Yes, I know I’m mashing up two totally unrelated movies. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately — namely, how Washington and Seattle policymakers seem determined to dismantle the structural incentives that have allowed this state to flourish for the last 30 years.
In the 1995 film “Clueless,” Alicia Silverstone plays Cher, a socially elite high schooler in Beverly Hills who is, well, clueless about most everything. Yet she floats through life effortlessly, mostly because she’s rich, connected, and attractive. She represents California in this setup.
Then there’s Tai, played by the late Brittany Murphy. She’s most everything Cher isn’t — earnest, awkward, and unpolished. Cher takes an interest in her, gives her a makeover, and Tai briefly emerges as the most popular girl in school. (And yes, I know the movie’s actual moral is that the makeover wasn’t really Tai — stay with me.) Tai represents Washington.
California has adopted just about every progressive policy idea in circulation, and arguably ruined the Golden State in the process. Yet the economy hasn’t collapsed, real estate remains valuable, and people still choose to stay. Turns out that when you’re the world’s fifth-largest economy, with some of the best weather on the planet, world-class universities, the entertainment industry, the tech sector, and the Pacific gateway to Asia, you can absorb a lot of bad policy. Like Cher, California doesn’t really have to try.
Washington has none of those locked-in advantages. We’re not in the top tier of state economies, the weather is famously brutal for nine months of the year, and we lack the geographic and cultural magnetism California has spent a century building. What we did have, for the last 30 years, was a tax code that punched above its weight — no income tax, manageable business climate, predictable rules. That structural advantage attracted capital and talent at an outsized pace and built the Boeing-Microsoft-Amazon-Costco-Starbucks economy other states tried to replicate. That was Washington’s real makeover, and unlike Tai’s, it was earned.
The current leadership in Olympia appears to view that prosperity as a problem to be corrected rather than a foundation to build on. And so they’ve begun stripping away the very features that made Washington competitive — most recently with SB 6346, the new high-earner tax whose constitutional vulnerability is already being litigated. The results are showing up: businesses and the entrepreneurial class are increasingly leaving for friendlier confines.
Here’s where the Clueless analogy actually gets useful. Tai’s mistake wasn’t the makeover — it was letting Cher convince her she should aim for Elton, a guy several tiers above her station, when Travis was right there and right for her. She got dressed up for a league she didn’t belong to, and she got humiliated for it.
That’s what Olympia is doing now. It’s not preserving Washington’s hard-won transformation. It’s trying to put Washington in California’s outfit — the same progressive tax-and-regulate agenda — without any of California’s structural ability to absorb the costs. California can be clueless and still succeed. Washington cannot. We don’t have the weather, the size, or the gravitational pull to make bad policy disappear.
Washington’s path forward isn’t imitating California. It’s remembering what made us different in the first place.