Washington state’s ‘historic’ millionaire tax takes aim at super-rich – will it succeed?

As living costs rise, the state where Gates and Bezos made billions is targeting top earners – could other states follow? Noel Frame knows exactly how difficult it is to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy, because she has been trying to do just that – first as an activist, then as a state legislator – for the past 15 years. And until recently almost all of her efforts ended in failure. She lives in Washington, a solid blue state that should, in theory, be hospitable to the idea of more progressive taxation and has plenty of multimillionaires to target, since it is the home of Microsoft, Amazon and an array of other tech-driven corporations. While the wealth of these tech giants has grown exponentially in recent decades, the state – which levies no income taxes – has struggled to bring in enough revenue to pay for basic services like public schooling and long-term healthcare. For each of the past five years, Frame has proposed a wealth tax that would treat the investment income of the state’s most affluent residents as another form of property, subject to the same 1% tax rate that middle-class homeowners pay on their houses. The closest she came was at the end of 2024, whe