Seattle has a lot to love. We’ve got mountains, lakes, fish throwers, and summer sun and rain the rest of the year! People are stampeding into Seattle. Our city grows by about 250 people every week. These newcomers like our quality of life, and they are recruited into Seattle’s booming tech industry. We now have more software job openings than Silicon Valley.
But our city also shrinks. We are losing our poorest citizens, pushing them out to the suburbs. Tower cranes, like vultures, pick at the remains of their houses and build shiny condos in their place. In the last six years, rent for a one-bedroom apartment doubled, from $925 to $1,978. Neighborhoods flip, as generations of Seattleites are kicked out and the young and affluent move in.
Prosperity comes with a cost, and it’s often black, brown, or poor. In Seattle, we’re fighting back against the injustice.
We’re a pretty liberal city. We were the first place to adopt a plan for a $15 an hour minimum wage, we implemented democracy vouchers to help candidates run for office without corporate funding, and we have a socialist city councilmember.
But it’s hard to keep a straight face when bragging about our liberal cred when we have the most regressive tax system in the country. People who make less than $21,000 pay 16.8% in state and local taxes, while people who make over $507,000 pay only 2.4%. In terms of time, poor people have to work into March to meet their state and local taxes, the family in the middle has to work into February, and the wealthy are all done on January 6th! That’s the opposite of what it should be.
It’s all because in Washington State we have no income tax, unlike California, New York, and almost every other state. We’re an outlier – no income tax but high sales taxes – in the company of Texas. The thought of that is enough to make our salmon turn belly up.
This unfair tax system exacerbates the gap between rich and poor, while starving the resources necessary for public services. It’s why our legislature has been fined for contempt by the state supreme court for failure to fully fund public education. It’s why tuition in our state colleges has almost doubled in eight years. It’s why we have some of the worst transit in the nation.
Washington State did have an income tax eighty-five years ago. But the rich white men on the state supreme court got their tax forms in the mail, and then decided it was unconstitutional.
We tried to rectify this with a statewide income tax in a 2010 referendum, but got beaten badly – except in Seattle, which voted for it. So this month, the Seattle City Council passed a new income tax, spurred by the Economic Opportunity Institute and a grassroots coalition called Trump Proof Seattle. Polls show that two-thirds of Seattleites support it.
The tax is unique because only the wealthy will pay it, meaning they’ll start to pay a fairer share in making this city run. It’s a 2.25% tax on income in excess of $250,000 for single earners, or in excess of $500,000 for married couples. It’s projected to raise $150 million annually.
The money is earmarked to help rectify the inequality that plagues our city. That means the creation of affordable housing, the funding of programs for homeless people, and protections for people who may lose out as the Trump administration guts government safety nets.
But some people like the system where the rich can enjoy what Seattle has to offer without paying a fair share to make it run. The ordinance has already attracted a legal challenge from a wealthy investment manager. There’s another lawsuit planned by the Koch-Brothers-funded Freedom Foundation – the folks who spend their time dismantling unions and filing frivolous public records requests for the birthdays of state employees. The state GOP is just telling people to not pay the tax – that is, break the law.
Just like in D.C., where Donald Trump and Republican members of Congress are gutting the Affordable Care Act, some rich people will do anything to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. In Seattle, we’re used to it, as we’ve been giving the rich huge tax breaks for centuries.
But it’s got to stop now, before there’s no one left in the city but millionaires and billionaires. Who will pay to keep the lights on then?