In January, the Puget Sound Regional Council reported that the region had lost 12,900 jobs last year. Last year’s losses were the first annual decrease in jobs since 2009 at the depth of the Great Recession.
John Curley, host of “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio, addressed the poor statistics, claiming that Washington is not business-friendly, and raised concerns over a proposed vacancy tax for business owners.
“Listen, you get a government in place that sees the business as the golden goose that they want to strangle all over the place, and then they talk about how Amazon’s the reason that there’s a housing crisis, because Amazon came in and paid a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of money, and that’s why you have a bunch of homeless people,” he said. “I saw, unfortunately, that all my friends at the 5th Avenue Theatre had layoffs. There are layoffs at the Pacific Science Center, and just ongoing problems in Seattle. The state is not business-friendly.”
Curley labels the proposed vacancy tax ‘the most absurd thing’
Curley noted that businesses and consumers make rational economic decisions based on incentives, although a vacancy tax would only punish them and force the business to leave Seattle entirely…