A few weeks ago, I sat down with some popcorn and opened up tvw.org, the non-partisan digital archive of state government happenings. I was looking for some clues about what might be coming down the pike for the 2026 Legislature, particularly around taxes.
I pressed play on the House Finance Committee’s Working Session from mid-October and settled in for an exciting two hours of testimony and deliberation.
By the end, I’d learned that revenue projections were down as a result of an unexpected drop in taxable activity. Sales in Washington are slowing sharply as our port-heavy economy strains under tariffs and increased prices on everyday goods.
I also learned that the new sales tax bill, Senate Bill 5814, was causing concerns across the aisle about its complex implementation and far-reaching effects on small businesses. This new expansion of taxes came with very little guidance or instructions, and the Department of Revenue's assistance programs have proven totally insufficient for helping navigate the new rules.
The bill seems to be a bureaucratic nightmare, especially for rural small businesses, nonprofits and independent professionals who don’t have compliance departments. Both Democratic and Republican legislators were uneasy about the complexity.
But what struck me the most was that the two halves of this working session don’t seem compatible with each other.
Why are we layering new sales taxes onto working families at the exact moment their purchasing power is shrinking and sales tax revenue is becoming less reliable?
Stagnant wages, inflation and corporate price-gouging mean most of us are just scraping by; adding more regressive taxes is only going to perpetuate a status quo everybody hates.
You might be surprised that your local Democrat-in-Chief is criticizing taxes, but I’m not one to defend policies when they don’t make sense for working people. SB 5814 funds necessities like education, human services, public safety and transportation, but it was hurried into final form at the end of a contentious budget session after other revenue proposals were rejected.
But passed law is not always best law and there are other ways we could have found that money. And no, it wasn’t by making even more cuts and causing even more pain for workers and families. It’s by simply making the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share.
Exactly how we bring fairness to our tax code is a question legislators should be prioritizing. Taxing luxury purchases like yachts, trimming back the $10 billion Washington hands out each year in corporate welfare, and adding surcharges to hedge funds and speculators who buy single family homes would net us billions of dollars.
The truth is our state doesn’t have a spending problem — it has a priorities problem and an under-investment problem. Sales tax revenue can’t keep up with rising costs, which is why rural schools and health clinics are closing. Our regressive tax system means the poorest Washingtonians pay six times the tax rate of the wealthy. With no income tax to balance out this inequity, middle- and lower-income families end up footing most of the bill.
We’ve got to stop piling more taxes onto the people with the least ability to absorb them, and stop letting corporate lawyers and lobbyists intimidate our lawmakers. When some of the richest people in the world live in our state, we should not be facing budget shortfalls year after year.
There was plenty of fearmongering that wealthy people would flee after we passed the capital gains tax. But the myth of “wealth flight” is perpetuated by cherry-picked anecdotes of a few wealthy individuals moving, which doesn't represent the broader trend.
Instead, the rich got richer. The public policy center found that “the state’s millionaire class grew by 46.9%” in the two years after the passage of the capital gains tax. And despite the threats, research shows that a non-wealthy person or family is over 50% more likely to move away than a wealthy one.
Meanwhile, “job creating” mega-corporations are offshoring workers or replacing them with AI and laying people off at record pace. They often rely on public assistance programs to offset their poverty wages, meaning we get to subsidize their payroll while they develop new ways to screw over their employees and maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs.
We shouldn’t be rewarding this behavior with tax breaks, we should be passing laws that punish exploitation and protect workers and customers. When politicians ignore cronyism and continue to protect those who treat our state like a tax haven, that’s a failure of priorities and of basic responsibility.
Almost all Republican legislators have taken the “no tax pledge,” which means they can’t even consider taxing the ultra-wealthy. That’s unfortunate, because if we could get our budget stabilized, we might actually stop fighting about taxes all the time and start providing real opportunity to citizens again.
I’ll remain hopeful that the 2026 session brings some desperately needed fixes and clarity to SB 5814. But more importantly, it’s up to us, the voting public, to demand that our representatives protect consumers, simplify burdensome tax regulations for small businesses, and ensure the wealthiest pay their fair share before we even think about squeezing more revenue out of working families.
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Zac Eckstein is chair of the Lewis County Democratic Party. Learn more about the party at https://lewiscountydemocrats.org.
