Why Don’t Washington’s Corporations and Billionaires Oppose the Millionaires Tax?

Those of us with the poor fortune of having to delve into the finances behind the ballot initiative to repeal Washington’s new Millionaires Tax have noticed there’s one important party that’s oddly absent from the campaign: Washington’s corporate overlords and their billionaire owners.

The repeal campaign, Yes on I-645, is funded by comparatively smaller businesses and capitalists, as is the lawsuit hoping to get the tax repealed by the Washington State Supreme Court, a venture funded not by Microsoft, Amazon, or Boeing, but Eastern Washington plantation owners, McMansion developers, and a regional trucking company—not exactly titans of industry.

Because of this, the tax’s defenders against the ballot initiative (mostly unions representing underpaid public employees hoping to glean the lion’s share of the tax revenue raised) have out-fundraised six to one the right-wing campaign to keep Washington’s tax structure the most regressive in the country.

Compare this election to the one in 2010 when the bigwigs at Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon balled out to crush similar income tax reform and it’s like we’re living on a different planet.

What changed between then and now? The rich got richer while the rest of us got poorer, and we have more votes than them.

There’s a lot more money here now, and, denied the pressure release valve for public finances that an income tax represents, elected officials have had to look elsewhere to pay for services. Increasingly, they’ve found the money in the pockets of the corporations themselves, with state and local governments passing things like payroll taxes on large employers to balance the books, and those same corporations spending big bucks to stop the disease from spreading.

In this sense, income tax is like finding a vaccine for Washington’s most profitable companies, and the representatives of the corporate class all but admitted this to the Seattle Times. Unlike in 2010, they’re happy (enough) to trade Democrats’ income tax reform if party leaders drag their feet on business taxes.

The thousands of layoffs to AI and offshoring in the local tech economy recently suggest these corporations are not huge on paying their workers in the first place, especially such high wages, so if the state can tax workers instead of corporations, then all the better.

Tax reform is all about shifting the tax burden from one group to the next. In Washington, much of the tax burden rests on the poor, through sales tax, which is why we can’t afford nice things. If Washington residents want the state to pay for things like large public housing developments to solve homelessness, they can’t rely on taxing the poor to raise the revenue. Because the poor don’t have any money.

It’s been nearly a century since the last successful income tax reform campaign in Washington went up in flames, and the era provides an instructive example of why the wealthier classes are sometimes on board with taxing the rich. The reason Washington’s powerful farm lobby pushed through income tax in the first place in the 1930s was to shift the tax burden off of their own large property tax bills and onto the masses. When the Washington State Supreme Court goofily made progressive income tax illegal in 1933, the farmers didn’t fight the issue for long, as a new sales tax took the burden off their acreage anyway. That many of the planters now oppose income tax reform shows how well they’ve done in the intervening century (unlike the farmworkers who make their business model profitable, many of whom spent 1933 in a Yakima concentration camp for unionizing).

In not shelling out to spike income tax reform this time around, we see big business somewhat uniting with—or at least not getting in the way of—the progressive mainstream movement against small business tyrants in the hope that it will head off the far left, which is pushing business taxation like Rep. Shaun Scott’s statewide payroll tax concept whether we get income tax or not.

Billionaires and millionaires are different classes, and they have different interests. Being at the top of the pyramid together means their interests overlap more often than not, but when the hungry peasantry starts scaling the sacrificial mound, there’s no question who the oligarchs will roll down the steps first.

Small business tyrants are too greedy to spend much of their own money, even, paradoxically, in defense of their own money. That greed is the same reason they don’t want to pay taxes in the first place, and the contradiction looks to consume them this November.

To sail our feudal class metaphor across the Atlantic from the Mesoamerican to the medieval, the lower nobility is too cheap to repair their castle walls, and the king figures the revolting serfs will slake their thirst for treasure on the landed gentry’s estates long before marching on the royal capital.