Sawant declaring victory in November
Kshama Sawant will begin her 2020 political battles with a fight that left Seattle’s left bloodied but — apparently — unbent.
The newly reelected District 3 representative has announced her inauguration ceremony will take place January 13th in an event that will also rekindle the Tax Amazon movement:
We have both an opportunity and a responsibility. According to the Regional Affordable Housing Task Force, King County needs 244,000 additional affordable homes by 2040 to address the Seattle area’s deep housing crisis. We cannot afford to accept the broken status quo. That is why on January 13th, Socialist Alternative and I, along with other progressive, renters’ rights, labor, and socialist organizations and activists, will be kicking off the 2020 Tax Amazon struggle with a rally at Washington Hall.
Sawant has also announced that Sara Nelson, international president of the American Flight Attendants Association and a hero of the socialist left, will do the honors of swearing her in.
While there are few specifics of how the Tax Amazon cause will rise again, Sawant is describing the new effort as “a grassroots organization” that will “fight for a strong tax on Seattle’s biggest businesses to fund social housing.”
“Our goal should be to build the broadest possible grassroots struggle to win a strong Amazon Tax, without limiting ourselves to what is acceptable to the political establishment,” Sawant writes. “Let’s start 2020 with a bang and help begin a new decade of working class power.”
Council chambers in the summer of 2018
Even as they voted to repeal it in the summer of 2018, Seattle City Council members said that an employee hours tax is probably the city’s best route to creating an alternative, non-regressive revenue stream to combat Seattle’s affordability crisis.
That summer, the council faced down public saber rattling from Amazon and architected an employee tax that passed in a compromise form in mid-May to implement a $275 per full-time employee tax on companies reporting $20 million or greater in annual “taxable gross receipts” that was to have begun in 2019. But seven on the nine council members reversed their support and joined Mayor Jenny Durkan in standing up against the new tax out of fear about the economic fallout and facing a reported wave of public opposition.
Sawant now seems prepared to face those concerns and opposition head on.
Long an adversary to Mayor Durkan’s more moderate and business friendly approach, Sawant may well feel emboldened by the new crew on the council. The Wall Street Journal is calling it “political revenge.”
The cause seems to have clicked with her base around the Central District and Capitol Hill. The Amazon tax imagery was a regular component of Sawant’s campaign appearances and materials as she won a decisive victory over a pro-business, chamber-backed, and Amazon cash-boosted opponent in November. The election backlash to the Amazon cash also helped Sawant secure key new allies — her fellow council members as the council’s two citywide representatives — Teresa Mosqueda and Lorena González embraced the Socialist Alternative leader and a slate of progressive candidates facing chamber and pro-business opposition including Lisa Herbold in D1, Tammy Morales in D2, Dan Strauss in D6, and Andrew Lewis in D7.
From Sawant’s seattle.gov Tax Amazon page
How much power will be left for other major Sawant causes also remains to be seen. Her January 13th rally and swearing-in ceremony at Washington Hall in the Central District will be headlined by Nelson and the Amazon Tax. Big issues like Sawant’s push for a rent control measure tied to inflation, for now, will have to take a back seat.
In the meantime, Sawant’s seattle.gov page now features a Tax Amazon section with information about her inauguration, a “Tax Amazon Graphic” you can “post to Instagram,” and a “Sample Mobilization Message for Organizations.”
“We must build quality housing for all, including working people, students, retirees, and people experiencing homelessness,” the page reads. “And Amazon, corporate developers, and the other super-wealthy corporations in Seattle, who are raking in tens of billions in profits annually, must be taxed to fund this new housing – not working families and small- and medium-sized businesses.”
The Tax Amazon 2020 Kickoff & Kshama’s Inauguration will take place Monday, January 13th from 6 to 8 PM at Washington Hall, 153 14th Ave.
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I mean…she’s right. Bezos and Amazon pay nothing in taxes. And destroy neighborhoods. They should not only start paying hundreds of millions…but should pay back taxes for the past half decade or so. Long time CD resident and the Amazon employees are moving in and destroying the culture of my neighborhood. No longer the same CD it was even 10 years ago…
Agreed. The only neighborhood engagement I see from Amazon and other big tech employees freshly moved into one of the new over-priced boxes in the CD are the Ring doorbell videos they constantly post on Nextdoor.
exactly! these people are the worst. They have no life and just pray a POC steals a nose trimmer from Amazon off their million dollar front porch
I don’t like Sawant at all, but absolutely agree with you. Been in Cap Hill for 20 years and have seen friends pushed out and move to Tukwila because they don’t make enough to live here. I always thought Amazon growing would make this an amazing, cosmopolitan city, but it hasn’t at all. The opposite. The culture and joy I found in Seattle in the 90s is just gone. Packaged and shipped out.
