On ballots that went out last week, voters have two choices to make to determine the future of Seattle’s newest plan for housing.
The first is whether the developer should be funded at all. The next choice — regardless of the previous answer — is how.
Option 1A is with a new employer tax on all salaries over $1 million a year. Backers hope the 5% tax would raise as much as $50 million a year to be spent on buying and, eventually, developing housing that would be cost-controlled and owned by taxpayers.
Option 1B is to fund the developer with $10 million a year in existing city funding — specifically the city’s JumpStart tax on large corporations in Seattle.
I’ve been getting that response for a decade every time I point out the true scale of problem of affordable housing, but sure, yeah, 1% of the solution is better than 0%.
I’m sure we will have properly means tested a solution for an entire 1% of the problem in 10 years, by the time that problem has grown worse and worse and worse, and then in another 10 years some other smug asshole will say 'Well we solved 1% of the problem!" and then I’ll spend 20 minutes looking up basic stats around the issue and found that some other place did something resembling my plan 10 years ago and it more or less solved 90% of the problem, but yep I guess 1% is better than 0%, so yep you are right, I’m an idiot.
I mean, who doesn’t love to waste political capital on ineffective solutions?
What really matters is being able to act morally superior and virtue signal that your ineffective policy is in some sense technically better than nothing by co opting the language of a real solution and closing the overton window enough that a real solution is linguistically unthinkable!