Rick Steves, the Edmonds-based travel author and TV host whose empire of guidebooks, tours, and public television specials has made him a household name, took to Facebook on March 30 to celebrate the signing of the so-called “millionaires tax.”
His post, complete with a smiling photo of him holding an American flag in his right hand under the words “A Millionaires Tax? Let’s Try Shared Prosperity!” went viral almost instantly, racking up over 11,000 reactions and hundreds of comments as it was shared by Gov. Ferguson and Washington Senate Democrats alike.
“A new tax on fat paychecks like mine was just signed into law in my home state—and I like it,” Steves wrote. For a political debate that had been dominated by warnings of billionaire flight—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos decamped to Miami in 2023, and Starbucks’ Howard Schultz announced a similar move days after the bill passed—Steves offered a strikingly different voice from the wealthy class: one welcoming a higher tax bill.
The new law, which imposes a 9.9% tax on individual income above $1 million per year, will fund expanded childcare, free school meals for all Washington students, and expanded Working Families Tax Credits for hundreds of thousands of lower-income households. For Steves, who has long been an advocate for progressive taxation and equitable public investment, the math was simple.
“And—for those of us with a heart for the public good—it’s simply common sense,” he wrote.
He also took aim at Washington’s long-standing tax structure, which relies heavily on a regressive sales tax and has been routinely ranked among the most unequal in the nation for its burden on low-income residents. “It’s time to change our upside-down tax system,” Steves wrote.
He’s not the first to frame Washington’s tax code as upside-down, which puts an outsized burden on the poor compared to the wealthy. “We knew it was going to be a pretty major endeavor,” Washington Rep. Brianna Thomas, a Democrat who supported the measure, told Fortune the day after she and her colleagues spent 25 hours debating the bill. “We’ve got 93 years of precedent in front of us, behind us, around us at all times on the conversation around an income tax.”
Washington Senate Democrats were quick to amplify the moment, writing: “Millionaires like Rick know that we all win with shared prosperity.”
Whether the law survives looming legal challenges—rooted in a 1933 state Supreme Court ruling classifying income as property—remains an open question. But Steves’ post showed not every wealthy Washingtonian is heading for Miami.
