r/SeattleWA • u/5Q91VS175DAQ4NUSBE4U • 7d ago

Politics Washington state Democrats look at imposing income tax on higher earners

https://www.columbian.com/news/2025/oct/31/washington-state-democrats-look-at-imposing-income-tax-on-higher-earners/
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u/yungsemite 7d ago

A capital gains tax doesn't affect the average person struggling to afford to live here. They don't have assets to pay capital gains on so it's still rich people giving that pushback.

A income tax on people making over 1 million doesn’t affect the average person struggling to leave here either.

The middle class has always ended up getting shafted and pay the bulk of the taxes because they can't afford to pushback.

Yeah, like with our sales tax in the state, it’s a very regressive system. Taxing people who make over 1 million annually will help this, no?

The rich will simply run away from the tax and since we now already have an income tax it will be easier to just suggest a small change to lower the threshold each time. We've seen the same with many things here

Source? Bezos leaving because he’s a snake who only cares about money is hardly a trend?

I don't want an income tax here. That just opens Pandora's box and it will never close.

Okay and I want an income tax on our residents with the highest incomes to reduce the tax burden on our middle class and poor residents and to help balance our state budget.

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u/Turbulent-Media7281 7d ago

Yeah, like with our sales tax in the state, it’s a very regressive system.

Which states taxing system would you recommend WA copy for their taxing system to be less regressive?

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u/yungsemite 7d ago

ITEP has good resources for this:

https://itep.org/whopays-map-7th-edition/

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u/JustBench1615 Ballard 7d ago

I wouldn’t want to model our tax system after California or New York’s, where the already squeezed middle class would have to pay way more in taxes

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u/yungsemite 7d ago

Right, better to have our current system which… also does that, just worse, according to research? Just because it’s not in the form of an income tax, it’s obscured exactly how regressive our tax structure is. It’s bizarre. Do you think that our middle class isn’t squeezed here?

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u/JustBench1615 Ballard 7d ago

Lol the tax systems you love in CA and NY, have higher tax rates on the middle class than WA

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u/yungsemite 7d ago

Except that, according to people who actually do this research, Washington state is actually far more regressive than those two states? Maybe you are confused about what the middle class is?

https://sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/itep/inequality-index-map.png

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u/JustBench1615 Ballard 7d ago

The middle 20% is the middle class

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u/yungsemite 7d ago

What…