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Comment by bettercallsalad | Hacker News Reader

As someone who lives in WA, I despise how bad any state government run program here is. Literally it took me 3 months to get a SSN and I couldn’t get hold of anyone. Also on top of this tax, they have this care tax which also taxes 1% of your income for “long term care”.

I would love to pay my taxes if I had seen reasonable outcome. So far all I see is a corrupt state government with no accountability and transparency.

Also isn’t this illegal? I thought the state constitution says it is illegal.

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> Also isn’t this illegal? I thought the state constitution says it is illegal.

The state constitution treats income as property, and states that property taxes must be uniform.

So the bill is actually a state-wide, uniform 9.9% income tax but with the first million dollars exempt.

It is expected to be challenged almost immediately in probably a long court battle so we will see what the arguments are. I'm in support of the tax, but I'm a bit miffed that they refused to add language that prohibited lowering the threshold.

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.

> 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%.

What percentage of the total state income gets contributed by the bottom 20% compared to the top 1%?

> They don't need 50 times more food, or 50 times more gas, etc.

Of course not and I didn't imply that they did, but I'm sure we could find things they do spend 50x more on (or even more). And I'm sure those things are taxed as well.

> 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.

Framing someone investing their own money as "leaking...out of the state" is kind of ridiculous. It's not the state's money.

Do you think $1,000 is better off in the stock market or given to the state?

> the tax base is disconnected from the state's actual wealth growth

So follow the state constitution and tax everyone the same rate. A uniform flat tax is much more "connected to the state's actual wealth growth" than anything else, isn't it?

> Washington's regressive tax system makes the state fund itself using only money from the working class...

Absolute nonsense. I'd bet my next two paychecks the top 1% in Washington pays more into the state coffers than the bottom 20%.

> ...while the state's largest pool of potential revenue remains locked away in global markets.

I think you said the quiet part out loud? It's not "potential [state] revenue" and framing it that way is disgusting.

> 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.

> As someone who lives in WA ... it took me 3 months to get a SSN

States don't issue social security numbers. Your complaint is with the Feds.

States do however issue the documents that you might need to present to the Social Security Administration. Maybe he had trouble getting those?

Speaking of documents, here's a tip. Use your name as it appears on your birth certificate on any government forms even if nobody ever calls you by that name. Also probably a good idea to use it when you sign up for utilities, on rental and lease agreements, property deeds, and medical records.

The SSA is real picky about names. Even if no one ever in your entire life has called you anything other than "Rob", if your birth certificate says "Robert" and that is what was on the form when you got your SSN assigned shortly after your birth if you ever need a replacement card they are not going to be happy with documents that say "Rob".

Not to detract from your point, but aren’t SSNs handled by the federal government?

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