Seattle Nice Interviews Progressive Legislator-Turned-Chamber Leader Joe Nguyen
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By Erica C. Barnett
Our guest on Seattle Nice this week isn’t a politician—he’s a former politician-turned-Seattle Chamber leader, and he says he sees no contradiction between his past as an pro-tax progressive legislator and his present job as the head of the city’s anti-tax business lobby group.
Joe Nguyen, the former state senator from West Seattle, defeated his opponent Shannon Braddock in 2019 by emphasizing his progressive bona fides, exemplified by a commitment to take no corporate contributions. Elected on that anti-corporate agenda, Nguyen went on to propose or support a payroll expense tax on big businesses, an excise fee on businesses that pay executives more than $1 million a year, and the statewide capital gains tax. “Tax the rich,” he wrote in the Stranger, which lauded him (pretty excessively, even at the time) as the “AOC of Washington state.”
As head of the Chamber, Nguyen leads an institution historically opposed to business and capital gains taxes, and he talks like it, too—telling Seattle Nice that while he thinks “we need to have a more equitable tax structure in the United States, in Washington State, I worry that we’re putting all of our eggs in one basket” by taxing big tech businesses over and over. Already, Nguyen said, businesses have started to move jobs from Seattle to Bellevue because of the JumpStart tax, a payroll tax on Seattle’s biggest companies that the city now relies on to backfill its annual general fund shortfalls.
“Politically, it is very popular to say, ‘Tax the rich.’ Politically is very popular to say, ‘Go after the large companies.’ But the hard part that we’re going to put ourselves in is: If you want to tax the rich, you got to have rich people to tax,” Nguyen said.
“I was the architect and then sponsor of a lot of these policies,” Nguyen continued. “However, you’re concentrating a lot of that [taxation] into one specific area. And when you start to get some of this volatility, like you mentioned in your in your post [about social housing revenues] the other day, that’s the worry that I have.”
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Seattle, the USA, and the world are failing for the same reason Rome and others fell: the rich are taking everything, leaving workers with just enough to amuse themselves with sports and entertainment. What we need are leaders who recognize this fundamental flaw and take action against it. Nguyen appears to be another career opportunist.