By The Herald Editorial Board
Travel advocate, writer and public television host Rick Steves, who started his global journeys as a young man in 1978 with a “Hippie Trail” journey to Kathmandu, knows what it’s like to wear the dust and sweat of days of road travel and life on the streets.
“I vividly remember what it’s like — as a kid backpacking around the world — to need a shower and to need a place to wash your clothes,” he said, recently.
It’s what led Steves to come out from behind a recent anonymous gift that has secured a long-term home for the Lynnwood Hygiene Center.
Threatened with closure because the property’s owner needed to sell the Lynnwood facility that the Jean Kim Foundation has used rent-free at 19726 64th Ave. W., since 2020, the hygiene center risked ending its work to daily offer showers, a laundry, meals and outreach to other services to those living with homelessness in south Snohomish County.
Seeing local news coverage of the foundation’s partnership with the Hazel Miller Foundation to raise funds to buy the property for $2.5 million, Steves, an Edmonds resident, bought the property for $2.25 million and will continue the rent-free arrangement for the hygiene center.
“This is a place that gives countless people that are down and out a shower and a place to wash their clothes, and they get a hot meal. What’s not to like about that?” Steves said last week at a gathering to announce the purchase as well as the successful community campaign that has raised another $400,000 that will be used for renovation work and expanded services at the center.
No newcomer to community philanthropy, Steves earlier this year announced a $1 million matching challenge to encourage donations supporting an effort by the Volunteers of America of Western Washington to raise $26.5 million for the Lynnwood Community Center, an ongoing campaign to build a 39,000-square-foot community center on property donated by Trinity Lutheran Church. The center would provide space for a number of community groups, including Medical Teams International, Center for Human Services, Boys & Girls Clubs of Snohomish County, Korean Community Service Center, Cocoon House and Latino Educational Training Institute.
Steves also this year pledged another challenge grant to aid the Foundation for Edmonds School District to support the school district’s music education programs.
Such community philanthropy deserves attention and recognition, whether it’s a multi-million-dollar benevolence or a $20 donation from a retiree, especially at a time of year when our thoughts are on what we can give out of our love and concern for others.
But Steves acknowledges a flip-side to philanthropy, if it allows an abdication of public responsibility for the common good. Private donations, he told NPR in a report about the hygiene center, are not a substitute for public investment — government action — regarding the continuation of essential services. Steves said his recent donations were a response to a decline in such public investments.
“If we don’t have [$2.25 million] for a whole county to give homeless people a shower and a place to get out of the rain and a place to wash their clothes, what kind of society are we?” Steves told NPR.
Steves isn’t alone in his concern for the public funding of that social safety net.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate who represented Utah in the U.S. Senate from 2019 to 2025 and governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, recently wrote a commentary for The New York Times, calling on the nation to “Tax the Rich, Like Me.”
Noting the dwindling trust fund for Social Security — which could be depleted as early as 2034, forcing a cut of its benefits after that date — Romney called for removal of the $176,100-cap on FICA taxes and also said it was time to tax capital gains after death and end other loopholes and tax “caverns.”
“Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario using Elon Musk as a proxy. If he had originally purchased his Tesla stock with, say, $1 billion and held it until his death and if it was then worth $500 billion, he would never pay the 24 percent federal capital gains tax on the $499 billion profit. Why? Because under the tax code, capital gains are not taxed at death. The tax code provision known as step-up in basis means that when Mr. Musk’s heirs get his stock, they are treated as if they purchased it for $500 billion. So no one pays taxes on the $499 billion capital gain. Ever.”
That tax code provision makes sense when helping families keep family farms operating, but it is more commonly used by billionaires to avoid taxes on their capital gains.
“I believe in free enterprise, and I believe all Americans should be able to strive for financial success,” Romney writes. “But we have reached a point where any mix of solutions to our nation’s economic problems is going to involve having the wealthiest Americans contribute more.”
Those discussions are unlikely to be broached in Congress until Democrats again have control of one or both chambers. But a debate on taxes should be given some airing when state lawmakers return to Olympia in mid-January. Though Gov. Bob Ferguson and many state legislators have seemed wary of addressing further tax and fee legislation in the upcoming 60-day session beyond what was adopted earlier this year, that shouldn’t stifle further discussion of potential sources of revenue that the state inarguably needs to consider to meet its paramount duty to fund K-12 education and meet other reasonable needs in all 39 counties, while at the same time making our state’s tax code less regressive and more fair and equitable.
Steves has always touted the personal importance of using travel to broaden perspectives, what he has called “the most beautiful souvenir.” What makes travel a political act, he has said, is turning that broader perspective into action for one’s community and the world. But that perspective is gained wherever we travel in our daily lives and it should convict us of the need for action, personal and public.
We can and should celebrate philanthropic gifts — large and small — but we also must acknowledge the responsibility we hold as members of society to require our elected representatives to set fair taxes and direct that revenue to the services and programs that meet needs at local, state, national and global levels.
Happy holidays and happy travels.
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