The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
It’s been slow coming, and far overshadowed by the rise of Trump. But one movement that’s finally seeing a breakthrough is “tax the rich.”
The landslide win this month of a tax on millionaire pay in Seattle is the latest sign the public is agitated by massive wealth inequality — and willing to do something about it.
The vote was a test of sorts. It’s no surprise that Seattle voters said yes to more affordable housing, because of the need. But voters got a choice on how to pay for it. You could stick it to the man, with a 5 percent charge on corporate pay packages topping $1 million (option 1A), or go moderate by using existing city funds (option 1B).
Seattleites chose to stick it to the man — by 20 percentage points.
“The strong victory for the ‘anti-establishment’ 1A — which consolidated younger voters, working-class voters and communities of color — is a notable temperature check in the city,” political consultant Ben Anderstone said.
The measure was opposed by some of the behemoth companies most likely to pay: Amazon, Microsoft, Weyerhaeuser and so on. Nearly three-fourths of Seattle’s existing payroll tax on high earners, in place since 2021, is paid by just 10 companies — eight of which are Big Tech.
This new millionaire’s tax might be a struggle to collect. Seattle’s current payroll tax starts at pay around $189,000, which covers tens of thousands of workers. This millionaire’s tax, on the other hand, will hit the rarefied few in the C-suites — and only if they work at least half the time inside Seattle limits.
“I think it will be easier for companies to plan around the new tax on payroll exceeding $1M than for the original payroll expense tax on employees earning greater than $150K,” Grant Shaver, a principal at Bellevue accounting firm Clark Nuber, wrote in an email.
Impracticalities aside, voters enthusiastically backed the idea. Maybe that’s because there hasn’t been an exodus out of Seattle from the original tax on high earners. Or maybe it’s because there’s rising anxiety about an oligarchy forming — with Big Tech founders lined up like mafia dons at the presidential inauguration, as if they now run the country. One of them, Elon Musk, apparently does.
It could be tempting to dismiss this as crazy liberal Seattle stuff. But voters in surprising places have stuck it to the rich.
Take last fall’s statewide vote on a capital gains tax. It was upheld in some of the state’s reddest places, winning in 47 of Washington’s 49 legislative districts. The place that voted most lopsidedly for Donald Trump, the 7th Legislative District in the northeast of the state, also voted, on the same ballot, to tax the rich. Rural Okanogan County, in the 7th, voted for it by a Seattle-like 17 points.
Oren Cass, a conservative economist, recently wrote that these trends are real and bipartisan, especially as the GOP draws more working-class voters. So it’s politically nuts, he says, for Republicans in Congress to make it their top goal to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy.
“Tax cuts simply are not a top priority for the American people broadly, the working class that now forms the core of the Republican coalition nor even the Republican Party itself,” he wrote in The New York Times.
A poll in Washington done for The Seattle Times last fall found the same. Even 43 percent of Republicans, along with 86 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of independents, said they would support controversial wealth taxes on the über rich — people with net worths over $250 million.
Locally, Democrats are considering wealth taxes but also are noodling around with jacking property taxes, which would do nothing for tax fairness. Federally, Republicans appear hellbent to get the old trickle-down band back together, blowing a wider hole in the national balance sheet to grant huge breaks to corporations making record profits.
That vote in Seattle this month, and the vote last fall in far-flung places like the Okanogan? These are flares going up that the masses are restless.
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