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Comment by mrfredward | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is the incentives the tax creates. It's per head, which means every time you hire someone, your taxes go up, and every time you fire someone, your tax bill goes down. It's a tax incentive for destroying jobs, specifically low wage jobs held by the most vulnerable people, since the tax is a drop in the bucket for executives, but much more significant percentage wise when hiring low skilled workers.

It should have been a tax based on revenue, so that it targeted the financial footprint of the company, rather than punishing companies for employing lots of people.

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Eh, it's just a (relatively small, per employee) flat tax on each employee. That's like saying that having to buy a chair is a disincentive to hiring.

In saying that, I tend to dislike 'special' taxes like these.

> That's like saying that having to buy a chair is a disincentive to hiring.

Is that not a bad thing? A chair might be a bad comparison, because a chair is essential to workplace ergonomics and therefore the health of employees, but this tax has no direct benefit to the workplace. If our assumption is that hiring employees is one of the most important functions of our society, then shouldn't the barriers to hiring employees be kept as absolutely low as possible?

> but this tax has no direct benefit to the workplace

Which taxes do?

Sure they do ... they (ostensibly) go to paying for the infrastructure that supports that workplace: the roads and mass transit that leads from the worker's home to the workplace, the police and fire brigade that protect's the workplace's capital investments, etc.

That's not to say that tax funds are always perfectly allocated ... of course they're not. But they're not worthless either.

I think the point was that the chair viewed as a per-employee "tax" has benefit to the employer, but this head tax doesn't.

Whether the tax has value to the employer is not well defined one way or the other. I suppose it comes down to the balance between utility derived and cost as with all economic issues.

The tax has a benefit because we'll have better infrastructure to take care of things that make the city better. In this case helping homeless. I do want to help everyone, but for people that must have a personal improvement getting homeless people treatment and places to stay helps you because they aren't in the way. Having roads, cops, buses, and ambulances helps me too, but I also value those because I want to live in a better society that takes care of all its members.

Wouldn’t a company’s taxes/costs go up with each new hire whether there’s a head tax or not though? Social security for example is half paid for by employers.

Payroll taxes scale down as the employee's pay rate scales down. This was a flat amount per employee-hour.

Exactly, the Seattle tax punishes low-margin employers of blue collar workers much harder than it hits employers of high-salary white collar workers. It's as if it were a carbon tax on labor designed to speed to adoption of automation.

I wouldn't call it paid for by employers. It's a tax on your employer to employ you. It goes directly into the cost of your employment along with your salary and your benefits. If it weren't for this tax you could make more money. You are paying it just as much as you are paying "your half" of social security.

Maybe that was impossible because Washington State's constitution forbids an income tax?

No, that's just personal income tax. It doesn't affect B&O taxes.

That's kind of weird, right? If you're charging a percentage of wages, it doesn't make a difference if the employer or employee pays it.

It's easy to define the number of employees within the city. How do you define the revenue?

Or do you mean global revenue?

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