Seattle Mayor — and proud socialist — just went on camera and, when asked about wealthy residents fleeing the city over escalating tax hikes, smiled ear to ear and said “BYE!” Like she’d just won something. Like watching the people who fund your entire city pack up and leave is a victory lap.
This is the political equivalent of burning down your own restaurant and then bragging that you don’t have to do dishes anymore. Congratulations, Mayor. You’ve achieved the purest form of socialist governance: driving away everyone with money and then wondering why the budget looks like a crime scene.
The clip is making the rounds and it’s exactly as bad as you think. She’s not reluctant. She’s not even pretending to care. She is genuinely delighted that wealthy residents of her city — the people who pay a wildly disproportionate share of the city’s taxes — are heading for the exits. She said “BYE!” the way a Disney villain dismisses a peasant. With glee. With contempt. With the absolute confidence of someone who has never once opened a spreadsheet.
Let’s walk through what’s actually happening in Seattle, because context makes this clip go from bad to catastrophic. The city has been hemorrhaging businesses for years. The downtown core looks like a post-apocalyptic movie set where the zombies got replaced with fentanyl addicts and aggressive panhandlers. Office vacancy rates are through the roof. Retail storefronts are boarded up. Amazon — literally the company that built modern Seattle — has been shifting operations elsewhere.
And into this economic dumpster fire, the city’s response has been: more taxes. Tax the rich. Tax the businesses. Tax the property owners. Tax anyone who hasn’t already figured out that Boise exists. And when the predictable happens — when the people being taxed into oblivion start looking at U-Haul prices — the mayor’s official position is “BYE!”
This is the Detroit playbook, and Seattle is speedrunning it.
Detroit was once the wealthiest city in America. The auto industry made it a powerhouse. Then decades of progressive governance, union shakedowns, and tax-the-rich theology hollowed it out until the city literally went bankrupt in 2013. The population went from 1.8 million to under 640,000. The people with money left. The people without money were stuck in a collapsing city with no services and no hope. That’s the end state of “BYE!”
But Seattle’s socialist brain trust thinks they’re different. They always think they’re different. Every progressive city that drives out its tax base thinks it’s the exception, right up until the pension fund collapses and they’re begging the state legislature for a bailout.
Here’s the math that Mayor “BYE!” apparently skipped. In most cities, the top 10% of earners pay somewhere between 40-60% of all local tax revenue. These aren’t shadowy oligarchs lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. These are doctors, lawyers, tech executives, business owners, and entrepreneurs. They’re the people who employ other people. They run the companies that generate the sales tax revenue that funds the police department that the mayor also probably wants to defund.
When those people leave, they don’t just take their personal tax payments. They take their businesses. Their employees. Their spending. Their charitable donations. Every millionaire who walks out the door takes a constellation of economic activity with them. The restaurant they ate at three times a week. The dry cleaner. The landscaper. The boutique. It cascades.
And who gets left behind? The people who can’t afford to move. The working-class families who are now stuck in a city with a shrinking tax base, deteriorating services, and a mayor who thinks poverty is a feature, not a bug.
That’s what makes the “BYE!” clip so infuriating. She’s not hurting the rich people. The rich people are going to be fine. They’ll move to Florida or Texas or Tennessee, pay zero state income tax, live in a city where the sidewalks aren’t covered in human waste, and wonder why they didn’t leave sooner. The people the mayor is actually hurting are the ones she claims to champion — the working poor, the middle class, the people who need a functional city government to survive.
But that’s socialism in a nutshell, isn’t it? It’s never actually about helping the poor. It’s about punishing the successful. The ideology doesn’t care if everyone ends up worse off, as long as nobody ends up better off. Equality of misery. That’s the goal. And Seattle’s mayor just said the quiet part out loud, on camera, with a smile.
So enjoy the clip, folks. Screenshot it. Save it. Because in five years, when Seattle is running budget deficits the size of Montana and the city council is holding emergency sessions to figure out why there’s no money, we’re going to play that clip back. And the answer to “what happened to Seattle?” will be a smiling socialist waving goodbye to the only people who were keeping the lights on.
BYE, indeed.
