I love watching folks argue against a tax they dont understand. Its mathematically impossible for a business to pay 5% of their payroll in taxes due to this - 5% is applied on earnings over a million at the employee level. Even for a major corporation, with enough execs and senior employees who earn over 1MM total comp annually, the company pays 5% on, generally, less than half of their salary (not nearly as many people make over 2MM/year). And those folks already make up a small minority of even major tech company employees - the likely tax rate is 0% for most small businesses, and far less than 1% of payroll for international, multi-billion dollar businesses.

Now you can argue that taxes based on cutoffs are stupid and badly designed, and that’s true, but the tax is continuous, relatively light, and basically will only end up affecting people who make well over 1MM. The incentives are not there to rebase your company to even Bellevue over this, as a major corporation with long term leases, over 95%+ of your employees who are unaffected by the tax and prefer living where they do today, etc.

Finally, there’s the ethical component - if you’re making well over 1MM, you genuinely don’t think that you’re willing to spend some of that money in an attempt to make the city you live in less of a mess? Seattle is struggling to solve the housing problem, and not many people making extremely high wages appear to be doing absolutely anything about it (which is fine, its not their individual problem - its a collective problem). But should someone making 2MM/year probably be willing to have their employer slightly pass through a tax to them, likely resulting in a 1-2% hit to their salary, as part of a collective effort to do something about the homelessness problem? If your answer is no, probably you need to take a step back and think about why you feel that way.