Article from Reason by Christian Britschgi.

Less than a month after unanimously passing a literal tax on jobs, the Seattle City Council is looking to reverse course.

Yesterday Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, along with seven of nine city councilmembers, released a statement announcing their intention to repeal the controversial employee head tax.

“It is clear that the ordinance will lead to a prolonged, expensive political fight over the next five months that will do nothing to tackle our urgent housing and homelessness crisis,” reads Monday’s statement. “This week, the City Council is moving forward with the consideration of legislation to repeal the current tax on large businesses to address the homelessness crisis.”

…

Almost immediately after Durkan signed the tax into law, an initiative campaign was launched to put the head tax on the November 2019 ballot. Within days the campaign had attracted $300,000 in funding including $25,000 a piece from Starbucks and Amazon. The effort reportedly gathered 22,000 signatures by June 7, comfortably above the 17,000 it needed before its June 14 deadline.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Daniel Schwen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons