Only Suckers Pay?

Two stories appeared in The Seattle Times this week, both disquieting on their own, but somehow I found my disquiet was amplified by their juxtaposition.

One was a story about a new condo development at the Ballard Locks, which is near us. We live in a condo ourselves, but these are a whole different kind of condo. These are condos for stuff. The stuff — vintage classic cars, high-end wine collections, and yachts of the wealthy. The “toys” of the super-rich.

As Alexis Weisand reports, “In a city infamous for its high housing costs, Seattle’s ultra-wealthy will soon be able to buy ‘condos’ for their luxury cars and yachts.

“Nearly nine acres of a former industrial fuel terminal on Salmon Bay waterfront near the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Ballard will undergo a transformation into an extravagant car collector garage, superyacht marina and private community called Terminal One Motor + Yacht Club.”

We got a look at one of those toys last week when one of Mark Zuckerberg’s three yachts, the 390’ long “Launchpad,” motored into town (see photo below). It happened that the Meta man’s yacht docked the same day that Meta laid off 1,400 employees locally.

The second story was titled “Only Suckers Pay.” It was about how many people don’t pay the fare when riding Seattle buses or light rail.

In a column by Danny Westneat, we learned that at least a thrid of bus and light-rail riders ride free. My observation-based guess is that the number is quite a bit higher. On one part of the system, the Seattle Streetcar, 70 percent never pay. And since it’s not NYC, no one has to hurdle subway turnstiles. You just walk on.

Meanwhile, Sound Transit, which has huge money problems and is reneging on promises to complete the system, garners only 14 percent of its operating costs from fares. It’s even worse for the bus system at 8 percent.

I have a feeling that there is some connection between “Only Suckers Pay” and “Condo for the Toys of the Super-Wealthy,” but I’m not entirely sure what it is.

I guess you might note that some people, like Zuckerberg, have an incomprehensible amount of wealth while others live on the streets. It seems likely that some of the latter are among the free-riders? Which would make the connection between the two stories one about our extreme wealth gap in America, which is certainly evident here in Seattle. That’s definitely a real thing, but I don’t think that’s quite it where I’m finding the connection.

In the story about transit riders one of the “suckers” who does pay responded to Westneat’s piece by writing in, “I [have] made a conscious decision to stop paying my fare. I was paying $108 per month, out of pocket for a pass only to see that Metro clearly does not care. I gave up on being a responsible player.”

I guess I’m thinking the real link may be, that from top to bottom in today’s America, the theme is “only suckers pay” or “only suckers play by the rules.” After all we have a President who wants to pay people for doing this:

And, of course, the President and his political party have made sure that when it comes to taxes, “Only Suckers Pay.” Trump himself paid only $750 in taxes in 2015 and the same again in 2016. We won’t know more than that because he’s managed to get himself and his family exempted from any future IRS examination or audits. Perhaps given the inequities of the tax system and the President’s own impunity, more tax-payers will follow the example of the transit fare-payer who has decided he’s done?

Another Seattle example is the matter of property crime. The police do not respond, period full stop. Like others in Seattle, our small condo building has been broken into multiple times, despite one expensive “hardening” measure after another. One result of all the preventive measures is that we do have really excellent footage of those who break in. Full facial views of culprits in the act. You can’t get the cops to look at the videos, which may be less about the police than about Seattle city policies on crime.

Crime without consequence may also be one of the reasons there are so many empty store fronts in Ballard and so many businesses here are closing. Crime does pay. Shop lifting and people selling illegal drugs from their RV’s here doesn’t make it easy to successfully operate a retail business.

I also wonder if some of the fare jumpers or some of the many who live in tent and RV encampments here in Ballard may decide that the “Terminal One Motor and Yacht Club” will be worth a visit? A little outbreak of class warfare? Maybe the cops will be more responsive when someone from there calls to report a break-in? Or maybe there will be no need for cops as the Terminal will likely have its own private “security” force?

Here’s my hunch about what links these various stories: we’ve become a nation and a city, where playing by the rules and obeying the law is “for suckers” (Also Donald Trump’s term for soldiers killed in combat). Play fast and loose with the law and Constitution? Don’t bother paying your fair (or fare) share? Pile up and display ostentatious wealth, while others live on the streets and some support themselves via criminal activity? Why not? “Only suckers pay.”