homeless people I see who don’t beg are the ones too mentally ill to have any connection with reality.
There are some that beg and always have been (and probably will). I would say the vast majority of beggars I see are the same people I've see doing it for years. I haven't seen the guy with his cat downtown in years, but I still occasionally see the older black man that is fairly well groomed that just holds his hat out like I have for the last twenty years. When I lived on Cap Hill, those begging on Broadway were either street kids or the same few older people who probably did need the money to survive. No
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You are correct.
So, don't complain when they decide to move out or automate jobs when you make stupid laws.
Re:The party of OWS are the coproratist tools now (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Money is power (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the city of Tempe should bus them to SF.
Right now they move into Papago park, leave trash everywhere (really, that place practically became a city dump until Tempe spent a few million to clean it up) and they're known to assault joggers, hikers, and bikers who come too close to their "house". I don't know how somebody can be expected to avoid that, because these "houses" in every way resemble every other trash heap in that park. They were also very aggressive towards volunteers that were helping cle
Re: Money is power (Score:4, Informative)
Less than 1% of San Francisco residents are homeless. That's still a lot, but nowhere near 20%.
Re: Money is power (Score:5, Insightful)
If you shrink that ring down even further to only where the homeless are at the figure jumps to 100%.
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You'd be charged with a Haight crime.
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You'd never get them to stay, they're drawn to liberal paradises like San Francisco like flies to shit.
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It doesn't count as subsisting red states when they are able to write off their taxes on their taxes (nice scam, btw).
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This [thinkaboutnow.com] is something you could use.
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They will be much better taken care of when bused to San Francisco.
I'm not sure if they still do, but Las Vegas used to bus them to Salt Lake City.
Half of Utahns are Mormons, and Mormons are well-known for their charitable donations. As someone who lives in Silicon Slopes, I can attest to the large number f pan-handlers near our on and off ramps and Walmart parking lots. A local channel did a story and discovered some pan-handlers made a 6-figure income.
Do not give pan-handlers money. Instead, take them to take groceries, food, or the bus ticket they always claim to need. Pan handlers in need will accept your generosity while those only wanting money
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Better yet: Just don't give out anything at all to randoms who harass you on the street or sidewalk. And in that, I include those students that outfits like Greenpeace, Planned Parenthood, and the HRC send out to bother people for money on the sidewalks. I use these as my examples because I actually agree fairly wholeheartedly with their agendas, but despise this method. Also included are the people who harass outside of storefronts for signatures for whatever ballot proposition committee is paying them
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Then let them leave and don't bitch when another city offers them the same tax breaks that Seattle is trying to take away. Instead just be happy they will drain another city.
I, for one, would welcome Amazon to San Antonio as long as they don't get voting rights - we are blue enough already. Frustrating thing is they will come here, push for it to be more "socially responsible" like Seattle then bitch when a tax actually effects them
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