Do you think all taxes should be punitive? Are you against personal income and sales taxes, and business profit taxes?
So if one is planning a tax regime, you should think long and hard about the first and second order effects of your planned taxes. Unfortunately too many in government and politics don't think about this.
This is why it's interesting to consider taxes that aren't tied to activities, or activities that are extremely resistant to change, e.g.
- taxing land doesn't impact the supply of land, as (aside from melting ice caps and land 'reclamation' projects) the amount of land on Earth is fixed.
- taxing human existence (e.g. an annual per capita flat tax) doesn't impact the number of humans
However, there is a trade-off in these cases. Look at the examples you gave: personal taxes are progressive and sales tax is regressive.
I think they are discouraging whether or not you want them to be.
In this case there was a distinct purpose behind the tax (helping those who cannot afford housing costs).
A very modest tax on the highest income tiers, provides the funding necessary to build new low income housing, keep improving transportation, and to combat homelessness, while not negatively targeting the jobs for the non-rich.
They have a very nice, gilded problem, of trying to not die from economic gorging. The people of Seattle should be putting their considerable resources behind aggressive lobbying in the state, to convince voters to enact a state income tax.
But this is a very specific effect you are after: the wealthy spending less on housing.
That is to say, suppose there is a wealthy person and they are choosing between a new yacht and a new house, you want this policy to very specifically move them from the house to the yacht because of the scarce land.
You said you this matter or factly, but it's a core point in the debate between left and right political economics, at least in America. The demotivating effects of taxes are said to be offset by the moral imperative for those with to help those without. The amount of relative positive and negative added by each policy is difficult to quantify, confusing the already difficult philosophical argument.
No one in the US argues that taxing something reduces the amount of it that (legally) occurs.
I am not suggesting taxing or not taxing, or lowering or raising the tax.
I am advocating a change in the form of the tax.
This preserves the moral imperative.
So its not the behavioral effects of the policy that are confusing the philosophical argument, it is the philosophical argument confusing the study of the effects.
2. Tax should be evenly distributed
If you want jobs, don't tax jobs.
Amazon may be a large employer, but its not the only employer. Everyone should be taxed in proportion.
What they should tax is land use per sf of lot (not sf of the building).
Now people who use a lot of land, or who use the land inefficiently, pay the penalty.
It should also apply equally to everyone who uses the land from large private home owners to small bookstore and cafe owners.
I know there is property tax on the value of the property, but that is a different incentive (to build cheap). This is the incentive to use the space efficiently. So use some amount per sf of lot (say $0.5? I don't know how much that would raise).