Authored by Jeff Eager via RealClearPolitics,
Seattle, which is home to Amazon and Microsoft, currently employs some 193,000 well-compensated Washingtonians working in the tech sector. One major reason that Seattle emerged as the first big tech hub outside of California is obvious: It is the only West Coast state with no state income tax. Its state constitution forbids an income tax. High wage workers and entrepreneurs seeking a piece of the relatively laid back, outdoors-focused Pacific Northwest lifestyle can move to Washington without taking a state-mandated pay cut.
For the progressive Democrats who dominate state politics in the Pacific Northwest, money in the pockets of anyone other than the government and its political allies is wasted. To grab more of it, legislative Democrats in Washington are pushing through an income tax in the guise of a “millionaire’s tax” that would levy a 9.9% tax on incomes over $1 million. Just yesterday, as the “millionaire’s tax” neared the finish line in the Washington legislature, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced he and his wife have relocated from Seattle, where they lived for 47 years, to Miami. Florida has neither a state income tax nor a state income tax masquerading as a “millionaire’s tax.”
The constitutionality of the bill rests on progressives’ expectation that the Washington Supreme Court will completely abandon decades of precedent deeming income taxes unconstitutional. The expectation may not be unfounded: Five of nine justices were appointed by Democratic governors. Democrats also voted down an amendment to forbid applying an income tax to lower income levels, signaling the “millionaire’s tax” is likely to become a “thousandaire’s tax” if Democrats get their way.
What makes this proposed tax truly egregious, however, is its attempt to stop voters from having any say in it. The Democrats’ tax bill includes a necessity clause that precludes a voter referendum that could overturn the new income tax. So long as the majority-progressive-appointed state Supreme Court goes along, progressives will have upended 90 years of constitutionally prohibited income taxes while shielding it from a vote of the people.
Additionally, Washington progressives have taken a brazen step to undermine local governance in the state. The state house just passed a bill giving unelected bureaucrats appointed by the governor the power to remove any elected sheriff in the state based on vague guidelines, overriding local voters’ ability to select their own law enforcement. The move is an effort to exert progressive control of sheriffs in rural parts of the state who have questioned unpopular and difficult-to-enforce laws, such as COVID restrictions and gun regulations.
Not to be outdone by its neighbor to the north, Oregon’s progressive governance is also thumbing its nose at the will of the voters. The Beaver State, which has made itself into an economic backwater, has long levied high state income taxes, driving businesses and people who earn money for a living out of state. (The state’s second largest business, the $12 billion Dutch Brothers coffee chain, left the state last year, taking its corporate tax revenue with it.) The state’s economy, always tenuous, is now crumbling. Oregon’s unemployment rate of 5.2% is third worst in the nation, better than only California (5.5%) and New Jersey (5.4%). Layoffs since the beginning of 2025 are comparable to job losses during the Great Recession.
Oregon progressives charge forward undaunted. The Democratic legislative supermajority voted in February to disconnect Oregon’s tax code from the federal code so the state can continue to tax job-creating business investment at the higher rate eschewed by D.C. Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill. The disconnect will not help attract the investors needed to stabilize Portland’s cratering downtown real estate market, where values, when buyers can be found, are a fraction of what they were five years ago. Investors recently rated Portland as the worst place in the country to invest in real estate other than Hartford, Connecticut.
Punitive rates of income taxation are not enough for Oregon Democrats. For the past year, they’ve tried to muscle through the largest tax increase in state history. It is a deeply unpopular package consisting of fuel tax increases to pay for more unionized transportation workers and a doubling of the state payroll tax to fund public transportation – even though the state is shedding jobs at an historic rate and such a massive payroll tax will only make things worse.
Those increases, which would hit consumers’ wallets directly, fomented a tax revolt among Oregon’s left-leaning and normally placid electorate. It took Gov. Tina Kotek and the backroom persuasion of the Service Employees International Union two legislative sessions, including the longest special session in state history, to eke out passage of the tax increases in the face of overwhelming public opposition.
Kotek then waited to sign her signature bill to try to deprive opponents of the ability to collect signatures to repeal it. That tactic backfired spectacularly; opponents collected nearly 250,000 signatures from an electorate of 3 million voters in weeks, setting the tax hike on a path to near-certain defeat this November.
Not having learned their lesson, Oregon Democrats are again trying to frustrate voter involvement by moving the date of the repeal vote from November to May, so that Kotek, who is up for reelection, and other Democrats, need not appear on the same ballot as their radioactive tax increase. This is in spite of the fact that the voter repeal petition signed by so many Oregonians specifically said the ballot measure was to be voted on in the November election.
Pacific Northwest progressives’ crusade against allowing the voters a direct say in their schemes is ironic. In 1902, Oregon was one of the first states in the union to adopt voter initiatives and referenda to supplant, in the eyes of that era’s progressives, the corrupt and elite legislators blocking the popular will. Washington state joined not long after.
Yet, today’s progressives are the elites in Washington and Oregon, dominating every function of state government and culture. Their rule depends on seizing an ever-increasing share of the resources of private citizens to distribute among progressives’ sprawling and union-dominated political coalitions.
And despite their obvious policy failures and responsibility for crumbling state economies, Pacific Northwest progressives have decided that the will of the people no longer matters. Voters cannot be permitted to stand in the way of the elite definition of “progress.”
Jeff Eager is an attorney, former mayor of Bend, Oregon, and author of “Oregon Roundup” on Substack.