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> I'm a bit miffed that they refused to add language that prohibited lowering the threshold.

Well that's because the entire point of this is just to get a tax on the books so they can later increase the amount and lower the thresholds when all of a sudden this $4B windfall isn't enough.

This is absolutely going to be a lions-eating-faces situation a few years from now when we're talking about a 14.9% tax with a $250,000 exemption.

I'm also genuinely curious how the exemption doesn't by definition make it no longer uniform. How does any exemption at all not violate the uniformity requirement?

> I'm also genuinely curious how the exemption doesn't by definition make it no longer uniform. How does any exemption at all not violate the uniformity requirement?

That's the part that I'm assuming is going to get fought out in court when this is inevitably challenged. The state will likely try to argue that it's not a property tax, but an excise tax. They used that argument in support of the capital gains tax, and won (Quinn vs. Washington State, 2023), stating that the tax was an excise tax on the privilege of selling assets. The WA supreme court ruled that the tax was a permissible excise tax and not a property tax, so did not run afoul of the constitution.

They'll likely argue that the millionaire tax is an excise tax on the privilege of participating in the state's economy.

Alternatively, they may try to define high income as a new class of property. Property taxes only have to be uniform within a specific class of property, so if they create a new class, then it would be uniform for that class.

Should be an interesting court battle.

> Alternatively, they may try to define high income as a new class of property. Property taxes only have to be uniform within a specific class of property, so if they create a new class, then it would be uniform for that class.

If nothing else, from a rhetorical/argumentative perspective I am actually really interested in hearing a coherent argument that your 1,000,001st dollar is a difference class of property than your 999,999th.

qup 97 days ago

Do you have anything specific you want the money spent on?

Or is it just a punish the rich type of support?

Yes. Washington desperately needs infrastructure improvements, our state has not kept up with population growth, especially in areas outside of the Seattle metro. Go north into the Skagit valley or Whatcom county, we have two lane roads over capacity with many fatal accidents each year, power lines still above ground that get taken out year, after year every time we have a wind storm (happens a lot, especially in the fall).

There's a reason it's a long standing joke that our state bird is the traffic cone.

Near where I live there's still remains and pot holes from a landslide a year ago that has not been cleaned up or repaired.

I'm not a "punish the rich just for the sake of it" type person, but I do believe that you shouldn't get to move here, use the state's economy to extract wealth, and then not contribute back into it's development, infrastructure and people.

Even if you don't buy the "job creator" argument, if you're bringing a business and "extracting wealth" you're not earning that wealth as a W2 employee, so this tax won't apply. The best example I can think of for >$1M W2 earners are highly specialized physicians, and maybe some even more specialized (and prolific) attorneys. Aren't they already contributing a lot?

> The best example I can think of for >$1M W2 earners are highly specialized physicians, and maybe some even more specialized (and prolific) attorneys. Aren't they already contributing a lot?

That depends on how much they are consuming within the state and paying sales tax. If they are W2 earners, they aren't contributing via B&O tax like businesses do, and so essentially they just contribute the same as anyone else in the state, via all the other regressive taxes, just proportional to how much money they spend.

> they aren't contributing via B&O tax like businesses do

Well they're not businesses so that makes sense.

> "just" proportional to how much money they spend (emphasis mine)

Yeah, which for most of them is going to be a lot more than someone earning a fraction of what they earn, so they do actually contribute more in absolute terms, even if for some reason you think that their contributing less on a percentage basis is for some reason bad.

Good luck finding someone making $2M/yr who isn't spending a lot more in the local economy than someone earning $40k/yr.

Prior to the tax, the bottom 20% of Washington earners pay between 13-17% of their income in state and local taxes through the regressive tax system. The top 1% of earners pay closer to 3%.

In absolute terms, yes, of course someone making $2M/year will spend a lot more money than someone earning $40k, but they don't spend 50 times more. They don't need 50 times more food, or 50 times more gas, etc.

For the $2M earner, any surplus likely isn't spent locally but is invested instead, which leaks the money out of the state into global markets.

And that's the problem with regressive tax codes in general, the tax base is disconnected from the state's actual wealth growth. Washington's regressive tax system makes the state fund itself using only money from the working class while the state's largest pool of potential revenue remains locked away in global markets.