Don't Cry for Amazon or Starbucks

The Seattle City Council, believing that taxing the rich will solve all of the city's problems, just voted to increase the taxes on Seattle’s largest employers. The largest of the large is Amazon. But Starbucks also counts among those who will be most affected. They are both very unhappy.

The Daily Mail has the story:

Starbucks and Amazon have come out swinging against a new tax in Seattle that would see large corporations pay $275 in tax for every employee.

Any firm earning more than $20 million a year will be asked to pay a head tax, which will raise up to about $48million to help battle the city's homelessness problem.

Amazon, which employs about 45,000 people in Seattle, will shoulder most of the burden - and they're not happy about it, instead claiming the city is anti-business and has a spending efficiency problem. …

Amazon vice president Drew Herdener spoke for the company:

'We remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council's hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here,' he said in a statement. 

'City of Seattle revenues have grown dramatically from $2.8B in 2010 to $4.2B in 2017, and they will be even higher in 2018. This revenue increase far outpaces the Seattle population increase over the same time period. 

'The city does not have a revenue problem – it has a spending efficiency problem. We are highly uncertain whether the city council's anti-business positions or its spending inefficiency will change for the better.'

As for Starbucks, a senior executive explain the company position:

John Kelly, Starbucks' senior vice president of global public affairs, said the Council had made poor spending decisions in the past at the expense of the city's most vulnerable.

'This City continues to spend without reforming and fail without accountability, while ignoring the plight of hundreds of children sleeping outside,' Kelly said. 'If they cannot provide a warm meal and safe bed to a 5-year-old child, no one believes they will be able to make housing affordable or address opiate addiction.

'This City pays more attention to the desires of the owners of illegally parked RVs than families seeking emergency shelter.'

We must mention that the chief executive officers of these companies, Jeff Bezos and Howard Schultz are major donors to liberal democratic causes. Bezos personally owns the Washington Post, a notable leader in the Resistance, the #GetTrump movement.

How does it happen that these leading Democrats did not know that the Democratic Party credo is: tax the rich; redistribute income. Did they think that they could protect themselves by donating to the Democratic Party? Were they buying protection?

No matter the reason, it is rich seeing them complain so bitterly about a political philosophy that they have richly supported over the years.