Seattle boom an inconvenient truth for Republicans

Seattle boom an inconvenient truth for Republicans
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020628294_westneat24xml.html?prmid=obinsource
All those jobs in liberal, high-tax Seattle get Republicans to thinking about the meaning of their economic policies. Not.

By Danny Westneat

Seattle Times staff columnist

In a dramatic reversal, Republicans responded to the news that Seattle has become one of the nation’s top jobs factories by openly questioning everything they’ve said over the years about job creation and how to grow the economy.

“Of all places,” said Reince Priebus, the national Republican chairman, who is leading the GOP in a soul-searching exercise. For years you heard the word ‘Seattle’ and the first thing you thought was: pot smokers and gays,” he said. “Well, the joke’s on us, because it turns out all those pot smokers and gays have jobs.”

A new jobs report showed Seattle businesses are on a hiring spree that has driven the city’s unemployment rate well below the rest of the state, to one of the lowest for big cities in the U.S. The realization that neither the city’s high taxes nor its endless bureaucratic red tape seem to have dampened this explosion of capitalism at all has already begun to shake up the local political scene.

Sen. Rodney Tom, leader of a mostly GOP coalition in the state Senate, said he was mulling switching parties. Again. “The whole point of joining with Republicans was to fight Seattle and its values,” Tom said at a press availability. “But while I’m fighting Seattle, businesses are moving there. It doesn’t make any sense.” At his side was Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, who made news earlier this year for trying to cancel a Seattle sick-leave policy that Republicans had dubbed a “job-killing nightmare.”

He announced that due to Seattle’s job-creation record, he had reworked his bill so it would extend Seattle’s policies to the rest of the state instead.

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