We Meant to Do That

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 01, 2026

 

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson recently manufactured a viral moment for herself:

 

 

This one deserves some scrutiny.

 

We can deduce from her dismissal of the “overblown” notion that capital is mobile that Wilson does not welcome a potential exodus of her city’s tax base. That rote concession elicited no emotion from either the mayor or her audience. But when Wilson displayed her contempt for the paltry few wealthy Seattle residents who would, of course, leave, the audience reveled in her self-satisfaction and, seemingly, experienced some of their own.

 

Within the ranks of the far-left radicals who have captured the commanding heights of politics in some of America’s bluest cities, there is an obvious tension over the desired effect of their “tax the rich” policies. Is the point of taxing the rich to recoup their misbegotten largess and “spread the wealth around,” as Barack Obama used to say? Or is the point of progressive taxation retribution as an end in itself? Is the expropriation of wealth its own virtue, with revenue generation a mere side bonus?

 

There are echoes in this of the Democratic Party’s pitch to voters in the Biden years — a time when Democratic politicians emphasized the astronomical taxpayer-provided dollar figures they intended to spend while only cursorily touching on the services those sums were supposed to fund. “Don’t tell me what you value,” Joe Biden himself frequently intoned. “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” That’s a terrible way to measure an individual’s moral code, but he did seem to channel his party’s zeitgeist with that one. The spending was the whole point of that political exercise.

 

Something similar might be said of the far left’s rapacious impulses. Unlike their predecessors, this crop of radicals does dwell on the wildly expanded list of government services they intend to fund through the expropriation of private wealth. It never matters to the radicals that the price tag on their schemes is typically exorbitant, which heightens the risk of taxpayer flight. To progressive reformers, that’s not a problem at all.

 

So the rich will be forced to pay, or they’ll be forced to leave. Either way, they’re getting what’s theirs, and we will be the authors of their misery.

 

That retributive sentiment is not uncommon, but it’s hardly universal.

 

Pity the suckers in the cities governed by the radical left who let themselves believe that the new order would rain taxpayer-provided goodies down around them. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is already brushing up against the limits of political physics in the United States. New Yorkers will have to do more with less, the mayor now warns — a condition he still blames on the wealthy city residents he is busily hounding out of town. Mamdani hasn’t resolved the cognitive dissonance around his scheme to demonize the city’s most mobile residents until they pay up or move out. Wilson, however, has.

 

If the tax base flees, well, we meant to do that. And now, citizens of Seattle, you soon won’t have those pesky job providers and charitable givers around. And when that day comes, things will be better.

 

Right?