Welch: The bill for Seattle’s socialism comes due in Everett

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, July 22, 2026

In May, the New York Times ran a story about Seattle’s new mayor taunting the rich as her fight with Starbucks widened. Katie Wilson, who calls herself a democratic socialist, won City Hall by about 2,000 votes and took office in January. She ran on reining in landlords, limiting who gets to buy a home, and taxing big business until it bends.

Seattle elected her. The rest of us are paying for the worldview.

Start at the gas pump. A gallon of regular averaged about $5.32 across Washington in late June, according to AAA, among the highest prices in the country. The state gas tax now sits at 56.5 cents a gallon, third in the nation behind California and Pennsylvania, according to federal energy figures, after the Legislature tacked on six cents in 2025 and wired in automatic annual increases that no longer require a floor vote or a public hearing. The Climate Commitment Act adds another 40 to 50 cents on top, by the Washington Policy Center’s estimate. Every gallon a nurse in Marysville or a framer in Lake Stevens burns helps fund a machine built in Olympia.

Now look at your receipts. House Republicans called the 2025 session the largest tax increase in state history, roughly $12.5 billion in new state and local taxes, with another $4.5 billion piled on in 2026. That package included Washington’s first income tax, 9.9 percent on income above a million dollars, in a state that ran for more than a century without one. It added business surcharges and extended the sales tax to services like temporary staffing and security. Those costs do not stay with the business. They ride along to you at the register.

Then there is your rent. In 2025, Gov. Bob Ferguson signed House Bill 1217, statewide rent control, on a near party-line vote. It caps most annual increases at seven percent plus inflation, or ten percent, whichever is lower. Supporters sold it as protection. What it actually does is tell every small landlord in Snohomish County that Olympia now sets the terms of their private contracts. Economists across the spectrum have warned for decades that rent caps shrink supply and drive housing quality down. We are about to run that experiment on ourselves.

Here is the part that should bother you most. The same officials who drive these costs spend their energy blaming everyone but themselves. When rent climbs, they blame landlords. When a corner store raises prices, they blame corporate greed. When gas hits five dollars, they blame oil companies, not the 56.5 cents they added at the pump. The arsonist keeps showing up to the fire in a firefighter’s coat.

Wilson has been open about the strategy. In a 2025 op-ed, she described ratcheting up taxes on big business until the corporations themselves give in and back a state income tax, treating them as piggy banks to be squeezed. That is not a slip. That is the plan, stated plainly, and it is the same plan now moving through Olympia one bill at a time.

Call it what it is. The Union of Seattle Socialist Republic does not stop at the King County line. Its policies are written in Seattle, passed in Olympia by the Democratic majority, and paid for in Everett, Marysville, and Monroe. Wilson is the clearest face of the movement. She is not the whole of it. The engine is the legislative majority that keeps voting yes.

None of this is permanent. Every one of these taxes and mandates came from people who stood for election and won. They can lose the same way. The 2026 races are already taking shape, and the single most useful thing you can do is stop treating Olympia as weather that happens to you. It is not weather. It is a choice made by named people, on recorded votes you can look up.

Read the roll calls. Ask your legislators why your gas costs a dollar more than it does across the country. Then vote as your grocery bill depends on it, because it does.

Todd Welch is a Herald columnist covering local and state issues.