The idea that Amazon pays nothing in taxes is false. It might be true for Federal Income taxes, but that’s because they get to offset the many years of prior losses.
Estimates I’ve seen are that Amazon has paid about $250m a year in local and state taxes. City tax revenue are up massively the past several years and Amazon is a major reason.
That figure is mostly sales taxes collected from customers. Amazon itself pays almost nothing, and neither do its executives (thanks to our lack of a state income tax, which is why we’re constantly forced to improvise unwieldy and politically fraught workarounds like the head tax).
The $250M in taxes Amazon paid locally “includes payments to state, county and city entities. It does include sales taxes paid on the company’s own acquisition of equipment and supplies, but NOT customer purchases of Amazon-sold goods.”
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-paid-250-million-in-washington-state-and-local-taxes-in-2017-source-says/
“King County needs 244,000 additional affordable homes by 2040” This women needs to pull her head out of you know where and focus on the present. Tiny homes have been served an eviction notice and I counted at least 10 people laying on the sidewalk this morning off Broadway. Get off your platform and do something for today not 20 years from today!
It’s time for businesses to pay their fair share…no more tax breaks for Amazon!
Amazon doesn’t get tax breaks locally – you may be better served to lobby your federal representatives – as the federal taxes that Amazon successfully avoids paying every year would be under their purview. Comrade Sawant has zero control over that.
Sawant has pushed–and won–expansions of tiny house villages. But, as I hope we can all agree, those are a far cry from a permanent solution, and any real solution will require lots of revenue.
The obvious place to get that revenue is big business.
the way our systems are set in place (to change laws in how we build, fund and repair affordable housing) makes it to where our response is deadly slow, especially when we have very wealthy and litigious neighbors.
We need you out here to put pressure on city, county and state (…feds….not so much right now, or since the 70s) – it’s not up to her, its up to us!!!
We need a rental cash assistance plan funded by the city through a tax on big business immediately (10 years ago).
We need an Empty Homes tax so that empty apartments, second homes, and AirBnbs are taxed at a higher rate than apartments and houses that are someone’s primary residence.
Or those of us who Airbnb out a room or basement to make ends meet. And who pay occupancy tax and business license on our meager incomes to Seattle already.
Enjoy cleaning toilets and bedrooms after strangers have slept in your home – you can enjoy running an Airbnb. Only the desperate need apply….
Or buy a right-sized house so you don’t feel compelled to rent out rooms and such? It amuses me to see these single tech folks buy a 3 bedroom house and turn around and AirBnB the other rooms.
Who wants to really share a house with a bunch of strangers nightly for about $25 a night and have to clean all their shit up afterwards ? It’s a fantasy that mr big investor is making $$ in Airbnb – Seattle has restricted into to one property.
Those of us with families are the ones hustling our basements to get by. It’s kind of like suggesting that driving for uber makes you a king in your own car.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear … if it’s your primary residence, I was imagining that you’d qualify for the lower tax rate, whether you rent a room to a full-time housemate or a string of Airbnb guests.
If you’re one of those people by making ends meet by turning a dozen apartments into Airbnbs, on the other hand, I think you’re a big contributor to the housing crisis and should pay the city at least a tiny amount of the $$$ it will cost the rest of us to arrange housing for the families who have been displaced.
I also think some of those investment vacant properties might turn into investment rental properties, if the incentives are right, and the added housing supply could have more impact on affordability than even rent control.
sorry, but airbnb has got to go. Evades taxes and incentivizes property owners to go for tourist money rather than residents. Also, airbnb is now calculated into new homes (new builds with cottages for example) because its way more lucrative than just renting.
Oh, great. We get to pay for YET ANOTHER lawsuit because CM Sawant can’t control her mouth. I agree with the tax, but calling it the “Amazon” tax, singling out a specific business for legislation, is going to bring another lawsuit. I am tired of paying to defend a wealthy woman against suits because she simply cannot use her common sense! Let her pay her own damned defense and she’d be less rash.
