It was called a head tax, but maybe it should have been called the Robin Hood tax. It would have taxed Seattle’s business behemoths — including Amazon, Vulcan and Starbucks — and used that money to house the homeless. But the tax on Tuesday died in a bed of bad puns: Off with its head and on the chopping block. At a Seattle City Council meeting, over chanting and shouts from the crowd, seven defeated-looking councilmembers — Sally Bagshaw, Bruce Harrell, Rob Johnson, Lisa Herbold, Mike O'Brien, Lorena González, and Debora Juarez — voted against the so-called "head tax." Just two councilmembers held fast to the proposal – Teresa Mosqueda, newly elected last fall, and Socialist Kshama Sawant.

"This is not just a stunning betrayal by politicians and a kowtowing to big business," Sawant said at a rally held before the vote. "It is also a kowtowing to corporate politicians like Jenny Durkan." Mosqueda said she would not vote to repeal the ordinance without a replacement revenue source for homelessness funding. A frustrated Councilmember Lorena González, speaking over shouts from head tax supporters in council chambers, said she believed the head tax was good policy, but that money behind the repeal effort sunk the legislation. "We will continue on this City Council to fight for solutions that make sense, that will not tear the city apart, and save the lives that we need to save," González said. One argument against the head tax was that might alienate Amazon, and therefore hurt growth.

But credit rating agencies say the tax would not have hurt Seattle. “Any impact would be felt marginally over many years and would thus be difficult to distinguish from other rationales for corporate decisions," Fitch, a credit rating agency, said in a statement. Moody’s Investors Service concurred. Moody's also warned that Amazon likely exercised "an outsized influence" over Seattle politics, according to the Equal Opportunity Institute, a liberal think tank. Sawant touched on this point during Tuesday’s Council meeting. "We have to understand that the logic of bowing to big business points only in one direction, to a race to the bottom for the rest of us,” she said.

The vote followed weeks of opposition to the tax, which specifically have paid for services and low-income housing for the homeless. The tax would have charged big businesses, including Amazon, Vulcan and Starbucks, $275 per employee per year, or 14 cents per employee per hour. The tax was unveiled as extra money for homelessness, but that wasn’t necessarily an accurate representation. It’s possible the money wouldn’t have been extra: It could have plugged a future hole in the budget instead. Seattle had already been spending money from its construction boom on homelessness. With a depleted general fund projected to sink into the red, the city needed to find money just to stay afloat. The head tax would have arrived just in time. Opposition to the tax was fast and fierce. But it was unclear where the animosity stemmed from – big business or city residents, who conflated Seattle’s growing homeless problem with government inefficiency.

Homeless service providers wonder what is next. "Every day, we turn clients away because we don’t have enough beds and we don’t have enough staff to provide long-term case management to clients in the system," Andrew Coak, a member of the task force and case manager at the Downtown Emergency Services Center, said in a statement. "It’s literally a matter of life or death for the people I work with." Head tax supporters are now asking business to find money for the homelessness crisis. The No Tax on Jobs campaign, led by Saul Spady (the grandson of Dick's Drive-In co-founder Dick Spady), Pushpay's James Maiocco, and accountant Philip Llloyd, raised $350,000 in pledges to overturn the head tax, according to recent campaign disclosures.