Comment: A millionaires’ tax won’t chase the wealthy out of state

Published 1:30 am Saturday, January 31, 2026

By Jack DeWaard / For The Herald

With Gov. Bob Ferguson now backing a Washington state tax on millionaires, the simultaneously timely and timeless issue of millionaire migration — i.e., millionaires migrating out of higher tax states — has bubbled to the surface in recent policy and public discourse in Washington state. To the extent that folks on both sides of the aisle care what the best science has to say, here’s an important way to think about this issue:

First, millionaire migration isn’t really a thing. Using confidential tax data from the Internal Revenue Service — and not the publicly available versions of these data, which are used by groups like the Cato Institute and are hugely problematic — Cristobal Young and colleagues showed that millionaires actually have lower rates of state out-migration than non-millionaires. They also showed that, while the out-migration patterns of millionaires (versus non-millionaires) are more sensitive to tax rates in states of both origin and destination, these “patterns of migration have little impact on the millionaire population tax base” over the 13-year period that they examined.

Second, the focus on millionaire migration misses a larger and much more important point.

Migration is, at root, a concrete manifestation of inequality and inequity. As such, millionaire migration reflects the lack of political willingness to adopt and coordinate progressive tax structures within and across states. Naturally, progressive tax structures raise subsequent questions about the appropriate level of taxation for millionaires. Without casting shade on millionaires keeping a good chunk of what they’ve earned, income and wealth inequality and inequity in the United States has been widening and continues to, which raises fundamental moral and ethical questions about social responsibility, fairness, and, more generally, the type of society that we collectively choose to [re]create and live in.

In light of this, I suggest anchoring debates about millionaire migration in Washington — and more broadly — in three core ethical principles, which so happen to be the same ethical principles that guide scientific research:

The first principle: Respect for persons, encompasses the idea that Washington’s millionaires really shouldn’t be at the center of this debate at all. Instead, the centerpiece should be all of Washington’s residents, especially the most vulnerable such as those who are un- or under-employed or insured, living in poverty, disabled, etc.

The second principle: Beneficence, flows from the first principle of respect for persons and can be summed up by the phrase, “Do no harm.” In the context of millionaire migration, we therefore need to think openly, honestly, and critically about the actual and potential harms (economically, politically, socio-culturally, etc.) that can and do result from the concentration and consolidation of income, wealth and related downstream pieces such as housing in Washington.

The third principle: Justice, flows from the second principle of beneficence and, in the context of millionaire migration, is the idea that both the benefits and the burdens of Washington’s tax structure must be fairly distributed so that some groups do not benefit or are not burdened more than others.

Recognizing that even the best science these days often gets drowned out by media cycles and performative politics, it’s more important than ever to have some sort rudder here to navigate the issue of millionaire migration in principled and consistent ways so that we — that is, all Washingtonians — can come together to collectively chart the future that we want.

Jack DeWaard, an Everett resident, is an associate professor at Saint Martin’s University in Lacey and a former program director at the National Science Foundation. Views expressed are his own and based on the best science.