Just a thought here. I’m not Amazon. I have a one-person business and I’ve lived and worked on Capitol Hill for nearly 40 years. I was opposed to the “head tax” and I’m opposed to implementing an “Amazon” tax. The reason—simply raising more money from taxes will not solve the problem. There has been very little accountability for the hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve already invested. Oh, they said that unless the providers meet numbers, they wouldn’t fund them the next time. Then when they didn’t meet their numbers, oh what the heck, they funded them anyway. It’s really easy to spend—or collect in taxes—someone else’s money. Hey, they’re rich, they can afford it. Yes, maybe. But I think the City Council needs to do a lot better job of spending the money they have been getting from us. The tax structure in our State is flawed, no question. B&O taxes are a stupid way to raise money. Maybe we do need in income tax or taxes on investment income. But instead of glueing a poster on Amazon and raising our pitchforks, let’s demand more accountability. Amazon is just a really easy target. They must be to blame for everything, it was such the perfect place before they got here. Maybe not. I was paying about 45% of my income for an apartment when I moved to Seattle in 1978.
Kshama beats the drum that her uninformed supporters want her to beat. It gets them riled up and in her favor, so she’ll beat it until it doesn’t garner the results she is looking for. While I loathe Amazon, I think she and her ilk just see it as the easy target and thus paint them as the easy solution.
the state is currently looking into lowering b&o taxes in favor for more progressive taxation (looking into the “idaho model” of taxes) – although i don’t necessarily trust they will do the right thing (capital gains and income tax failed before). Please put pressure on our state reps for progressive taxation! Our housing problem is also fundamentally an income and wealth inequality problem.
in the meantime, we can’t wait for state to catch up to our current crisis – and no, we do actually need more money, because we can’t catch up with escalating construction costs (labor shortages, land costs) without matching that with public dollars.
Here we go again. There was a groundswell of public opinion against the previous “Amazon tax,” and hopefully that will happen again. We are spending large amounts of money on the homeless issue now, with little to show for it…..throwing more money at the problem is not the answer. But I do agree that Amazon needs to pay federal taxes.
This is all about Sawant’s intense hatred for Amazon and “the man.” The company has certainly been a mixed blessing for Seattle, but it is not all bad.
“Throwing more money at the problem is not the answer”. Funny, it always seems to be the answer for just about every other “problem”: The military, corporations, the wealthy and super-wealthy – giving them more money is literally the foundation of “trickle-down economics”. But when it comes to the poorz and middle-class it’s always “nope, more money won’t fix THAT…” Well, if not, then what WILL?
I have no problem throwing more money at it, when we know that we’re getting the best return on our investment. It’s just stupid to simply just increase the amount of money we spend. This is our money that we’re spending now. Let’s make sure it’s working before we spend more. Is this some radical idea? No. It’s what we do with our personal budgets. Let’s approach it the same way with tax investments. Like I said, it’s easy to spend other people’s money, like Amazon’s. They are too easy of a target. It comes down to holding our Council responsible for investing it where it will get the best return—housing.
Sawant has an unhealthy obsession with Bezos. What next? Is she going to sneak into his house and boil his kids’ bunny?
Kshama beats the drum that her uninformed supporters want her to beat. It gets them riled up and in her favor, so she’ll beat it until it doesn’t garner the results she is looking for. While I loathe Amazon, I think she and her ilk just see it as the easy target and thus paint them as the easy solution.
Sawant says “we need to build housing.” What she means is “the government needs to build housing.” She wants a bunch of public housing. Housing that is funded, owned, and operated by the government. Hooray. Great track record. The city currently does a poor job of enforcing livability regulations in private rental housing; imagine what it’ll be like when the fox is guarding the hen house. Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine — there are plenty of examples of failures throughout the world.
What she — or at least a majority of the council — continue to fail to rectify is the underlying cause of the housing shortage: zoning. Seattle’s zoning is still too restrictive, given its circumstances. However, each councilmember lacks the courage to make sufficient changes because they fear losing the next election. SEPA also gets in the way, but that has now changed, thanks to a new state law (that unfortunately has a sunset).
Zoning and other onerous regulations (including design review) played a massive role in creating this problem. Now they want to tax anything and everything to fix it. The answer is always more money, not addressing the root causes. If progressives had their way, they’d take all of our money (oh wow, socialism!) and still have the audacity to claim they needed more. “Oh, you’re only left with $5,000/yr after all the taxes? Stop complaining: this guy over here only has $1,000, and he needs some of your money.”
Just LET more housing get built. The problem will then solve itself.