Five years of data tracking Seattle’s JumpStart tax have been released, and as a result of several factors, the city has lost roughly 30,000 jobs since 2020 and suffered a 48% drop in the taxable value of office buildings, with a nearly 40% office vacancy rate.
Seattle’s JumpStart tax is a tax on the city’s largest employers based on their payroll. A business is only required to pay if its total payroll is more than roughly $9.1 million a year, and the company pays at least one employee roughly $195,000 or more annually.
Jake Skorheim and Spike O’Neill, co-hosts of “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio, compared the startling statistics to what Detroit went through during the Great Recession, though Seattle is much worse off than Detroit, in part due to what Jake and Spike believe to be the city’s JumpStart tax…