I subscribe to The Seattle Times because I generally believe that paying for local reporting is important and that we should be supporting journalism in our communities. Today I got a push notification on my phone alerting me to a new article from the Times, headlined “Will players shun Seattle?” (the headline seems to have since been modified to “Will the ‘millionaires tax’ hurt Seattle sports? It’s complicated”). You can read the article yourself if you have a subscription here.
Now, I rolled my eyes when I got that notification, because I knew this entire premise was kind of ridiculous as a sports fan who’s seen the success of teams in New York and California, two states with plenty heavy tax burdens, as well as plenty of other teams from other states with income taxes much steeper than the new millionaire’s tax, but I opened it up because I wanted to see what they were pedaling, and boy, was I in for a treat when I did that.
First, this article says absolutely nothing about the reason for the millionaire’s tax. The benefits of the tax are absolutely not considered here. This is certainly an amount of forgivable, as an article in The Seattle Times is presumably speaking to an audience that reads The Seattle Times and has therefore seen information about this tax before, but combined with the article’s other sins, it’s a glaring absence. To be clear, if you’re new here, sales taxes are incredibly regressive since poorer people spend more of their income than wealthier people. Washington State has high sales taxes, but until now has had no form of income tax, a much more progressive way of raising revenue. In order to fund all the things the state government does, like pay for our public education system and hospitals and roads and stuff, we need more sources of revenue, since our state is facing a huge budget deficit. This was one way of trying to find an alternative revenue source instead of raising sales or property taxes. Criticize it if you want, but that’s why it exists.
Diving into the actual article, we quickly run into some dumb things. Referring to remarks from Seahawks GM John Schneider, the article reads, and I quote:
During a weekly radio appearance on Seattle Sports 710 in mid-March, Schneider said the tax could hinder the team’s competitive advantage in recruiting free agents. He followed up those comments a few weeks later during a meeting with reporters by reiterating his view that the tax could hurt the team.
“It’s going to affect all the sports teams, for sure,” Schneider said at the time.
Notice the insidious thing the author of this article did there. Schneider’s quote didn’t say the tax could “hurt the team.” Schneider said the tax would “affect” the team. Now, if you open up the article on Schneider’s remarks and read his full quotes, he does use the word “sting,” but that’s the closest he gets to saying the tax will “hurt.” “Hurt” is the article’s author’s word, not Schneider’s. That’s incredibly dishonest, in my opinion, especially in an article that is presented as objective reporting and not one that’s in the opinion section of the paper.
Continuing on, we run into something truly insane. The article references quotes from John Wilson, who is reported to be a partner at K&L Gates, a multinational law firm. I don’t know what his resume looks like, but he says something that I’m almost positive anyone who knows anything about Seattle sports is going to immediately find hilarious.
“Washington has historically punched above its weight in free agency for its market size, relative to Los Angeles and New York,” Wilson said. “In part, that’s just been because of the tax environment.”
Alright. Who the hell is he talking about? Seahawks fans, Mariners fans, Sounders fans, Storm fans, Kraken fans, anyone else, am I missing something? Who are these big free agents our teams have signed that demonstrate that we “punch above our weight”? The Mariners have a few big name players that have come up here in their history, sure, Robinson Cano being the obvious one, but also Cruz, Beltre, and Sexson, but they were heavily compensated, above their market values. I’m not as tuned in to Seahawks transactions, but I don’t remember anyone who signed for them as a free agent that’s a household name. I genuinely have no idea what this dude is talking about. Mariners fans have been banging the table forever begging ownership to reel in free agents. The Seahawks are in a salary cap league, so it’s harder to really say anything about their spending, but they certainly don’t have a long history of signing great free agents, best I can tell. Have the Kraken even signed anyone noteworthy? The Storm? I guess Clint Dempsey coming to the Sounders was kind of a big deal, but I don’t think the lack of income tax really mattered there.
Moving on, somehow, we get to something interesting – a scientific study of how tax rates affect teams’ winning percentages. Alright, sure, let’s look at this. What does this study have to say?
As state income taxes increased, the winning percentages of sports teams decreased, Hembre told The Seattle Times. His study found that for each percentage point increase in state income tax rates, professional sports team winning percentage declined by 0.7 percentage points.
…am I supposed to know what that means? Like, sports fans are used to winning percentages being displayed in decimal form. Meaning a team that wins half of their games is said to be .500. You might’ve had a talk with a Mariners fan at some point where they said “oh they’re one game below five hundred,” that’s because that’s how they read that number. How does “0.7 percentage points” convert to that? Well, on the scale anyone who actually talks about sports would use, that’s 0.007. So, if you do the math, that’s one less win in a 162-game MLB season. Now, that’s per percentage point of state income tax rates, so I don’t know exactly what the math is to convert that to how much the study expects the millionaire’s tax to affect Seattle teams, but, well, that sounds like something a reporter writing an article could do. And probably should’ve done. But they didn’t. So.
Finally, we get to something that makes me go absolutely insane.
Some sports leagues, like the NHL and WNBA, have lower minimum salaries which may allow athletes to dodge a high-earners income tax. But as the popularity of those leagues and their stars continues to swing up, the lucrative brand deals they sign would put their total income over the threshold.
Hey. Alex Halverson. Reporter for The Seattle Times who wrote this article. Hey. Dude. My guy.
Do you know how the fuck tax brackets work?
Is that something you bothered to learn before writing a whole ass article for The Seattle Times?
Are you actually writing, uncritically, in an article your editor decided to not only publish, but to send an alert to a bunch of subscribers’ phones telling them that this article was published, that the WNBA players for the Storm are dodging a tax by making less money, implying that they’ll make more money that way? Like, what the actual fuck?
Your paper has won a Pulitzer prize. It is an essential pillar of the community. We need reporters who are neutrally reporting on the issues of the day. It is deeply important to our democracy. I want to support you. I want to tell people on Reddit who get around your paywall that they should be considering a subscription so we can continue to pay people like you to do the important job of reporting to the public the truth of what’s happening in our community.
It is impossible for me to do that if a paragraph like the above one exists in your paper.
This isn’t the only issue I’ve had with The Seattle Times this week. Earlier today, they referred to The Urbanist, an outlet I’m sure some of you have issues with but is ultimately an independent news organization highlighting stories about increasing housing supply and building public transit in our community, as the “media mouthpiece” of a developer. It’s been reported that their management team, in negotiations with workers, actually pushed back against AI protections by saying “journalism doesn’t mean journalists”.
I don’t know who The Seattle Times thinks they work for, but they are currently demonstrating that they do not work for us, the people of this city. They are demonstrating this time and time again. This is a travesty. We need journalism in this city. We need people who are asking the mayor’s office tough questions, who are taking statements from the police department with a grain of salt, who are finding out the facts and delivering them to us. We do not need a mouthpiece for the wealthy, who are more concerned with convincing us that the sports teams we like are going to be affected by the taxes we passed, so shouldn’t we maybe consider calling our representatives and telling them their progressive funding model means our baseball team isn’t going to win as much? It’s gross that they’re doing that. It’s gross that they’re pushing that propaganda to our phones as if it’s an important news story. It’s gross that they’re doing all this while begging for money to support their dying business model.
Do better. I demand it.
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