Article from Reason by Christian Britschgi.

Seattle’s Amazon tax is trying to come back. On Wednesday, the Rainy City’s lone socialist councilmember, Kshama Sawant, announced a plan for a tax on the city’s largest employers to fund affordable housing and Green New Deal–style home renovations.

“This will not only transform the lives of Seattle’s working people, it will set a historical marker for cities around the nation,” said Sawant. “It’s more than reasonable for the biggest, richest companies in our city to pay zero-point-three percent of their revenue to do their part to address our city’s crushing housing crisis.”

Her tax proposal would levy a 1.7 percent tax on the payrolls of Seattle’s 825 largest businesses. She expects this to raise $300 million a year.

This money would fund the construction of 8,000 new affordable homes and retrofit an additional 47,000 units to meet “Green New Deal” standards, which involves converting them from gas or oil to electric systems.

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