 If you've ever been to Seattle you you'll know right away. They've got a homeless problem I don't know what it is, but it's a bad problem right now and the city council came up with an idea And in fact, they could cement it in the next hour Let's just charge companies a surtax to help deal with it The problem is this surtax for every employee up to $500 maybe more This will provide the funds we're gonna have to deal with this So lo and behold among those targets is Amazon perhaps the city's biggest employer and Amazon That's fighting fire and fire. Are you nuts? We're your biggest employer and you're zooming us like this Hillary Vaughn in Seattle on this high stakes battle of wills I guess Hillary I know well a lot of these people lined up here today are in support of this head tax And I talked to several of them and they tell me that this tax would be fair because they blame the city's biggest job Creators for poverty and homelessness in their hometown Big business existing is not incidental to Impoverishment in our city and in our culture. It's the cause of it Operations are paying a lower tax now than at any time in history. So I don't think I would call it punishment business as usual Means death as usual if they can't pay who can Now supporters of this extra tax say the money would be used to build affordable housing city officials say 6,000 businesses would pay this tax and the plan would bring 75 million in Additional tax revenue to the city but some companies that call Seattle home are pushing back hard on the proposal Starbucks Alaska Airlines Expedia joined 100 other companies including small businesses in an open letter to the mayor saying in part quote We oppose this approach because of the message it sends to every business if you are investing in growth If you create too many jobs in Seattle, you will be punished now Critics of this idea say throwing money at the problem doesn't solve anything because Seattle is not a Tax-poor city to begin with Starbucks said that Programs that they have for the homeless should be reformed instead of investing more money up front And then you also have Amazon who has suspended construction on a big build project here in downtown Seattle They say they're waiting to see what happens within the hour here today as the city council decides whether or not to go through with this Head tax the problem is that's putting 7,000 jobs on hold Neil and depending on what's decided here today They may decide not to bring those 7,000 jobs here because they're going to pay for every person that they hire here in Seattle Neil Some of them even threatening to leave all together from the city Let's get the read on all of this with Melissa Arma the stock swish. She's our stock market expert We've also got Michael Paris to tell the entrepreneur and author best-selling author at that also multiple best-selling author My friend Charlie Gaspina. All right To not multiple These idiots hold you to everything you said it's my guys. All right, so Melissa, I'm looking at this I'm saying if ever there's an ingrained invitation to chase a company out for whatever meritorious reasons This is it. It's very anti-business. I'm not sure why they're doing it I will say one thing Washington in Washington State There's no state corporate income tax and there's no individual state tax like in Florida There's no individual state tax So that's probably one of the reasons Amazon set up their headquarters there in the first place However, this isn't good It's like saying don't come here come, you know, it just doesn't make any sense and the problem is that such a precedent say they Pass it, which I think they're gonna pass it We're gonna find out in the next hour very liberal city and that other cities could do it too They have a problem with funding their budgets They can just pass and slap a tax on all these big businesses and that the argument that was to raise is that they've you know The corporate tax has been cut these guys are making money hand over fist certainly Amazon is and that they can afford it But to her point that you be careful you wish for because other causes cities come up That's exactly right and we've seen this across other cities. It's just simply doesn't work They had it in Chicago and that was passed and then it didn't work goes a job killer same thing happened in Seattle That's a tax on companies to deal with head tax. Yeah, actually Seattle even had this and they cut it back in 2009 back Then it was $25 per head now what they're proposing is up to $500 per head. That's 22 times higher That tells companies. Hey, don't come here. No growth is gonna happen. I'm against this All right, these are some of the protesters gathering in Seattle. They're trying to get their hands on I guess for you know, book The cultural dynamics interesting because you have these very liberal companies and Jeff Bezos runs the Washington Post You know, he's at war with president or Trump's at war with him because of the Washington Post is so left-wing and it It's editorial positions reflect. I believe Bezos own opinions. He's he's pretty progressive But he's also a CEO. So he is fiduciary Responsibility is not to make the world a better place. It's to the shareholder So the minute something like this happens if this is gonna cost them more than say to open up a his headquarters in Texas he might have to make that move to Austin, Texas or someplace like that where they don't hit you with this and You know, that's the sort of interesting thing watching Tim Cook watching Bezos watching all these very progressive tech leaders When they're confronted with the fact that progressive liberalism will hurt their bottom line Forced them to lay people off and hurt their shareholders They have they have a legal responsibility to the shareholders. So I you know, I don't see that Helping even if this were to pass to your point that this would would you know Not be copied elsewhere than then but companies can always move and Charlie's point they have moved out of high tax Locals to more friendly environments. I mean, what's to stop companies from doing that? Nothing and here's the thing Why do we add a 3.9% unemployment rate and we have so many homeless people and the problems growing actually New York City is the worst It's a worse country. Why California is really bad. There's 11,000 Seattle Government or say that has failed in addressing that widely the And also this isn't a flat tax. It's only a flat tax for three years We have homelessness in in larger spot we're a larger specs because we de institutionalize people so so much it's it's They don't have to compulsory go into a mental institution and Certain cities are magnets, but is that on the companies to fix? No, no, it's not it's up to the city The city has to be more efficient. We see that this simply doesn't work There's already gonna be a point seven percent payroll tax that rolls out in 2021 This is only affecting 600 businesses. That's 3% of the businesses in the city. They should not do this They should not do it and guys Amazon has already indicated these additional 7,000 positions We wanted to fill and expand for it. So that's on hold. Okay, we'll see what happens to this decision A little more to this