For the most part I stay out of commenting on politics but when it comes to adding taxes we don’t have in Washington State? Um, no.
The tent cities listed above are not from Washington State, they are from Los Angeles, California another very liberal state. We also have a huge homeless problem inside the city of Seattle and Tacoma. Two cities that are close to where I live. Here are pictures from Seattle:
You probably don’t see this mentioned as much around the world when Seattle is mentioned. You see the Seattle Center and iconic Space Needle. You likely don’t see the pictures of the homeless living in tents in Seattle pictured above.
The news stories are out there, you can follow them on Google News if you use the right keywords.
What we don’t have in Washington is a state tax.
What’s powerful about his report is that he isn’t advocating for new government programs or subsidies for anyone; he just wants to change who pays. His report advocates scrapping all of our sales, property and business taxes — all would go to zero — and replacing them with a simple, flat 10.4% state and local income tax with a $15,000 deduction. So a family of four working the gig economy and making, say, $25,000 a year — kind of like the one featured in “Parasite” — would pay about $3,000 less per year than it does now.
Seattle is so far gone on inequality we’re beyond the movie ‘Parasite’ | The Seattle Times
The bolding above in the quote is mine. Movies like Parasite can raise issues in real life, but Parasite isn’t non-fiction, it’s not an answer to how economic disparity should be resolved in a real world city. The article using this fantasy movie as suggested motivation of “how bad it could be” is preposterous.
The author of The Seattle Times article references Parasite a second time in the article toward the end:
We’ve fractured into such disparate camps that the one probably couldn’t get close enough to the other to feed on its resources even if it tried — as happens so wrenchingly in “Parasite.”
The Seattle Times
Scare tactics.
I’ve outlined my issues with Parasite, see: 20+ Parasite Reviews – A Curious Class Exercise In Social Irony and Cruelty
You can’t solve real world problems with movies. Can you be inspired to change something based on a movie? I’m not even sure that’s possible. There are very different realities between movies and real life. In movies most everything is bent, twisted and amplified for dramatic license within a couple hours of run time. In real life, it isn’t always so dramatic and cannot be resolved so quickly and neatly.
It’s extremely unlikely Parasite could happen exactly as depicted in the movie in real life. Bong Joon Ho wouldn’t even suggest that, I’m guessing. Impossible? No.
My biggest problem with Parasite is that it expertly showed a problem and yet offered no real solution. In real life you have to find solutions to problem someday, somehow.
Seattle has many problems, but solving them with adding a new statewide tax that we’ve never had isn’t the solution.
When it comes to state governments and politics, they only know one thing: more taxes for everybody! Only, it’s not for everybody because the biggest money earners (the giant corporations) get corporate tax loopholes that reduce and in some cases eliminate their tax burden. Go research how much Amazon pays in corporate income tax in Washington State.
The issue with poverty isn’t going to be solved by adding a state tax. It just means we’re going to add another tax that impacts every Washington state citizen outside the big cities. Citizens state-wide be subsidizing taxes for the city of Seattle, where the homeless problem is the worst. While Seattle has the biggest population in the state, the rest of the state combined has way more people than the city of Seattle.
The politicians have been trying to add a state tax for years and by and large majority the citizens of this state keep voting “no.” This has zero to do with helping to balance the social inequity in the city.
We don’t believe there will be fiscal responsibility with the additional tax revenue.
I would welcome a state tax if I honestly thought the money would be managed by state government correctly.
We used to have a huge tax surplus in this state, we used to have $25 car tab renewals and due to poor mismanagement by the state government, we no longer have these perks. One of my car tabs costs almost $300/year when I voted to have $25 tabs.
Politicians don’t add taxes and then take them away. We’ve been down the road where adding taxes to everybody in the state to solve the problems of a couple major cities doesn’t seem either equitable or fair.
Meanwhile, there are various corporate business incentive taxes. Why do large tech companies in this state pay so little taxes? Because of the jobs they bring into the state, that’s supposed to be the answer.
Amazon doesn’t need tax incentives. They can take all their low paying warehouse jobs to some other state. Sure, they pay executives handsomely.
This is a complicated business problem. How to take the tax revenue from the state and divide it up equally when too many people live in too small a geographic footprint. Grifters, drugs, all the bad crime a city doesn’t want moves in with poverty. It’s a very real problem, but my solution to fixing the problem is simple: tax corporate business more.
It’s laughable that when more taxes are requested, it’s always mainstream America that is asked to pay more while businesses get tax breaks and incentives over the fear that they will “leave the state.” You know what? Leave then. Pack up your bags and move to another state. Take the low paying jobs with you.
And, please, let’s not use movies as motivation to add more taxes.
Movies, Movies, Movies 