Washington’s Wealthy Elites Want Their Wall Street Profits Untaxed, and They’ve Assembled a Dark-Monied Campaign to Win
They paid a record-breaking $18 million fine for violating Washington state election laws. Now they’re back to steal money from your kids.
Last week, in the Sunday edition of the excellent Washington Observer newsletter, Paul Queary updated readers on the status of the campaign to cut taxes for the richest 7000 residents of Washington state.
If you’ll recall, last year the Washington State Legislature took a much-needed step toward balancing the state’s tax code by passing a tax on extraordinary capital gains profits, with that revenue to be invested into childcare, early learning, school construction, and other education programs for kids. In the months since, a small group of the wealthiest Washingtonians and their lackeys has been fighting to repeal the tax through every avenue available to them. That battle has been largely in the courts, but Queary says the next front to repeal the capital gains tax is already underway.
“We ran across the prosaically named committee Repeal the Capital Gains Income Tax in our regular, some might say obsessive, perusal of the Public Disclosure Commission’s database of filings,” Queary writes. “On the surface, it’s just an ‘empty’ PAC, with no money and no spending. But click on the ‘debt’ tab and it becomes immediately more legit. The committee owes $30,000 to hired-gun operatives unafraid of controversial work.”
Queary is underselling the resumes of the dark-money mercenaries that Washington’s wealthy few have hired to fight the capital gains tax at the ballot box. The team that’s involved here has a long history of fighting and winning for the worst of the worst in Washington state — from defending oil companies to combating previous attempts to tax wealthy Washingtonians at the same rate that the poorest families in the state already pay.
But most notably, these are the same people who were behind the opposition to a GMO labeling ballot measure in Washington state that secretly took millions from huge corporations like Coca-Cola and Nestle, and eventually had to pay $18 million for intentionally deceiving Washington voters — the largest fine in Washington state history. In a statement upholding that fine, Washington Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven González said “the grave nature and broad extent” of the campaign’s lack of transparency “struck at the core of open elections.”
It seems pretty clear that nobody on the team learned anything about transparency or ethical behavior from that debacle. The fact that this campaign has only recorded its debts, and has not identified who will pay the bill, is already pretty shady. They will have to disclose soon who’s agreed to put up the money, or once again be in violation of our transparency in elections rules.
Look, I get it. If you want to run an initiative to take hundreds of millions of dollars away from investments in working-class Washington children and hand it over to the richest 7000 people in the state, you’re not going to hire saints for the job. But the track record of this nascent campaign portends the remarkable depths that these few millionaires will sink to in order to fill their money bins.
The rapacious capitalists who are fighting the capital gains tax in court clearly don’t have faith in their legal team — probably with good reason, given that their highest-profile lawyer is failed gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna — and so they’re preparing to buy a victory at the ballot box. The shamelessness of their crusade is a little surprising, even considering the fact that it’s spearheaded by the boundlessly greedy Matt McIlwain — a man who recently funded and promoted a video claiming that free-market capitalism successfully “destroyed” racism in America.
Something that’s interesting to me about this dark-money campaign — and maybe this is just my English major talking — is the name: “Repeal the Capital Gains Income Tax.” It is perhaps the most upfront name I’ve ever seen in on one of these, because it identifies exactly what they’re after — they want to repeal a democratically enacted tax not for the sake of working Washingtonians, but just to line their pockets and those of their richest friends with extraordinary capital gains assets.
In time, as all these campaigns do, they will flood your Facebook feed with misleading ads about farmers and small business owners who claim that the capital gains tax will mean the end for their business (even though it’s very specifically constructed to not affect family farms, home sales, or small business profits — only the six-figure profits that come from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other passive wealth-building assets.) And they’ll claim that it’s one small step toward an income tax that will affect all Washingtonians — even though capital gains taxes have nothing to do with wages or 401(k)s. If past behavior is any indicator, we’ll see plenty of unethical and possibly illegal behavior from this group.
This is a campaign to repeal a tax on a wealthy handful of Washingtonians — a group so small that Seattle’s light rail line can carry more people in a half-hour — and steal educational opportunities from hundreds of thousands of Washington state’s children, at a time when students are just beginning to recover some of the losses they suffered during the pandemic. I guess we should be grateful for even this one moment of clarity, before the dark money starts flooding into our social media feeds and our television screens. At least they took a second to show us who they really are.
