I spoke with a good personal friend who is one of the top producing real estate agents on the west side of Washington state. He had some very interesting insights:
-He thinks Washington state is going to enter a recession over the next several years as the anti-business policies of the state backfire. He thinks total tax revenue for the state will plummet.
-He just saw the owner of a local (industry redacted as announcement not public yet) manufacturer move their entire operation with lots of employees to Texas.
-He is getting tons of home listings from entrepreneurs who are leaving the state. The entrepreneurs who have businesses that can be moved are moving them. Washington will lose payroll revenue, sales taxes, property taxes, estate taxes, and revenue from the hundreds of fees the state levies.
-He thinks entrepreneurs and business owners have been pushed over a red line where companies big and small will be leaving due to the extreme amounts of state bureaucracy and red tape.
-He has also been hearing a lot of people concerned by the blind eye turned to the fraud in the homeless industrial complex here. Lots of facilities run by cronies of politicians that have been collecting millions of dollars a month but never even opened their doors and had a homeless person stay there. Lots of bureaucrats putting out friendly press releases and collecting six figure salaries, but not actually fixing the problem (because their continued employment requires the problem to never be fixed).
Most of the good high paying jobs and businesses that can leave the state will leave. We already lost Boeing and we are losing Starbucks, and now there will be a massive shift towards a recession here, especially with the $3 a gallon in extra fuel taxes we have here higher than other states.