Op-Ed: The Data Says Seattle's High Earners Tax Is Working, Despite Whining from Big Business [View all]

The Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) released a “report” that was meant to convince us that taxes on high earners are smothering the Seattle economy. Regarding such claims, I recently wrote in the pages of Geekwire that “most of these posts are long on rhetoric, short on rigor. Given Washington’s pressing needs, we should do better. And given our community’s capacity for data-driven thinking, we can do better.”

The DSA report is, sadly, yet another such example, this time in service of corporate lobbyists’ agenda. The report may be prettier than a random Linkedin post, but the reasoning is every bit as shoddy.

The DSA contends that taxes on high earners are chasing high paying jobs out of town. But the data shows a very different story. The DSA relies on the total, net number of jobs between Seattle and Bellevue to make its point. On the way, they ignore the obvious collapse of downtown retail and restaurants that impacts central cities everywhere. More importantly, the taxes they complain are the cause of this decline are not levied on retail and restaurants! In fact, the employers that do pay these taxes have largely expanded in Seattle.

Business leaders are frantic to establish their anti-tax narrative because the tide is turning and local lawmakers are increasingly embracing the push to tax the rich in order to invest in the public good — whether affordable housing or public education or clean energy. Long a state lacking an income tax, Washington finally greenlit a “millionaires’ tax’ this spring, after years of inaction and false starts at the state legislature. That tax will go into effect in 2029 — with millionaire-funded legal appeals and repeal initiatives at the ballot box likely before then.

https://www.theurbanist.org/op-ed-the-data-says-seattles-high-earners-tax-is-working-despite-whining-from-big-business/