Free Words

WELCOME TO SEATTLE. I MEAN CUBA, COMRADE. 🇨🇺☔ You all know how I feel about Seattle. I live here. I pay for here. And I've been begging to move my job to Florida since my clients are in finance and they're all over the globe anyway. The answer so far? Wait until next year. So I wait. In the rain. Watching the city eat itself. Let's take the tour. 🏛️ Seattle elected Katie Wilson mayor. A self-described "sewer socialist." I didn't make that up. She did. 💸 Washington passed a 9.9% "millionaires tax" on income. Signed in March. In a state that brags in every brochure that it has no income tax. Starts at $1 million. Just like Washington's capital gains tax started at "only the rich." Give it five years, it'll be taxing your garage sale. 🏗️ A Seattle architecture firm told FOX 13 that fear of the millionaires tax killed a major project. "An economic chill." Rich people don't build towers in cities that call them the enemy. Who knew? Everyone. ☕ Starbucks, born in Seattle, opened a Nashville office and told Seattle staff: move or lose your job. 224 got layoff notices. 120 of them turned down Nashville. Even the COFFEE is leaving Seattle. 📦 Amazon filed another WARN notice: 121 more layoffs across Seattle, Bellevue and Sumner. Axios calls it "the relentless drip of Seattle's tech layoffs." That's a drip like the Titanic had a leak. 🏠 GeekWire says Seattle's pending home sales posted the sharpest drop in the NATION. First place! Finally Seattle wins something. 📉 Venture funding in the Seattle area is down. An economics professor on KING 5 is asking "Where's the bottom?" Sir, I'll tell you. It's in Portland. They found it first. 🏢 Downtown? About 35% of office and retail space sits empty. No job growth in three years, says the Downtown Seattle Association. A $175 million city budget hole. And the plan to fix it? More taxes. Obviously. 🎰 Someone literally built a website to help Washington residents move to Las Vegas. VEGAS. People are choosing the desert, 115 degrees and a slot machine at the grocery store over Seattle. And it's not stopping at the city limits. Bellevue and Redmond, you're next. The tax collector has a car. We've seen this movie before. 🏚️ Detroit had 1.85 million people in 1950. By 2020, about 640,000. In 2013 it filed the biggest city bankruptcy in American history. 🌹 Portland? Already there. Just with more kombucha. Socialism never survives. It never has. Higher taxes and bigger government chase out the people who pay the bills, every single time. Venezuela. Cuba. Detroit. Portland. Now Seattle wants a turn. And yet every generation thinks THEY'LL be the ones to get it right. Which brings me to Initiative 645. Washington, this one's on you. ✅ Vote YES on I-645 and you repeal the 9.9% income tax. Vote NO and you keep it. On the ballot November 3. Here's the trick. The Attorney General's office wrote a ballot statement saying repeal "would decrease funding for public K-12 education." Money that doesn't exist yet and won't show up until 2029. They're scaring you with the kids. Again. And it works. DHM Research polled 800 Washingtonians. Show them that scary sentence: 57% keep the tax, 35% repeal. Leave it off: 44% keep, 40% repeal. One sentence written by the government moved the vote almost 20 points. The people voting NO think they're finally getting a piece of someone else's stuff. They're not. Millionaires own moving trucks too. Ask Starbucks. They'll get 10% of nothing. Some of us are trying to save this state. But the people who fall for the same trick every single election keep outnumbering us. They keep electing the same people and expecting a different result. Einstein had a word for that. So did my grandmother. Hers had four letters. Seattle, honey, you have the mountains, the water, the coffee and the talent. You're throwing it all away for a slogan. Florida, please hold. I'm coming. 🌴🦋