On March 30, Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed Senate Bill 6346 into law, which will levy a 9.9 percent tax on households with incomes exceeding $1 million per year, beginning in 2028.

“Adoption of the historic Millionaires’ Tax makes our tax system more fair, and means free meals for K-12 students, the largest tax break in state history for small businesses, eliminating the sales tax for baby diapers, and sending a check to nearly 500,000 working families to make life more affordable,” Ferguson said at the signing ceremony.

The new tax is expected to generate about $3 billion in the first year, of which 41.3 percent will be sent “to Washington families and small business owners. The next year, that increases to 47.3 percent.”

Essentially, Washington’s new tax is a massive exercise in governmental wealth redistribution, which does not have a great track record of increasing overall prosperity or reducing the wealth gap.

Although Washington is marketing its Millionaires’ Tax as a novel experiment, it has been tried many times before in several states.

A few states—California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York—have implemented heavy taxes on millionaires during the past decade or so.

So far, the results have been what anyone who understands basic economics would expect.

According to a 2025 Heritage Foundation report, “Two million more Americans moved out of California and New York than moved to those states between April 2020 and July 2023.........

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