Washington is being buried in indefensibly bad legislation that is extremely hostile to large companies and tech companies of every size for openly ideological reasons. It has rapidly become one of the worst business environments in the country when it used to be one of the best. Many companies have stopped or reduced hiring in Seattle and are moving operations to other States; there is a new announcement in the news every other day.
I know several longtime residents that have recently moved out of State or are no longer domiciled there as a consequence. There was an article in the news just this week that housing prices are starting to decline rapidly in Seattle.
It is looking like they couldn't help themselves and killed the golden goose.
That state desperately needs to restructure its finances but the legislature is almost complete captured by clueless ideologues. Washington isn't California. Most of the attraction of living there historically was its extremely business-friendly environment.
I've lived a large fraction of my life in Washington and I'm watching the State commit suicide in real-time.
How old are you? What propaganda told you this? In my generation (young millennial/genz) the attraction of living in Seattle, which pulled me and almost a dozen professional friends at this point has been:
- high quality urban living in a temperate environment. Including access to great parks, waterfront, bikeability in the city
- access to great outdoors and regional amenities like skiing, ocean fishing, hiking, wine country
- liberal policies and general friendly society (it’s friendlier here than the east coast)
- no state income tax (we’re all very high tax bracket)
- a high enough income population that you can find a plethora of high-end products and services that cluster around high income earners (only a few us cities have this stronger than Seattle I feel)
That doesn't explain everything, obviously, but I think you need to take it into consideration. For decades I've heard this in some form from people: "Oregon is amazing, but I had to leave when I couldn't get a job." Meanwhile the Sea-Tac region has had amazing growth, packed wall-to-wall with a range of companies.
Another interesting anecdote is that I know many people who work remote for companies all over the world who moved to the Seattle area once they had a remote job. I am one of these people who moved once I got a remote job. Im not sure what kind of impact this has long run. I think the flywheel drawing high skill people to Seattle is still very strong.
If you're not too high an income earner, the Oregon income tax is worse than California's.
And no, Washington's sales tax doesn't come close to the Oregon income tax.
A. Their job is only available here
B. No state income tax
(C?). They REALLY love skiing/hiking
People have always regularly left for NYC/Bay Area, but I predict it will start to happen in droves over the next few years as A rapidly fades and legislation begins to threaten B.
The budget expansion is almost entirely by medicaide.
Looking at 2019-2023
* Human Services: +~50% nominal → ~+22% real — biggest absolute dollar growth, driven almost entirely by Medicaid expansion and COVID enrollment
* K-12: +23% nominal → ~0% real — flat in purchasing power
* Higher Education: +~20% nominal → ~-2% real — slight real decline
* Government Operations: +~30% nominal → ~+6% real — modest real growth, headcount/compensation driven
* Natural Resources: +~25% nominal → ~+2% real — roughly flat
* Total Budget: +43.5% nominal → ~+17% real
There are a few very angry, emotional, and vocal opponents of this in most corners of the internet, although very few of them actually make a million dollars and there are many million+ income people supporting this.
Demographically, there are over 3 million households in WA, and only 20k of them would be affected.
The majority of states have one so it's not that big a deal, but it'll be less often said "I'm going to turn down this higher SF offer for Seattle b/c of lower COL...".
I'm not sure where the next refuge will be. Austin? Memphis?
Just to remind you that he's still indeed an Establishment Democrat. He won't drown us in fascism, but he sure isn't fighting for the working class.
Current government is using it as toilet paper, first by introducing capital gains tax, and now income tax.
I see in another comments though that you argue in bad faith by dismissing opponent arguments as “small amount”, “talking points”. If you don’t have anything real to say, don’t bother to answer.
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https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=1.90.100
RCWs > Title 1 > Chapter 1.90 > Section 1.90.100
RCW 1.90.100
Personal income tax prohibition.
Neither the state nor any county, city, or other local jurisdiction in the state of Washington may tax any individual person on any form of personal income. For the purposes of this chapter, "income" has the same meaning as "gross income" in 26 U.S.C. Sec. 61.
——
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
Gross income defined (a) General definition Except as otherwise provided in this subtitle, gross income means all income from whatever source derived, including (but not limited to) the following items: (1) Compensation for services, including fees, commissions, fringe benefits, and similar items; (2) Gross income derived from business; (3) Gains derived from dealings in property; (4) Interest; (5) Rents; (6) Royalties; (7) Dividends; (8) Annuities; (9) Income from life insurance and endowment contracts; (10) Pensions; (11) Income from discharge of indebtedness; (12) Distributive share of partnership gross income; (13) Income in respect of a decedent; and (14) Income from an interest in an estate or trust.
_Oregon_ has bad policies (10% income tax on all, upwards of 14% on high income earners at 400k); schools are in a rough place, their legacy pension system is a disaster. But Washington seems fine imo. TX and such states will always be a draw while their cost of living is low, if you don't mind the heat and general lack of outdoors (relative to PNW). IMO the weather and housing prices are the main tradeoffs between WA and TX.
