People seem to be misinterpreting why Seattle is fucked. Seattle is not fucked because they over-regulate big business or because of the “millionaire’s tax.” They’re fucked because they overregulate small and mid-sized businesses which caused a massive localized inflationary spiral that is forcing out big businesses because labor costs are too high Seattle massively over regulated the service sector by imposing gargantuan minimum wages on restaurants and delivery apps + implementing a zillion other regulations that caused service sector costs to soar. Seattle’s housing prices are actually *declining* but their inflation rate has been 1-1.5 points higher than the national average despite reduced housing costs. This is caused mainly by food service prices rising at 7% a year due to Seattle’s minimum wage policies and excessive service sector regulations. Inflation in Seattle is now 5% and nominal wage growth is 3%, meaning real wages fell 2% in the last twelve months High local inflation forced big companies to pay artificially high wages because highly paid corporate workers expect wages to keep up with living costs. On top of that, Seattle has a payroll tax that almost exclusively applies to huge companies. Those big companies are therefore paying insane wages to do business in Seattle, whereas if they relocated, they could pay people the same real wages relative to local cost of living and save tens of millions a year in corporate labor costs alone But here’s the thing: Because Seattle overregulated their small and midsize businesses, those businesses are now operating on razor thin margins and are reliant on highly paid corporate workers who can pay exorbitant prices in order to stay in business. So when a corporate office relocates out of Seattle, all of the local restaurants collapse because they no longer have a customer base who can afford the prices they have to charge due to Seattle’s regulatory environment What this means is that as corporations cut payroll in Seattle the entire city’s service sector is imploding, which has resulted in localized stagflation. Their whole labor market is quickly evaporating and now they have 5.5% unemployment, 5% inflation, and -2% real wage growth. None of this has anything to do with the “millionaire’s tax” because the companies are leaving before the people do. Why would companies care about a tax on ultra high incomes that doesn’t impact their cost of doing business?

I promised a long-form note on why the tariffs are madness, yes, but even more so why replacing the Pax Americana regime with an America First regime is such a terrible deal for ALL Americans. So here you go! No paywall on this one. "Crashing the Car of Pax Americana" 🧵

Collision on Westlake Ave N just South of Dexter Ave N blocking the NB lanes. Use caution.

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I sat down with @insideEdition recently to talk about one of the biggest under the radar issues in the gig economy right now - driver safety and distracted driving. I’m not sure most people realize this but drivers are paid on a per job basis, so they’re literally incentivized to do as many deliveries per hour as possible, since that means they’ll earn more per hour. Basically if a driver sees a yellow light, and they speed through it, they just increased their hourly earnings.. And unlike rideshare, where you have a passenger in the back of your car, delivery drivers are always by themselves, so there’s even less accountability. Big thanks to @StevenFabianTV and the Inside Edition team for highlighting this issue as I think there’s a lot more that can and should be done here to incentivize safe driving. @DoorDash recent ‘earn by time’ offering is a good example of this (I talked to @t_xu about this in our last podcast together) and was mentioned briefly at the end of the story but I think all the platforms need to do a better job of rewarding the safest drivers. Commercial insurance costs in the gig economy are skyrocketing, but as it stands today, if I’m in the top 1% of safe gig drivers, I will get paid the exact same (maybe LESS because I’m driving slower and doing less jobs per hour) than the bottom 1%. That shouldn’t be happening. Nice shoutout for Ryan McMahon at @cmtelematics in the story too, who’s doing a lot of work on the telematics side to bring safer driving incentives to gig platforms.