Danny Westneat’s recent Seattle Times column calls out Washington’s “No. 1” ranking for corporate tax breaks, fixating on Microsoft’s $18.7 billion federal income-tax reduction and Amazon’s $17.4 billion figure as evidence of greed. The framing is pure political theater. It treats legal deductions and credits as moral failings while ignoring the far larger story that these companies have repeatedly carried Washington’s economy when other states stumbled.
In fact, Washington is ranked 45 out of 50 in the nation for business tax completeness according to the Tax Foundation.
Federal tax rules apply nationwide. Microsoft and Amazon simply operate at a scale that maximizes every lawful provision Congress wrote. Calling this “avoidance” while the companies continue to employ tens of thousands of Washingtonians and generate enormous state and local revenue is selective outrage. Washington has no corporate income tax (yet) and relies on the Business & Occupation (B&O) tax, property taxes, and sales taxes to cover state spending (plus many other taxes). These firms pay heavily into those systems even as they claim federal deductions available to any profitable American company. B&O is on gross revenue so you can imagine how much money both companies are giving the state of Washington on the Washington portion of the revenue.
The real numbers matter more than the talking points. Amazons’ own numbers show it has invested more than $400 billion in Washington since 2010 through payroll, infrastructure, and operations, contributing over $380 billion to the state’s GDP. It employs more than 95,000 full- and part-time workers here and supports more than 250,000 indirect jobs. Microsoft remains one of the state’s largest private employers, with tens of thousands of high-wage positions concentrated in Redmond that delivers outsized property-tax revenue in Puget Sound. Together with Boeing, these companies anchor a disproportionate share of Puget Sound’s roughly $607 billion gross regional product and the state’s overall economy.
History shows what happens when these economic engines leave. Other states without comparable private-sector anchors have endured deeper and longer downturns. Washington’s tech-driven growth has repeatedly buffered the state during national recessions and aerospace cycles. High-wage tech employment fuels consumer spending, housing demand, small-business activity, and the tax base that funds schools, roads, and social services. Driving Microsoft or Amazon toward lower-tax, lower-regulation jurisdictions would not “rebalance” fairness; it would shrink the pie for everyone else.
The Seattle Times column treats record profits as a problem rather than evidence of value creation. Those profits fund research, capital investment, and the very jobs that have lifted living standards across the region. Policy that paints success as illegitimate invites capital flight. We have already watched high earners and entrepreneurs relocate in response to new capital-gains and income-tax experiments. Accelerating that trend by demonizing the companies that actually generate wealth is economic suicide.
Washington Policy Center has long argued for competitive tax and regulatory environments that keep capital and talent here for both large corporations and small businesses. Complaining about “tax breaks” while ignoring the employment, investment, and multiplier effects those companies deliver is not journalism, it is an invitation to mediocrity.
The relevant question is whether the economic return from Washington's tax preferences exceeds their fiscal cost, and that requires accounting for jobs, wages, investment, B&O taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and spillover economic activity, not merely headline federal tax benefits.
If we truly care about working families, they should focus on keeping the engines of growth running rather than wishing them gone.
