Great article. Much better than the New York Times article.
From TFA
"Is this really all about Amazon?
No, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was. Council member Kshama Sawant, who exhorted her supporters to “Pack City Hall!” in a mass email yesterday, has consistently characterized the head tax as a “tax on Amazon” and Jeff Bezos, whom she described earlier today as “the enemy.”
Demonizing individual corporations is rarely a path to building broad community coalitions, and that’s especially true when that corporation is Amazon, whose name many Seattleites (rightly or wrongly) consider synonymous with “jobs.” This is one reason head tax opponents were able to so easily spin the head tax as a “tax on jobs,” and to get ordinary citizens to gather signatures against a tax that would really only impact the city’s largest corporations."
That seems like bad politics. Isn't it politics 101 to anticipate that the affected parties (here Amazon and Starbucks) would push back? And if enough political support to overcome this hasn't been built up in the first place, why would someone try passing the head tax at all? This is like playing chess looking only one move ahead.
I don't get it.
Help me understand?
(Due Disclosure: Not a US citizen, nor a Seattle resident, I don't have a position, pro or anti, on the tax measure itself)