The Roundup: More on the Millionaires Tax Hand-Wringing
From the Editor
What's up, South End?
This week, we're talking taxes. Again.
The Millionaires Tax has been a huge talking point, even before it was signed into law last month. And here we are, weeks after it became a reality, and an op-ed was penned by none other than Howard Schultz taking aim at Seattle, and at mayor Katie Wilson, with claims of hostility toward businesses.
I know how many of y'all feel about Schultz. In the view of many Seattleites, especially Sonics fans, he sold us out when he literally sold the Sonics to the ownership group that shipped the team to Oklahoma City. But that's not why we're talking about him.
We're here because so many right-leaning movers, shakers, politicians, and business people are hell-bent on pushing the narrative that this new tax will make big business flee and lead to the destruction of our city.
Never mind the fact that Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks had all recently laid people off before this tax was signed. KUOW reported just this week that tech layoffs in Washington are the second highest in the country, with over 11,000 workers losing jobs between May 2025 and now. That isn't the result of the new tax.
So, what are we really talking about with the Millionaires Tax? Who will it really hurt? And what will the actual ramifications be for working-class people?
To hunt down some answers, I turned to John Burbank, the founder and former executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute.
We spoke about Schultz's op-ed, why local millionaires keep threatening to leave over new taxes here that already exist in most states, and why taxes on the highest earners are important.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
MD: Howard Schultz wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal claiming Seattle is hostile to businesses. Even outside of him, there's a narrative that new taxes will run off all the business people and destroy our city. Is there any truth to these claims?
JB: When you look at these corporate moves, it has a lot to do with greed, more than anything else. It's also about trying to step away from the structures we have for a limited amount of power on behalf of workers through unions and through our state laws, which actually create some economic security for workers — for example, we have paid family medical leave 12 weeks for all workers. We have paid sick days for all workers. We have expanded Apple Health to 138% of the federal poverty level. Many states don't have any of that, and so that's the political climate that apparently is conducive to corporations like Starbucks, which says much more about them than it does about us.
In fact, Seattle had the fourth most population growth of any city in the country, which means that in some ways, we are maybe not thriving, but we're moving forward, and people are still coming here. We have a great concentration of intellectual, academic, and entrepreneurial capacity here. I know that you can run businesses here and be very prosperous, and a lot of businesses do.
I think what Starbucks is doing is what Boeing did — trying to flee to a culture and political economy in which workers have very little power, and in which racism has been very effective in dividing workers from each other.
MD: Will this new tax really run off businesses or contribute to widespread job loss? Some would argue that we've already seen widespread job loss recently that has nothing to do with this specific tax.
JB: I think you answered your own question. I think it's much more propaganda than reality. I mean, I think over 40 states have an income tax. California has an even higher income tax on people with high incomes. Oregon also has a similar tax, so really I don't think anything will change in terms of who comes in or who doesn't come here. What it will change is that it will bring a lot more money into the state, and some of the things that Schultz likes to complain about are about educational infrastructure and not providing high-quality education. Which is mainly a result of the state having defunded higher education. It's never funded early childhood education, and it's sort of going back on its funding for K-12 education. And why is that? Because there's not enough money. And we've been dependent upon a regressive sales tax, which hits low-income people the most and is not very robust, as opposed to something like the tax that I helped get passed in Seattle last year, which is the excess compensation tax on compensation that exceeds a million dollars.
MD: Why are these city- and state-level taxes on high earners important?
JB: We need to think about the sort of foundational aspects of social well-being and shared commonwealth. If you look at the foundational aspects of that, things like paid family medical leave, paid sick days, universal child care, a healthy public K-12 system, a healthy transition to public community colleges and four-year colleges — those are the elements that we are developing in Seattle, and those are the elements that create a community in which all of us want to live and can thrive. And if corporations want to participate in that, that's a good thing, and we want them to do that. If they choose to emphasize essentially corporate greed and executive greed, and in so doing they decide they have to leave Seattle, well, let them go. They have distorted and undermined the Seattle experience in terms of building a community in which all of us can live and prosper.
The Roundup Rundown
When we got word that AI data centers may be heading to the South End, we reached out for answers. It was quick and to the point.
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I know y'all have probably seen and heard many discussions around data centers. So, if you've ever wondered: What are data centers? What are the economic or environmental impacts of data centers? Will they make my utility bills go up? Who makes decisions on whether or not they'll be in our community?
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For this article, I'm asking that you do more than just read. Please share on your feeds to make sure everyone in the community knows this is coming and hopefully has time to prepare.
One of the biggest stories the Emerald has covered since I arrived at the publication in 2020 is light rail stations in the South End. This includes stories on how dangerous existing stations are and stories on the yearslong advocacy for new stations.
Contributor Connor Nash has the latest update on two South End stations that the community has spent an awful long time advocating for.
Will the stations arrive soon? Has the new mayor weighed in? Will Sound Transit yet again push the date back?
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Mike Davis is the newsletter editor and Voices editor at the South Seattle Emerald. Born and raised in Seattle's South End, Mike is a longtime journalist who's covered everything from arts and culture to sports to politics.
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