Four key items to keep in mind as Seattle City Council votes to repeal the progressive business tax for affordable housing and homelessness services:
- Not what “volunteer” usually means: Campaign disclosure reports filed yesterday show that the big-business-funded repeal effort spent $250,000 on paid signature gathering in May through a firm called “Morning in America LLC”, which previously worked for Donald Trump and is owned by the notorious Tim Mooney. Imagine if they had put that money into affordable housing instead of investing it in a campaign to cut their own taxes.
- All in the family: The same disclosure reports show the anti-tax campaign spent $20,000 purchasing services from Cre8tive Empowerment, a corporate vehicle owned by Dick’s Drive-In heir Saul Spady — during the month of May alone. Some corrections may be in order, as this makes clear Spady is an overpaid consultant, not a grassroots volunteer as he was often described over the past month.
- Rock & a hard place: When Marilyn Strickland was mayor of Tacoma, her approach to that city's homelessness crisis involved "site hardening" — installing large pointy boulders to shoe poor people away. Now that she's head of Seattle's business lobby, Strickland's approach to homelessness hasn't really changed, the hostility to poor people has just become more metaphorical than physical.
- A worker's perspective: We published an account of what one Amazon worker thinks about all this. “Nobody on my team, or any managers, have said ‘if this tax goes through, we’re going to have to make some serious budget changes.’ Nobody on my team is thinking this tax will actually affect our budget…”
And ICYMI, Working Washington issued an official statement yesterday on the move to repeal.