Tax happy politicians—and voters—in Seattle have managed to make the city unaffordable to the poor and lower middle class. Ironically, that’s exactly what they, supposedly, wanted to avoid.
KIRO’s Jason Rantz recently wrote that many Seattle residents now face tax increases of “about to pay $250 more a year over the next three years after voters passed sales increases for Metro buses and property tax increases for preschool education. That, on top of the tax hike for parks.”
Making matters worse, more tax hikes are on the horizon. A constant string of “proposals keep getting pushed to raise taxes on business (from parking taxes to linkage fees and everything in between).” Rantz points out that Murray recently said, “I think it’s important to remember that Seattle[…] does not have one of the highest tax burdens.” As Dori Monson put it, Murray is essentially saying that “We’re not yet one of the highest tax burden cities. Until we achieve that, there’s still going to be room to kick up the taxes.”
If the Democrats who run the city are truly concerned about the poor and middle class in Seattle, they sure have a funny way of showing it.
Their mantra of “Let’s help the middle class and poor by taxing them into all being poor, or moving away…” I would hope more people would catch on…
Why do you think they want to raise the minimum wage?? They need more income to take…
The Democrat/Socialist Left who run the city are interested only in their own personal gratification and financial well being. All be it at someone else’s expense.
To make taxes more palatable to ‘stupid American voters” we must make tax increases look like helping the struggling poor, or education benefits for our kids, to trick them into passing them. Sound familiar?
Those of us who read The Wall Street Journal, prior to tabloid king Rupert’s takeover, could amuse ourselves by reading the editorial page. One consistent theme there was the editorial which blatantly contradicted the news story on which it was supposedly based. While Jason Rantz is, by his own admission at this very site, not a journalist, this ShiftWA post does contradict his post, on which it was supposedly, in part, based. Rantz was worried primarily about high taxes on the suffering rich:
The way it is now, the city is relying on primarily upper middle class and those oft-vilified One Percenters) to fund these progressive ideas — and even though the theory is that all these policies will help make Seattle more livable, costs continue to increase. And their plan is to continue to rely on the wealthier residents to fund everything in this city without keeping their costs under control. That’s not a very good plan. You can’t guarantee that the One Percenters and businesses will forever stay in the city. What happens if they leave? What happens if the tech industry changes for the worse? Sure, we’ll always have Bill and Melinda Gates (maybe some city leaders will ask them to fight unimportant issues like HIV and malaria so we can have some free yoga lessons in community centers no one will attend) but they can’t handle the burden alone.
Perhaps dimly aware that such an appeal will not succeed, the anonymous authors here instead feign concern for the middle class and poor, who usually get vilified here for wanting better public schools and better-paying jobs.