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(THE DAILY SIGNAL) – Seattle’s socialist-in-chief is no longer laughing about chasing away businesses and wealthy residents. But the attitude adjustment may be too little, too late.
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Just a few weeks ago, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson infamously giggled when asked if she was concerned about wealthy residents fleeing Seattle because of her policies.
“I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if—the ones that leave, like, bye,” Wilson said to applause at Seattle University.
As I wrote at the time, this flippant attitude toward a potential wealth exodus was remarkably foolish.
Businesses and the “rich” were already leaving Seattle, but hitting the accelerator on leftist policies is causing a full-blown economic meltdown. The result will be a loss of hundreds of millions—likely even billions—of dollars in future tax revenue.
And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a political program based on taxing the rich doesn’t even begin to work if there are few rich to tax. But here we are. Reality is setting in.
Now for the consequences.
In November, Wilson stepped into a labor dispute between Starbucks and its employees, saying that she was “proud” to join the picket line.
“I am not buying Starbucks and you should not either,” she said of Seattle’s signature brand.
That didn’t go well with Starbucks management, which has announced plans to effectively leave the state of Washington.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz even took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to blast city and state leaders for making a bad situation worse.
Schultz wrote in early May that Seattle faces “serious” problems, including “chronic homelessness, disorder in core business districts, persistent budget deficits, declining public-school outcomes, and a slowing technology hiring cycle.” He lamented that Washington and Seattle have failed to meet those challenges.
“Seattle’s mayor, Katie Wilson, has chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner,” he wrote. “Her socialist rhetoric vilifies employers, even while she continues to rely on them for revenue. She has encouraged residents who disagree with her policies to leave.”
While I don’t find Schultz to be all that sympathetic—he’s been seemingly happy to back idiotic causes in the past to appeal to woke leftists—his sudden turn against the Democrat powers that be suggests that Seattle is in real trouble.
Now, the mayor seems to regret her anti-Starbucks line.
In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, she admitted comments calling for a Starbucks boycott were “not productive in the sense that they caused more harm than good.”
That would be an understatement.
Other Seattle leaders have expressed dismay at how things are going too.
Seattle City Councilmember Rob Saka, a Democrat who once fully supported Wilson, said to The New York Times that he’s “gravely concerned” about Starbucks pulling the plug and moving to Nashville. “This is real,” he said.
Jon Scholes, the president of the Downtown Seattle Association, who was on Wilson’s transition team, said to KOMO News that “tone and tenor and words matter if you’re leading a city.” He warned that Seattle’s business climate was “at a bit of a tipping point, and we should take nothing for granted.”
His association recently released a report that highlighted the issues facing the city.
“Downtown lost an estimated 13,000 jobs in 2025, the steepest decline since the pandemic outside of 2021,” the report said, according to KOMO News. “Office vacancy rates remain stubbornly high at more than 30% overall, with Seattle’s central business district exceeding 32%. Some of downtown’s most valuable office towers have lost more than half their assessed value since 2021.”
This makes Wilson’s comments about saying “bye” to businesses even more egregious. Seattle was already facing a crisis, and she just made it a lot worse.
As radio host Buck Sexton wrote on X, the socialist tough talk may have tickled the fancy of purple-haired activists, but they aren’t the ones paying the bills.
Whatever pivot Wilson makes, and I imagine it will be a rhetorical one at best, is not likely to get her out of the hole that she and fellow Democrats have dug in the city.
Seattle has become a poster child of Left Coast zaniness, a hotbed of crime and disorder, an example of the human cost of allowing mass open-air drug use, and a warning about how a beautiful city can be mismanaged to oblivion.
Wilson should have been doing everything in her power to assure businesses and residents that she would create a more suitable climate for them to thrive in. She didn’t, and I don’t blame businesses for throwing up their hands and moving along.
What do you think about this rhetoric?
This article was originally published in The Daily Signal.
