Washington is being buried in indefensibly bad legislation that is extremely hostile to large companies and tech companies of every size for openly ideological reasons. It has rapidly become one of the worst business environments in the country when it used to be one of the best. Many companies have stopped or reduced hiring in Seattle and are moving operations to other States; there is a new announcement in the news every other day.
I know several longtime residents that have recently moved out of State or are no longer domiciled there as a consequence. There was an article in the news just this week that housing prices are starting to decline rapidly in Seattle.
It is looking like they couldn't help themselves and killed the golden goose.
_Oregon_ has bad policies (10% income tax on all, upwards of 14% on high income earners at 400k); schools are in a rough place, their legacy pension system is a disaster. But Washington seems fine imo. TX and such states will always be a draw while their cost of living is low, if you don't mind the heat and general lack of outdoors (relative to PNW). IMO the weather and housing prices are the main tradeoffs between WA and TX.
And then you have a litany of new business regulation across every sector of the local economy. My recent favorite, which fortunately did not make it out of this session due to heavy lobbying by tech, was requiring data centers to turn-off power during periods of high electricity demand. It's insane that this is even being seriously considered.
Oregon is also a mess but it has always been a mess.
Texas isn't the only alternative. Turning Washington into California with worse weather even makes California relatively attractive.
None of this matters. We have been hearing how California is doing the same shit for years and people are moving out in droves, but turns out California house prices are still high because people are staying there and its still a very good place to live and work on the average, despite way higher cost of living.
So Washington is going to do just fine.
It soaks the “rich” with an income threshold that isn’t indexed to inflation and kicks in at an income level where preschool is still a major affordability challenge.
And then you pay PFA and don’t get preschool for your kid because we’re still years away from having enough seats for everyone.
So it is preschool for some (multco paying for seats in existing preschool, aka kicking your kid out of their preschool spot) paid for by the broad middle class.
Even Kotek was ragging on it.
2020’s 125k/200k thresholds should be today’s 150/250 thresholds. They are not.
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/26/kotek-multnomah-count...
The tech companies killed the golden goose that was handed to them. They got too greedy. Amazon basically got carte blanche to build in Seattle, and plenty of tax credits to do so.
Amazon and their founder then told WA gov that they were going to relocate to Florida. WA gov said "well, we paid billions for your infrastructure, so if you're going to leave, please partially refund us" and Bezos whined and whined and whined. Imagine, a guy worth (at the time) nearly half a trillion dollars being told that he should have to pay a few hundred million dollars for his broken promises.
Imagine being given incredibly generous tax incentives for decades that allowed you to build a multi trillion dollar company, and then whining when the giver of those incentives asks for a tiny portion of that to be paid back when you tell them you're leaving.
There are a few very angry, emotional, and vocal opponents of this in most corners of the internet, although very few of them actually make a million dollars and there are many million+ income people supporting this.
Demographically, there are over 3 million households in WA, and only 20k of them would be affected.
The majority of states have one so it's not that big a deal, but it'll be less often said "I'm going to turn down this higher SF offer for Seattle b/c of lower COL...".
I'm not sure where the next refuge will be. Austin? Memphis?
Current government is using it as toilet paper, first by introducing capital gains tax, and now income tax.
I see in another comments though that you argue in bad faith by dismissing opponent arguments as “small amount”, “talking points”. If you don’t have anything real to say, don’t bother to answer.
Just to remind you that he's still indeed an Establishment Democrat. He won't drown us in fascism, but he sure isn't fighting for the working class.
That state desperately needs to restructure its finances but the legislature is almost complete captured by clueless ideologues. Washington isn't California. Most of the attraction of living there historically was its extremely business-friendly environment.
I've lived a large fraction of my life in Washington and I'm watching the State commit suicide in real-time.
How old are you? What propaganda told you this? In my generation (young millennial/genz) the attraction of living in Seattle, which pulled me and almost a dozen professional friends at this point has been:
- high quality urban living in a temperate environment. Including access to great parks, waterfront, bikeability in the city
- access to great outdoors and regional amenities like skiing, ocean fishing, hiking, wine country
- liberal policies and general friendly society (it’s friendlier here than the east coast)
- no state income tax (we’re all very high tax bracket)
- a high enough income population that you can find a plethora of high-end products and services that cluster around high income earners (only a few us cities have this stronger than Seattle I feel)
The budget expansion is almost entirely by medicaide.
Looking at 2019-2023
* Human Services: +~50% nominal → ~+22% real — biggest absolute dollar growth, driven almost entirely by Medicaid expansion and COVID enrollment
* K-12: +23% nominal → ~0% real — flat in purchasing power
* Higher Education: +~20% nominal → ~-2% real — slight real decline
* Government Operations: +~30% nominal → ~+6% real — modest real growth, headcount/compensation driven
* Natural Resources: +~25% nominal → ~+2% real — roughly flat
* Total Budget: +43.5% nominal → ~+17% real
