Ranee Soundara

What bothers me about this bill, as someone who was born and raised in Seattle and spent half my childhood in Island County, is not just the tax itself. It is the worldview behind it. Of course we want to support early education, school lunches, and programs that help uplift the most marginalized people in our communities. That is not the issue. The issue is whether the state actually understands who it is targeting, who it is hurting, and whether it can be trusted to distinguish between durable wealth and the fragile economics of people trying to build something. Washington keeps writing statewide tax policy as if the whole state is Seattle. It is not. This state, Seattle especially, loves to perform its liberalism. It talks constantly about progress, equity, and protecting the vulnerable. But bills like this expose how selective that politics can be. When statewide tax policy is written around a narrow image of wealth, it does not just touch Seattle tech workers. It also reaches family-owned and pass-through businesses across the state, including people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who built something over time and do not live anything like the caricature of the wealthy. Across the state, there are family-owned businesses, small operators, and early-stage companies where income is irregular, cyclical, and often tied up in keeping the business alive. In those businesses, the real risk is not the average year. It is the unusual year — the year when several years of work, reinvestment, or one strong season finally shows up as income on paper. That is what this bill misunderstands. It treats that kind of income as excess personal wealth, when in many cases it is the very capital a business needs to survive, hire, grow, and reach the next stage. That is why this bill is so destructive. It kills family-owned and operated businesses that are already trying to make it. It kills startups before they ever have the chance to become durable. And while the American Dream is often more myth than reality, this bill punishes even the attempt at upward mobility in a system that is already stacked against ordinary people. As a woman of color founder building a women’s brand, I now find myself researching where I need to move my business in order to give it the best chance of surviving — and where I can eventually build something that rewards the employees who help me get there. That is the problem with bills like this. Even if today it is 9.9% above $1 million, the moment the mechanism exists, people start asking the obvious next question: when does 9.9 become 10? When does $1 million become $900,000? When do success, marriage, or growth become things the state quietly teaches you to fear? And I do not absolve myself of responsibility for any of this. I voted for this governor. I contributed to the American Dream Killer, and I 100% regret my vote.