Washington State’s Democrats Vote To Eat The Rich

Washington state has never had an income tax. Every time voters were asked whether they wanted one, they said no. They have said no eleven times, in fact, with margins as steep as 77% against. In 2024, Washington’s citizens forced the Legislature to enact I-2111, a measure that explicitly banned a state income tax, after gathering over 446,000 signatures for the initiative.

Democrats looked at all of that, shrugged, and passed one anyway.

On March 10, the Washington House voted 51-46 to approve SB 6346, imposing a 9.9% tax on individual income above $1 million. Governor Bob Ferguson, who had publicly flirted with vetoing it before deciding not to, pledged to sign it. It was all a performance to pretend that he was getting taxpayer benefits out of targeting the millionaires to pay “their fair share.” Democrats dressed it up as a narrow “millionaire’s tax” and insisted you have nothing to worry about. That is exactly what they want you to believe. It is not true.

Why this income tax is unconstitutional by design

Here is the legal reality. Under the 1933 Washington Supreme Court ruling in Culliton v. Chase, income is classified as property under the state constitution. A graduated income tax violates the uniformity clause. That precedent has been confirmed and reconfirmed for nearly a century. Former Chief Justice Gerry Alexander, former Justice Phil Talmadge, and former Attorney General Rob McKenna have all stated unequivocally that income is intangible property under Washington’s constitution. The correct vehicle to change that has always been a constitutional amendment put to voters.

Democrats tried that route, too, and got crushed at the ballot box repeatedly. So they stopped asking.

Washington Democrats passed a law they know is unconstitutional because the real target was never the millionaires. The real target is the Washington State Supreme Court. When Democrats passed the capital gains tax a few years ago, the justices who upheld it practically begged someone to bring them a case that would let them torch Culliton entirely. SB 6346 is that case.

Once a legal challenge is filed, and it will be filed immediately, Democrats expect their sympathetic Supreme Court to use the vehicle to wipe out 90 years of precedent and legalize a permanent, broadened income tax for everyone, without a single voter ever getting a say.

The ‘millionaires only’ promise is a lie

If you live outside Washington and think this has nothing to do with you, pay attention. This is the playbook.

Washington already has a capital gains tax that Democrats sold as a modest levy on investment gains. They also have an estate tax (a death tax) that activates at one of the lowest thresholds in the country. Every new layer of taxation arrives with the same promise that it targets only the wealthy and that everyone else is safe. The income tax is the next layer. The threshold today is $1 million. The moment the Supreme Court blesses the structure, the number is up for negotiation, and lawmakers will negotiate it down.

Democrats made their intentions concrete when they specifically amended SB 6346 to exempt it from I-2111, the voter-passed ban on a state income tax. Read that again. Voters banned an income tax. Democrats passed one and wrote language into the bill to neutralize voters’ own protections. That is not an oversight. That is a statement of hostility toward the voters’ will. And this law may not be subject to a referendum, since Democrats inserted a “necessity clause” that precludes the voter challenge. They pretended this was a necessary, emergency piece of legislation. That it doesn’t go into effect until 2028 undercuts that emergency message, but Democrats don’t seem to care how transparent their scam is.

The wealth exodus is already underway

The wealthy are not waiting for a court ruling. On the same night the income tax cleared the House, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, who built his company from a single Pike Place coffee shop into one of the most recognized brands on earth, announced he and his wife are leaving Seattle for Miami after 44 years in Washington. He is taking his taxable income with him. Jeff Bezos made the same calculation after the capital gains tax passed.

Zach Abraham, principal and CIO of Bulwark Capital Management, which oversees roughly $1.1 billion in assets, told me on The Jason Rantz Show on Seattle Red 770 AM that he is leaving Washington and relocating his business. He calculated that his effective rate would fall between 49% and 51% once all state taxes are factored in. At one recent board meeting in Woodinville, Washington, just outside of Seattle, he sat alongside a small group of investors who collectively manage around $4 billion. Every person in that room is getting out, he said.

“I don’t feel that I have a choice,” Abraham told me.

An Association of Washington Business survey found 17% of Washington businesses are now considering leaving the state entirely, up 9% from a year ago. The CEO of Moment, a Seattle-based mobile photography company, just announced he’s moving the business to Wyoming after Washington’s separate new digital advertising tax added $200,000 in overnight annual costs.

Washington is following a blueprint that already failed

Washington Democrats do not have to guess how this ends.

California spent years dismissing warnings that its tax-and-regulate model was pushing out the businesses and high earners who funded the whole operation. Then Oracle left. Then Hewlett-Packard. Then Tesla. Then Charles Schwab. The departures were written off as isolated decisions until the state’s own budget office could no longer ignore the revenue gap left behind.

New York has watched the same pattern play out, with financial firms and high-net-worth residents flooding into Florida and Texas at a pace that has forced even Democratic lawmakers to acknowledge the damage. The Tax Foundation has consistently documented that high-income earners are among the most mobile taxpayers in the country and the most responsive to rate changes.

Washington is not pioneering a bold new model. It is copying a failure that two of the largest states in the country are still trying to reverse. The receipts already exist, and Democrats are simply choosing to ignore them.

What happens when the court rules

Washington Democrats have spent nine decades trying to create an income tax for everyone in the state. They are now five Supreme Court votes away from doing it without ever winning another election on the subject. They bypassed voters, neutralized a voter-approved ban, and handed a cooperative court the exact vehicle it has been waiting for.

The millionaire’s tax is the opening bid. Everyone else is the closing argument. You have been warned.

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Jason Rantz is a Seattle-based talk show host and author of “What’s Killing America: Inside the Radical Left’s Tragic Destruction of Our Cities.”