Seattle Times uses misinformation to defend their anti-tax position

Once again, the Seattle Times editorial board is pretending that one of our state’s only tax-the-rich taxes (the JumpStart payroll tax) has hurt jobs. They are using this as a reason to oppose HB 1220, a statewide 5% payroll tax on most bigger companies.

For once, they tried to bring receipts, but they clearly didn’t try very hard.

In the article, they claimed that—since Seattle’s total employment is down slightly relative to Bellevue after the tax was created—the tax must be hurting us.

Had they put in more effort than a middle schooler playing with ChatGPT, they might have noticed that the small difference was due to a collapse in retail jobs during Covid (like every big city), from 82,000 to 32,000 jobs.

The Seattle tax only applies to incomes of $189,000 a year or more. How many people in retail do you know that earn $189k?

In fact, it turns out that the high paying services sector, which is where all those tech jobs are - have boomed since JumpStart. They have boomed much, much faster than Bellevue’s, both as a percentage and in absolute numbers.

If you have friends that are the newsletter reading type, please share this with them. If, like most folks, they are more into videos, here are the links to my short video addressing the same issue on YouTube, Instagram and Titkok.

Here it is if you want to see it.