Progressives’ policies provide gloomy future for our region

There are two disturbing charts which show how progressive policies are hurting the average residential taxpayer.

• Four years since the end of the pandemic and Downtown Seattle’s vacancy rate has risen to over 33% – 1/3 of space available is empty. No new development being built. Businesses closing, moving to the Eastside (or out of state), or downsizing their Seattle operations. Commercial taxes used to pay 35% (in 2019) of Seattle’s property tax, today they pay only 17% – residential taxpayers went from being responsible for 65% of property taxes to 83%.
• Despite Washington’s hydropower being one of the cheapest energy sources in the world, none of the 20 large data centers being built in the United States will be in our state. The Democrat’s anti-business policies have completely negated the one advantage our state has to bring jobs to Washington workers.

While progressive policies are sending business investment, jobs, and corporate taxes to other states, Washington’s taxpayers are being forced to pay higher taxes to fund more wasteful bigger government programs that never achieve the promised goals (and in several instances like homelessness, make things even worse).

There is very little hope for change due to those who will direct policies for the next few years.  During his first months in office, Governor Bob Ferguson signed the largest tax hike in Washington’s history which included more than a dozen tax increases on business (who are then forced to increase the consumer price of their items)

Neither King County Executive-elect Girmay Zahilay nor Seattle Mayor-elect Katie Wilson have any type of plan to help attract major businesses to our state (while their campaign websites have plans for “progressive revenue” (i.e. higher taxes). There is little doubt that they will do the same thing Governor Ferguson did during his first year in office – raise taxes to fund the desires of wealthy progressive special interest groups which funded their campaigns.

Progressive government is the problem.