“Just to be clear, on Dec. 18, I moved to Texas. I dont know whats so specific about December 18, but lets just say its prior to January,” Kalanick said in an interview with TPBN.
He joined Tesla CEO , Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Larry Page, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and PayPal and Founders Fund founder Peter Thiel in a steady procession of wealth abandoning blue states for Florida and Texas. Democrats have been engineering this for years. California, New York and now Washington state are running the same tax-hiking playbook at nearly the same moment, and the results are entirely predictable.
In New York City, socialist Mayor has made taxing the wealthy a centerpiece of his administration. He is pushing an additional 2 percent income tax surcharge on city residents earning over $1 million annually, along with corporate tax hikes he claims would generate billions toward closing a $5.4 billion budget deficit. His ultimatum to Albany is that approving those taxes is the only way to prevent the city from imposing a 9.5% property tax hike on everyone, including the working and middle class he says he represents.
Democrat New York Gov. has repeatedly refused to go along, explaining at an event, “I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach.” That admission does not come from someone who genuinely believes taxing the wealthy carries no consequences. Someone who believed that would not worry about Palm Beach. Even Hochul understands perfectly well what happens to a tax base when people leave. At least in New York, she has enough self-awareness to hold the line. Washington state Democrats do not.
pushed Senate Bill 6346 through the legislature after an intense 25-hour floor debate. The bill imposes a 9.9% income tax on households earning over $1 million a year. Democrat Gov. Bob Ferguson has pledged to sign it.
Former state Attorney General Rob McKenna issued a legal memo calling the bill unconstitutional, pointing to nearly a century of settled precedent. Democrats already know that. Their strategy depends on it.
In 1933, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in Culliton v. Chase that income is property under the state constitution. Article VII requires property to be taxed at a uniform rate, making a graduated income tax flatly unconstitutional. That ruling has held for 93 years. Washington voters have rejected income tax measures at the ballot box 10 separate times.Â
Most recently, in 2010, a tax on households above $200,000 went down in 38 of 39 counties. The legislature’s 2021 capital gains tax only survived judicial review because the far-left state Supreme Court bent itself into a pretzel to absurdly classify it narrowly as an excise tax on a specific transaction. A broad millionaires’ income tax is legally distinct, and Democrats are using it to force the court’s hand.
That clean decision is the entire ballgame. Tax supporters are banking on a state Supreme Court now stacked with justices appointed by Democratic governors and backed by liberal interest groups. If Culliton falls, income is formally decoupled from property for the first time in Washington’s history. The uniformity requirement disappears.
Once that constitutional wall comes down, nothing prevents the legislature from lowering the threshold from $1 million to $500,000 to $200,000 to everyone who draws a paycheck. The millionaires’ tax is not the destination. It is the crowbar to push the income tax on everyone.
The economic fallout is not waiting for any ruling.
Bulwark Capital Managements principal told <a href="https://seattlered.com/taxes/bulwark-leaving-wa-income-tax/4117239" target="_blank
