A brand new initiative filed in Seattle aims to tax the highest income earners to help pay for affordable housing.
If that measure makes it to the ballot and gets approved, it would slap a payroll tax on businesses whose employees earn over a million dollars a year. It sounds familiar. In 2018, workers gathered outside the Amazon Spheres in Seattle, chanting "No head tax."
Now comes Initiative-136 (I-136), filed Tuesday in Seattle. Another payroll tax, but backers insist this isn't ‘Head Tax 2.0’.
"This is another payroll tax because that is a legal guideline that we have in the state of Washington. And we are focusing, though, just on that excess compensation. So, whereas Jumpstart focuses on incomes over $180,000, I believe, again, employer-paid, and we're focusing on just that concentration of wealth at the top end with employers," said Tiffani McCoy, Policy and Advocacy Director for House our Neighbors.
The group had success at the ballot box with an initiative that created a social housing development authority to create permanently affordable mixed-income housing. "And the new construction is really focusing on those two- and three-bedroom apartment units that we so desperately need in our region," McCoy said.
She stressed the difference it's not the actual employees, aka ''excess earners' who pay, but the employers who pay them.
Employers would be required to pay a 5% payroll tax on those salaries above a million dollars. The first million would not be subject to the tax.