And then you have a litany of new business regulation across every sector of the local economy. My recent favorite, which fortunately did not make it out of this session due to heavy lobbying by tech, was requiring data centers to turn-off power during periods of high electricity demand. It's insane that this is even being seriously considered.
Oregon is also a mess but it has always been a mess.
Texas isn't the only alternative. Turning Washington into California with worse weather even makes California relatively attractive.
None of this matters. We have been hearing how California is doing the same shit for years and people are moving out in droves, but turns out California house prices are still high because people are staying there and its still a very good place to live and work on the average, despite way higher cost of living.
So Washington is going to do just fine.
It soaks the “rich” with an income threshold that isn’t indexed to inflation and kicks in at an income level where preschool is still a major affordability challenge.
And then you pay PFA and don’t get preschool for your kid because we’re still years away from having enough seats for everyone.
So it is preschool for some (multco paying for seats in existing preschool, aka kicking your kid out of their preschool spot) paid for by the broad middle class.
Even Kotek was ragging on it.
2020’s 125k/200k thresholds should be today’s 150/250 thresholds. They are not.
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/26/kotek-multnomah-count...
Establishing free universal child care as the norm that everyone agrees we have to find a way to provide is the real virtue here. Detractors like you are missing the forest for the trees.
The tech companies killed the golden goose that was handed to them. They got too greedy. Amazon basically got carte blanche to build in Seattle, and plenty of tax credits to do so.
Amazon and their founder then told WA gov that they were going to relocate to Florida. WA gov said "well, we paid billions for your infrastructure, so if you're going to leave, please partially refund us" and Bezos whined and whined and whined. Imagine, a guy worth (at the time) nearly half a trillion dollars being told that he should have to pay a few hundred million dollars for his broken promises.
Imagine being given incredibly generous tax incentives for decades that allowed you to build a multi trillion dollar company, and then whining when the giver of those incentives asks for a tiny portion of that to be paid back when you tell them you're leaving.
Companies move in a group, if you're the only company doing layoffs you look weak and predators will pounce and the board will ask uncomfortable questions, but if everyone is doing it, they'll ask why you are NOT.
They've been boiling the frog with increasing job requirements since at least one or two decades ago, and AI is conveniently aligned towards this goal.
This assumes infinite demand which is not a good assumption imo. Especially if people are losing their jobs.
Yes, but "AI replaces people by improving productivity by 20-50%" is clearly a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy. So maybe the "people are losing their jobs" is just totally unrelated to AI . . . but people keep repeating that "companies can do same work with fewer people thanks to AI" nonsense, so there will always be a need to remind them how actual economics work.
That said I don't think there is a ton of productivity growth yet with LLMs that would show up in the numbers that are getting thrown around. Companies are just finally seeing that they have a bunch of people not doing much at all and cleaning house
Like companies have been doing the RTO "stealth" layoffs for years now, it's not even news anymore, this was already well underway.
There is also the obvious priapism of owners and investors to finally do to the remaining white collar workers what they have already done to everyone else. Whether or not AI actually can replace all these workers is nearly moot, they have fantasized about business without labor for so long they can't tell the difference from reality anymore.
>Yeah, screw DEI!
lmao I'm talking about wars; sprawl; advertising and consumerism; wasteful or gatekept luxuries; feet-dragging on any number of technologies and policies that could have mitigated the damage, just to please incumbents.
We temporarily made life spectacularly better for like 5-10% of the population, and doomed everyone to either generations of toil, or a hard reset in the form of a "burn it all down" revolution.
Just to drive the point home, in 2019 the total VC market was ~$300 billion. To date, roughly $235 billion is tied up in just OpenAI ($168b) and Anthropic ($67b)
When interest rates go up, money floods out of higher risk higher return areas like company formation, and floods back into buying bonds, so investors can collect the low-risk interest that didn't exist before.
like what more clear point do you want?
Whether or not you believe that this is a good or bad move, correct or lying move, whether AI is capable or not,
“AI” is the reason that CEOs are utilizing to cut roles
The timing of this is based on the fact that Capital is striking from deploying money to anything else outside of the largest deals that include AI as promise of higher profits
But ultimately it comes down to the fact that the people in control with all the money believe that the future is gonna need less human workers and is prioritizing giving money to organisms that will shed their workforces in order to run an experiment in AI capturing value on behalf of investors without having the additional overhead of personnel
For Block's case they have had multiple layoffs over the last 5 years, hardly the sign of an AI apocalypse and more of a sign of a business leader that only survived because of free money.
And perhaps Dorsey has a long enough of a runway for something to come along to save the company from eventual collapse. Maybe not, since firing 40% of a company tends to put a damper on innovative efforts that would massively grow revenues.
If Block is really so much more efficient, while doing well, they should invest that talent into expanded products and services. But that’s not what we’re seeing.
Some things:
- They acquired AfterPay for $29bn. Their market cap today, after the big AI bump, is $40bn. BNPL did not pay off the way payments companies thought it would.
- They have a weird internal combination of Cash and Square and AfterPay internally. They’re not as unified as they ought to be.
This feels more like Jack coming to terms with a company that’s hugely inefficient organizationally. It’s easier to clear out thousands of people and rebuild.