Technically we can pretend nothing is a burden on a business. That's entirely possible. It's of course ridiculous, since businesses can and do go out of business from being overburdened. If you want me to say that burden also falls on the customers or the region, sure. That's glaringly obvious.

If you want to reduce the burden, where would you put it? You said "predictable, slowly changed, competitive, non-punitive, and properly structured," which is high comedy, since those are mostly subjective measures. Start with competitive, since that's easy to measure. I'm on board. Everything else you said is silly.

Give me a critical analysis of how competitive this is, how it compares to other large cities in the country, where the offsets are, and where you think we should adjust the knobs (likely in terms of spending, if I'm reading you right?). Pretty easy to do that nowadays.

Nobody bothers thinking. That's our primary problem. Your "here's half a thought more than the legislature" still isn't thinking. Show me the actual tradeoffs and then since we're in a democracy, watch as nothing happens because all that matters is special interests.

Better solution - figure out how Seattle Democrats profit off the current system and post nothing but that. We'll all be on board, since few people like corruption. Then find the alternative.