We Don’t Want You Here

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson stood before an audience at Seattle University on April 14 and, with the nonchalance that only the powerful enjoy, dared Washington millionaires to leave the state. This was not empty political rhetoric. Though Washington state’s new wave of progressive taxation was now in place, the prospect that millionaires might leave never appeared to be a serious consideration. As Wilson remarked, “I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown,” she said. “The ones that leave, like, bye.”

She waved. The audience blithely cheered.

But people were paying attention and many were spooked, among them Starbucks, a famous Seattle-founded company. The hometown coffee giant had earlier announced its Nashville expansion in early March. One week after Wilson’s remarks, on April 21, the company released the specifics. $100 million invested, up to 2,000 jobs, in Tennessee rather than Washington. Fox 13 Seattle pegged Washington’s resulting tax revenue loss at up to $750 million.

The Blueprint Spreads

Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, signed a 9.9% income tax on earners above $1 million on March 30, 2026. He did so despite a state constitutional tradition, dating to Culliton v. Chase (1933), holding income to be property and therefore subject to uniformity requirements. Internal records obtained by The Center Square show that the explicit goal of the law’s drafters was to force the state Supreme Court to overturn that precedent. State Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen wrote in an August 2025 email that he wanted “to force the Washington Supreme Court to reconsider its caselaw.” The legislative purpose, in plain language, was constitutional revolution dressed as revenue policy.

Chicago presents the same logic in a different register. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s 2026 budget proposed $586.6 million in new “progressive” revenue, including a revived corporate head tax on companies with more than 100 workers, a hike in the city’s cloud computing tax from 11% to 14%, and a first-of-its-kind social media tax. The Washington Post editorial board, no friend of conservative orthodoxy, titled its response “Chicago Has Lost Its Mind.” Even Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat with national ambitions, warned that the head tax would “penalize the very thing that we want, which is more employment.” The shutdown standoff that followed in December 2025 amounted to an internal collision between two factions of the same party over how aggressively to push citizens toward the exits.

Consequences, consequences

Punitive taxation has a funny way of encouraging people to leave, and fast. The IRS migration data make the consequences plain. Between 2022 and 2023, California lost a net 100,397 income-tax filers and $11.9 billion in adjusted gross income. New York lost 71,987 filers and $9.9 billion. Illinois lost 28,609 filers and $6 billion. The losses cluster at the top of the income distribution: New York’s own tax department reports that nearly 1,700 millionaires changed their address out of state in 2024 alone, at a rate higher than the general population. Whoops.

New York City offers the cleanest case study of the doctrine reaching its fiscal limits. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced his pied-à-terre tax on April 15 standing in front of Ken Griffin’s $238 million penthouse on Central Park South. Lyceum has previously characterized that proposal as a piece of the same philosophy animating his administration’s 375-page racial equity plan: sort the citizens, decide who owes and who is owed, charge accordingly.

But less than two weeks later, the policy collided with arithmetic. Facing a $5.4 billion budget gap and a tax-the-rich agenda stalled in Albany, Mamdani asked the City Council to delay his executive budget deadline from May 1 to May 12. Three of the four major credit-rating agencies have warned that draining reserves to close the gap would trigger a downgrade.

Ironically, Mayor Bill de Blasio attempted the same maneuver in 2014, threatening property tax hikes if Albany refused to raise taxes on the wealthy. Albany declined; the city balanced its budget without new taxes or additional state aid. Mamdani’s first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, served as de Blasio’s budget director during that earlier collapse.

A healthy democratic republic depends on the unified belief that the citizen and the city share an interest in each other’s flourishing. Tax policy can express this premise or deny it. When a mayor laughs and waves at the residents she has decided to drive away, when a governor signs a law whose explicit purpose is to overturn a century of constitutional precedent, when a city budget is balanced by treating the productive class as a moral hazard to be managed, the premise has been replaced. What stands in its place is a transactional government that distinguishes between the people it serves and the people it bills.

The departing taxpayers will not be persuaded by speeches about fairness. They have already heard the speech. They are reading the budgets, comparing the rates, and packing the truck.