Jobs Tax: For the Seattle City Council, Politics Matters More Than Science

Posted by on Thursday, March 15, 2018 · Leave a Comment 

The other night I got cc’ed on an email to the Mayor of Seattle and the Seattle City Council by my friend, science writer Alex Berezow. Berezow is a writes for a variety of publications both print and online and is Senior Fellow of Biomedical Science at the American Council on Science and Health. He’s also written a book called, The Little Black Book of Junk Science. Berezow often writes about the bogus things that go on in the science world when scientists stop acting like scientists and elevate personal preferences over the facts and times when what people want to believe causes them to dismiss plane facts that counter their desired narrative. It’s always really good stuff. It was in the same spirit, I think, that he wrote to the City Council about growth and housing. Here’s his letter and my response. Enjoy!

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Dear Mayor Durkan and Seattle City Council:

New Geography, a website that covers economics, demographics, and urban issues, has this to say about Seattle:
“We can expect Seattle housing prices will continue to increase disproportionately to incomes unless there is land use policy reform.”
And:
“It would not be surprising for additional serious house price escalation to be in the offing, and Seattle to indeed become the new Vancouver in the next decade or two.”

Please read the article in full. Your policies will affect middle class Seattle residents like me for the rest of our lives.

http://www.newgeography.com/content/005540-vancouverizing-seattle
Thank you.
Alex Berezow, PhD
Science Writer
Northgate, Seattle

Hello Alex,

Thanks for sharing this information with the City Council and Mayor.

Sadly, this Council has responded to the basic fact of supply and demand the way Cardinal Bellermine responded to Copernican science: with stubborn resistance and denial.

When we explain that it is not Amazon and new jobs and prosperity that has raised rents, but their own imposition of ever more costly fees, fines, taxes, and regulatory delays to producing more supply, they have answered with a proposal to tax jobs.

This is from the recent report from the Council’s task force on the jobs tax:

Despite the economic prosperity driving growth in the City’s revenues, and in part because of it, Seattle is facing a homelessness crisis of unprecedented proportions.

That’s right, jobs and prosperity cause homelessness. Like Cardinal Bellermine, the Council and their task force use what they would consider simple logic. Ever since Amazon has arrived on the scene, the number of tents and homeless have grown. The Sun rises in the east, moves across the sky, and sets in the west. The Sun is moving, not the Earth.
The increase in housing prices and the related problems associated with it are not caused by the increasing regulatory sclerosis imposed by them (more design review, more parking requirements, more redundant infrastructure, etc). Jobs and prosperity cause prices to rise, not a lack of supply in the face of rising demand.
But don’t worry. The new tax on jobs won’t hurt a bit. It is,
Inherently progressive in the specific sense that, because it is levied on employers rather than individuals or households, it is a way to raise revenue for public use without directly and disproportionately impacting lower-income residents in the way that, for example, sales taxes and property taxes tend to do (emphasis theirs).
Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. You know. Employers. They’re not people.
Sadly, this Council is fundamentally incapable of being able to do what you and I know is the right thing, step back and allow the production of lots and lots of housing of all kinds, in all parts of the city, for all levels of income. Like Bellermine, accepting the math doesn’t fit the narrative. They, like he, have chosen the dominate narrative. The Sun goes around the Earth. Jobs and more housing cause homelessness and so must be limited and taxed.
And like Copernicus and Galileo, those of us who have actually done the work and who lean more on science than myth, must rely on history, not politics or science, to render final judgement. I’m not sure we’ll see it, but I think the verdict will be in our favor.

Eppur si muove!,

Roger–

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