A few days ago, our home state of Washington did something they had avoided doing for 93 years: the legislature enacted a state income tax.
This basically means that Washington state is now off the map on an increasingly shorter list of US states without income tax.
Just to clarify — for the benefit of those who live outside the United States — we still pay federal income tax but many states in this country also have a state income tax to help pay for state-based projects.
As it stands right now, this new income tax only affects those making a million dollars a year or more.
Regardless, many see this development as a slippery slope towards the state gradually imposing income taxes on people with lower and lower incomes until eventually it'll be something that affects everybody in the state.
Taxes, I suppose, are pretty much inevitable no matter where you live... unless you live in one of those offshore tax havens where you only get to live if your net worth is incredibly high.
As a generally poor person, this new tax is most likely not going to affect our family in any way, although there are already many rumblings from the ultra rich that they're going to leave the state and relocate to somewhere else. The question becomes how many "somewhere elses" is will remain as state-based income tax havens?
Notwithstanding the popular libertarian perspective that "all taxation is theft", we nonetheless can't overlook the fact that most places have roads and airports and schools and other things that have to be funded in one fashion or another... unless we're all supposed to go back to riding horses to and fro.
Having lived in Washington state for 20 years, I have found it to be a generally "financially friendly" place to live if you are anything other than in the top few percent of income earners.
Services here are generally quite good and we have something that comes relatively close to Universal Health Care... at least to a sufficient degree that if you are in the lower 2/3, your trip to the hospital for a serious illness isn't going to result in your immediate bankruptcy and homelessness.
We experienced this recently — first hand — when our middle son (who lives with us during the winter) ended up having to have a minor surgical procedure done in our local hospital, and even though he is employed full time his income level is such that $15,000 hospital bills were reduced to about $3,500 based on his income level.
For now, I'm just hoping this new tax remains a "millionaire tax."
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Created at 2026.03.17 01:20 PST
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