Opinion: Cue the revenuers

Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2026

in: Politics, Columns, Opinion

State hiring 300 tax collectors this summer even though income tax revenue won't arrive until 2029. — State hiring 300 tax collectors this summer even though income tax revenue won’t arrive until 2029.

🎧 Lars Larson: Washington’s Income Tax Infrastructure

Lars Larson believes that most of us know in our hearts Washington state won’t get as much money as it wants so the new income tax will soon hit folks who make less than a million

Lars Larson
The Northwest Nonsense

I don’t make a million bucks a year, so folks tell me I don’t have to worry about Washington state’s new income tax.

Lars Larson

Not true

The state has already started hiring hundreds of workers to collect the deceptively named “millionaires tax” even though money from the tax won’t start coming in for years.

And that assumes that the clearly unconstitutional tax survives court challenges.

And it assumes that angry citizens don’t drag it to an election and beat the tax to death with a ballot box.

The Evergreen State plans to build a whole new bureaucracy to identify citizen incomes that go above $1 million.

Most of us know in our hearts the state won’t get as much money as it wants so the new income tax will soon hit folks who make less than a million.

That’s the same path America’s income tax took over the past 100 plus years … tax the super rich first and then let the numbers slide down to the average worker.

Starting July 1 of this year, paychecks start for 300 new revenuers in Olympia.

So, even though the first dollars from the new income tax don’t come in till 2029, the cost of collecting it begins to be borne by average taxpayers this summer.

And when they decide to expand it to incomes UNDER a million, they already have the infrastructure in place to collect it.