
Amazon Pauses Huge Development Plans in Seattle Over Tax Plan - stablemap
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/technology/amazon-development-tax.html
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damm
I know I'm biased as I live in Seattle.

But GTFO Amazon and let other businesses come into town. Maybe we'll have
sprawling businesses all over the city/state instead of trying to be glutted
into East Lake Union.

At one point you brought in more than 1,200 employee's a week. We couldn't
keep up with the housing.

So help your employee's who couldn't get a place and pay the head tax. ;)

I know you won't.

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Alex63
How is paying the head tax going to help Seattle-area employees? It's unlikely
that many Seattle-area employees are going to qualify for the 1800 "affordable
housing units." The underlying issue appears to be Seattle's restrictions on
development. The crazy cost of housing in the area is the result of
restrictions on supply (and the high incomes of many tech employees). I'm also
unpersuaded that this tax will have any significant impact on homelessness in
the area unless restrictions on development are eased. It's going to be
interesting in the long term to see how the socialist city council reconciles
their political philosophy with their constituents' demands for tight controls
on development. We only have to look at San Francisco to see the likely
outcome.

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damm
It's designed to help the homeless. If those employee's are homeless it would
be there to help them.

It's hard but we need to stop looking down at them like a blight; put yourself
in their shoes and see how you would look.

People are homeless for a variety of reasons but most of them could be handled
with affordable housing for them and mental help and job counseling.

Lots of people think that's giving them too much but the State gives us a lot
to begin with.

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whb07
The city of Seattle has had the highest spending for homelessness in the past
year and the issue has gotten worse.

Tell me, what do you think would happen if you gave them $500 million more?

I saw a local grocer give her opinion when Seattle’s city was having a hearing
for this. This tax is going to negatively impact her as she’s already having
razor thin margins. It’s her company that’s donating tons(literally) of food
to the shelters. Boy that’s a great thing, negatively impact private charity
with inefficient government taxes.

Milton Friedman once said that if you put the government in charge of running
the Sahara, they would shortly run out of sand. I think if you gave Seattle’s
government more tax money they would burn it all and come back looking for
more shortly after. Just like they have been doing.

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damm
> Tell me, what do you think would happen if you gave them $500 million more?

Honestly with the way Seattle is with it's taxes. I highly doubt it; there's
already 90 million allocated and all they have been doing is studies and
trying to help outreach programs.

I know what I could do with 500million if I had it; I'd build a bunch of low
income housing apartment complexes all over town and use outreach to bring
people off the streets.

I don't think Durkan is up to the task however.

> I'm still waiting for them to fix the roads after we gave them another tax
> levy to fix the roads. It's been almost 4 years in some area's.

Now if you want to argue that Seattleite's are overtaxed and we don't see
enough out of it. I'm game i'll agree with you.

But as far as Amazon; my view is they are one company who is too big. If they
were like other companies like Nintendo and Microsoft and Google who have
offices all over Metro Seattle and King County I would have much more
sympathy.

If they were a little guy trying to make ends meat I would.

However Amazon is a big fish. Their earnings show it.

Revenue: $51.04 billion vs. $49.78 billion, as estimated, according to Thomson
Reuters EPS: $3.27 per share vs $1.26 per share, as estimated, according to
Thomson Reuters AWS revenue: $5.44 billion vs. $5.25 billion, as estimated,
according to FactSet

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/26/amazon-
earnings-q1-2018.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/26/amazon-
earnings-q1-2018.html)

~~~
bellt0wn98121
Amazon profits are like 1%-2%. At the end of the day, they don't make money
like Microsoft, FB, or Google. Their stock price has whatever future potential
baked in at their insane P/E ratio.

You have sympathy for the other companies because they're spread out in the
Bellevue/Seattle/Kirkland/Redmond region vs primarily being situated
Westlake/SLU?

Your argument doesn't make sense to me.

I don't think Amazon is too big. People just shit on them because their jobs
are mostly on the SLU area and do well at highlighting the wealth or income
disparity in downtown vs someone like MSFT who is further out in places like
Downtown Bellevue and Redmond, where there are hardly any homeless people.

On the east side, 405 traffic is just as horrible as I5 is next to Mercer. You
can't pin that all on Amazon.

