On Sunday there was a rally protesting Seattle ballot initiative I-77 -- the "latte tax", which seeks to tax espresso beverages to fund childcare programs. I-77 is falsely being sold as a fair tax on a "luxury item" to fund childcare for low-income people. In fact, it would impose an unfair burden on any coffee house or restaurant that serves espresso (mainly small businesses that would have an unfunded mandate to install expensive new accounting systems to keep track of the newly taxed items) in order to subsidize childcare for more well-off dual income families than low income families. Yes, the proposal really is that stupid and hostile to small business. The latte tax is so obviously idiotic that even the Seattle Post-Intelligencer came out against it.
The rally was organized by the owners of my neighborhood coffee house, Zoka Coffee and Tea, in the theme of the Boston Tea Party. They rented a horse and covered wagon, dressed up in 1770s clothing, and led a procession through the neighborhood to Green Lake, complete with fife and drum.
The people in the crowd were mainly owners of various neighborhood coffee houses and their barristas. They chanted slogans such as "Yes on Education, No Unfair Taxation". "What do we want? Coffee! How do we want it? Tax free!"
The climax of the protest was when two of the guys threw fake bags of coffee out of a boat into the lake.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a report on the protest.
The No on 77 website is here
See how our high-minded bloggist hath ascended from mundane concerns to the support of ye tax protest. Go Shark! Go Zoka! Think globally, act locally...
Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive on September 8, 2003 09:03 AMPerformance art, when well done, can be quite entertaining as well as informative.
Posted by: tom scott on September 8, 2003 05:15 PMWhat's funny about the whole thing is just how anti-tax and (gasp) conservative the liberals in the city have become over this ... of course, only when THEY become the tax target.
I hope it passes and I hope they choke on it. Then they'll know exactly how I feel when I look at my Washington state and local property taxes.
And apologies to those true conservatives who may get stuck with this. Sometimes it takes something completely stupid like this to wake people up.
Posted by: jimg on September 8, 2003 05:31 PMSeems to be an oddly dramatic and hard-line fight against getting $0.10 of the over $2 people pay for a $0.05 cup of coffee to low income child care.
Posted by: starbuck on September 12, 2003 04:56 PMWell, "Starbuck", if you actually read the text of the ballot initiative, you would know that only a fraction of the espresso tax revenue would actually go for low-income childcare. If you knew anything about the coffee house business, you would know that the operating costs per latte are a lot more than $0.05.
Of course, since you feel so strongly that coffeehouse owners should be forced to help pay for other people's childcare, I assume you already do your part and make voluntary donations to childcare providers? Please tell us which ones, and maybe we'll contribute to them too.
Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on September 12, 2003 05:27 PMStarbuck! You look so much like a wordly engineer I know.
Posted by: sbuckaroo on September 13, 2003 01:44 AMEasier to tax it on the way out. Since coffee has diuretic properties it stands to reason that the drinker is going to want to take a piss soon. Install coin-operated toilets near coffee houses and the tax collects itself.
Posted by: roobuckas on September 14, 2003 11:03 PMNice stunt with the boat!
Posted by: Adam Butler qx on April 28, 2004 04:46 PM