A gun to our heads

Seattle economics may be summed up as follows:

Step 1) Complain that there aren't enough well-paid skilled jobs
Step 2) Companies bring in well-paid skilled jobs
Step 3) Take exorbitant amounts of money from companies as punishment for bringing skilled jobs.  Increase taxes on skilled employees.
Step 4) Give said money to street junkies and professional panhandlers

Letters to Hannah   . . ."That's why I loathe them like the prophets of Ba'al, and every panhandler to me represents not just a failure of chemicals in the brain, or a refusal to get his act together, or a crime spree in waiting or a drug habit in action, but a whole code of ethics I hate for its enforcement -- not even really the bum, but the thing that he stands for.  A robbery in progress.  Some smug liberal's ticket to heaven on my back.  An endless tide of sermons with no actual payout, other than a fuzzy feeling and a fitting in with the sermonizers.  To hell with them, I say.

Things escalated quickly when the fanatical denizens of Seattle, or at least the people they elected to represent them, proposed that we charge every successful business $500 per employee to "end" our crisis of homelessness.  Nevermind the fact that the homeless here already buy their drugs with free checks from the government, or that they cause an exorbitant amount of minor and major crimes, or that free food is to be found at multiple places around the city, or that a judge ruled you can't search a bum's tarp without a warrant, or that an army of idiots can be found on every street corner, feeding their own egos by aiding these animals.  Nevermind, in fact, that we spend more here per homeless person than anywhere else in the nation, more than one billion over the past several years, and that the problem keeps growing the more money we throw at it.  Nevermind that a judge ruled the homeless could park almost anywhere they wanted, and so swarms of these locusts descended, with license plates from every state in the nation, to loot the earnings of our families and leave their needles and bottles and shit on the sidewalks*.  No -- they proposed this $500 head tax and were shouted down by people who said it was too much.  Too much, they said.  They would settle for $250, they said.  Please, sir, take my wallet, but not my wedding band**.

"Some churches decided that instead of just putting the burden on the public, they would take care of it "at their own expense" --  by opening homeless encampments on their own personal parking lots.  Thus the love of Christ did not extend to their neighbors, who protested loudly, and whose businesses suffered because people were afraid to shop at them.  The mentally insane made it impossible for an intelligent parent to let his children walk the streets.  People began to complain and the church, with an air of Pharisaical sanctity, professed its duty to everyone except the people at large.  What about Lazarus and the rich man? they asked.  Do Unto Others has always had an asterisk, and the Devil, as we now know, is always in the details.". . .