Travis Kalanick chose to ditch California on Dec. 18 for a reason. The Uber co-founder relocated from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, exactly 14 days before California’s would-be billionaire wealth tax residency deadline, dodging a potential $180 million hit on his $3.6 billion fortune. He made no secret of the calculation.
“Just to be clear, on Dec. 18, I moved to Texas. I don’t know what’s so specific about December 18, but let’s just say it’s prior to January,” Kalanick said in an interview with TPBN.
He joined Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Larry Page, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and PayPal and Founders Fund founder Peter Thiel in a steady procession of wealth abandoning blue states for Florida and Texas. Democrats have been engineering this for years. California, New York and now Washington state are running the same tax-hiking playbook at nearly the same moment, and the results are entirely predictable.
In New York City, socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made taxing the wealthy a centerpiece of his administration. He is pushing an additional 2 percent income tax surcharge on city residents earning over $1 million annually, along with corporate tax hikes he claims would generate billions toward closing a $5.4 billion budget deficit. His ultimatum to Albany is that approving those taxes is the only way to prevent the city from imposing a 9.5% property tax hike on everyone, including the working and middle class he says he represents.
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Democrat New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has repeatedly refused to go along, explaining at an event, “I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach.” That admission does not come from someone who genuinely believes taxing the wealthy carries no consequences. Someone who believed that would not worry about Palm Beach. Even Hochul understands perfectly well what happens to a tax base when people leave. At least in New York, she has enough self-awareness to hold the line. Washington state Democrats do not.
Washington Democrats pushed Senate Bill 6346 through the legislature after an intense 25-hour floor debate. The bill imposes a 9.9% income tax on households earning over $1 million a year. Democrat Gov. Bob Ferguson has pledged to sign it.
Former state Attorney General Rob McKenna issued a legal memo calling the bill unconstitutional, pointing to nearly a century of settled precedent. Democrats already know that. Their strategy depends on it.
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In 1933, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in Culliton v. Chase that income is property under the state constitution. Article VII requires property to be taxed at a uniform rate, making a graduated income tax flatly unconstitutional. That ruling has held for 93 years. Washington voters have rejected income tax measures at the ballot box 10 separate times.
Most recently, in 2010, a tax on households above $200,000 went down in 38 of 39 counties. The legislature’s 2021 capital gains tax only survived judicial review because the far-left state Supreme Court bent itself into a pretzel to absurdly classify it narrowly as an excise tax on a specific transaction. A broad millionaires’ income tax is legally distinct, and Democrats are using it to force the court’s hand.
That clean decision is the entire ballgame. Tax supporters are banking on a state Supreme Court now stacked with justices appointed by Democratic governors and backed by liberal interest groups. If Culliton falls, income is formally decoupled from property for the first time in Washington’s history. The uniformity requirement disappears.
Once that constitutional wall comes down, nothing prevents the legislature from lowering the threshold from $1 million to $500,000 to $200,000 to everyone who draws a paycheck. The millionaires’ tax is not the destination. It is the crowbar to push the income tax on everyone.
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The economic fallout is not waiting for any ruling.
Bulwark Capital Management’s principal told The Jason Rantz Show on Seattle Red that he’s leaving the state and bringing his business with him. The CEO of Moment similarly said his business is ditching the state for Wyoming. Starbucks announced it is expanding its corporate footprint in Nashville, Tenn.
Meanwhile, Downtown Seattle’s office vacancy rate reached a record high above 30% in the final months of 2025, a figure the Downtown Seattle Association’s Jon Scholes tied directly to the city’s escalating tax burden. Scholes noted that Amazon has relocated thousands of employees to Bellevue and other King County locations over recent years due to the increasingly aggressive tax environment.
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An independent economic study found that Washington’s 2025 tax increases, already the largest in state history, are projected to cut wages by $3.7 billion in 2026 alone. The millionaires’ tax has not even taken effect yet. Seattle attorney Joe Wallin, who testified against the bill, warned that some of the bill’s effects will be invisible because new companies won’t come to Seattle or the state of Washington in the first place.
Every business that leaves or never arrives is a data point Washington Democrats will ignore on their way to the courthouse because their tax thirst is unquenchable.
When not ignoring the consequences of their policies, Democrats stage bewilderment each time the wealthy and their businesses head for the exits. Hochul’s Palm Beach comment shows the bewilderment is a performance. Kalanick’s Dec. 18 timestamp tells the rest of the story.
Washington Democrats are deliberately passing a law they know is unconstitutional today because they are betting on a court packed with their allies tearing down the constitutional barrier tomorrow. The $1 million figure is a political fig leaf. The real agenda is a permanent, broad-based income tax on every Washingtonian, and this is precisely how they intend to get there.
