
Seattle City Council repeals head tax amid pressure from big businesses - fluxic
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/about-face-seattle-city-council-repeals-head-tax-amid-pressure-from-big-businesses/
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pitaj
Whomever thought taxing employment was a good idea needs to check their logic.

If Seattle politicians wanted to fix homelessness they would loosen zoning
regulations and pass measures to combat NIMBYism.

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SilasX
It's a much deeper error than Seattle's latest genius idea. Every income tax
is doing the same thing. You don't avoid the effects by sucking it out of the
employer instead of the worker; tax incidence doesn't work like that.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence)

Tax bads, not goods (like mutually beneficial exchanges).

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pitaj
Eh, I'm not sure you're right. While I hate income tax more than most, I think
there's a big difference between taxing _employment_ and taxing _income_.

Personally, I think income tax is probably one of the least bad kinds of
taxes. A couple of taxes worse than income tax, as an example:

\- corporate tax (double taxing)

\- sales tax (regressive)

Property tax is pretty close and maybe even better, as it isn't regressive and
requires arguably less resources to track.

The least bad tax system would probably be a combination of pure income tax
(mathematical progressive model with no deductions or exemptions, maybe with a
negative income tax thrown in there) combined with property tax.

But yeah, if you tax income or property, you'll probably get less of it, but
those quantities are probably less responsive to influence than others.

