Seattle

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

In recent years, Seattle has developed a reputation for passing asinine laws. Recently the city tried to increase taxes on diet soda, because the drink is more popular among white people. In the past they’ve allowed 6th graders to receive IUDs without parental consent, and have enlisted garbage men to snoop through residential trash in search of compost that is illegal to throw out. Seattle was also the first American city to pass a $15 minimum wage law, which promptly hurt low wage workers.

Following in the footsteps of Boulder, Philadelphia, Oakland and San Francisco, Seattle has approved its own version of a job-killing soda tax.

In a 7-1 vote with one councilmember absent, the Seattle City Council passed the tax on soda distributors by an overwhelming margin. The council ultimately agreed on a tax rate of $1.75 per ounce, which translates to about $1.18 for a 2-litre bottle of soda. Unless opponents of the measure succeed in blocking it, the tax will be collected beginning next year, the Seattle Times reported.

One year ago, when we first started discussing the Vancouver housing bubble, which as we first speculated - and was later confirmed - was the result of Chinese oligarch money-launderers parking "hot cash" in this offshore housing market (at least until a 15% property tax on foreign purchases made Seattle the new Vancouver), we said that Vancouver houses had become the de facto new Swiss bank account, and because of that the houses - once purchased - would remain a highly overprized, if vacant tribute to China's soaring capital outflows.

While the legal sequence of events focusing on Trump's controversial immigration order is now focusing on the next rulings out of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which may well culminate at the Supreme Court, the man who launched this weekend's legal firestorm is James Robart, the federal judge for the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, who temporarily blocked President Trump's immigration order.

Update: Moments ago, the White House issued a statement saying the DOJ would, as expected, challenge the federal court's ruling that halted travel ban "at the earliest possible time" and will file an emergency stay of Robart's "outrageous order."

Expect angry Trump tweets to follow.

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