The following is a lesson for government agencies of all types and levels across the globe. I remember when Jeff Bezos moved from New York to Seattle to rent a house and start selling books from his garage. He did this at 30 and he wrote the business plan as his wife was driving, then raised a million dollars from 20 people. - He went to Seattle because Washington State had no income tax. Fast forward to today and there are 60,000 employees in Seattle alone. Yes, I was ordering from Amazon when they only sold books. Along with Microsoft, whose ex-employees helped build the site, the entire city changed into a global tech capital.
- This is when the Seattle City Hall decided they were now going to tax him because of "fairness", he called it something else that you can look up for yourself. It started with a tax on employers of US$265 per employee per year, a so-called "head tax", to go to housing and homeless services. Amazon stopped building their new office tower, literally. It's worth your time to look up the origin and earlier life of Jeff Bezos. The tax was repealed 30 days later.
- Then they tried Jumpstart, a payroll and expense tax of 2.5%. By 2024, Amazon had shifted more than 14,000 employees to Bellevue, a council on the other side of the lake, still in Washington State but with no similar taxes. By 2026, Amazon was no longer Seattle's largest employer and it had vacated over 100,000m² of office space in the city. Downtown Seattle's office vacancy rate hit 35.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025, Jumpstart fell $47 million (1.6 billion baht) short of its revenue forecast in 2024 alone and there is a $175 million deficit projected for Seattle by 2027.
