Seattle Times op-ed: I’m not a millionaire. I don’t think we need a millionaires tax
Author Viet Nguyen, a Seattle-based technology communications executive and former president of 5G Americas, argues that Washington’s new income tax, though aimed at high earners, represents a clear break from both voter intent and long-standing constitutional precedent. Drawing on his own experience and review of the law, he warns the policy opens the door to broader taxation that could eventually reach far beyond its current scope.
I arrived here as a 17-month-old refugee from Vietnam in 1975. I built my career here, starting out volunteering on Gary Locke’s gubernatorial campaign in 1996, to running local races on both sides of the aisle. Then I spent nearly two decades in technology communications at Microsoft and T-Mobile, and as president of a national wireless industry association. I don’t earn a million dollars a year. I won’t owe a dime under ESSB 6346. But I believe this will be one of the most consequential mistakes Olympia has made in a generation.
I’m not writing to defend millionaires. I’m writing because I read the bill, read the case law and wrote directly to Sen. Jamie Pedersen, the bill’s lead sponsor, to understand the legal policy reasoning. His response did not resolve my concerns. It deepened them.
Start with what the Legislature actually did. In 2024, lawmakers adopted Initiative 2111 by overwhelming margins of 76-21 in the House and 38-11 in the Senate. That initiative banned Washington from taxing “any individual person on any form of personal income.” Less than two years later, the same Legislature made an exception to that ban, in the same bill that needs the exception to be legal. If they genuinely believed this tax was an excise and not an income tax, they wouldn’t have needed to amend I-2111 at all. That amendment is a legislative admission that this is exactly what it appears to be: a tax on personal income.