by Chris Saxman

A Warning for Seattle, Olympia — and Richmond

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz opens his Wall Street Journal op-ed by celebrating Washington state’s extraordinary economic rise — built over half a century by Microsoft, Amazon, Costco, and Starbucks into a global hub of technology, innovation, and logistics.

That era succeeded, he argues, because civic leaders understood private enterprise and the public good as partners, not enemies.

That compact is now broken.

Schultz catalogs Seattle’s visible decay: chronic homelessness, persistent budget deficits, declining public safety, falling foot traffic, slower tech hiring, and widening downtown vacancies.

He singles out Mayor Katie Wilson for treating employers as political foils rather than partners, vilifying the very businesses whose tax revenue funds city government. Starbucks has already responded — laying off 61 more Seattle workers on the same day the op-ed published, while pressing forward with a Nashville office slated to employ up to 2,000 people over five years.

Schultz is easy to dismiss as a billionaire protecting his tax bill.

But the SuperSonics episode is more than a character footnote — it is the opening chapter of the very story he is now warning about.

He did, after all, sell the Seattle SuperSonics to an out-of-town buyer after calling the franchise a “public trust,” and he relocated to Florida after Washington passed its millionaires income tax.

Seattle lost its NBA team because government and ownership could not make a deal on a new arena. Schultz moved on. The team moved on.

Sound familiar?

That is where the story stops being just about Seattle.

I would suggest to you we don’t really have an income problem, we have a spending problem.

Former Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire recently told the Association of Washington Business something her party rarely hears from one of its own:

The state budget has ballooned from $33 billion when she left office to nearly $80 billion today — yet lawmakers still insist they need more revenue. Her sharper indictment was cultural: too few legislators have ever run a business, and it shows.

We’re answering it by stacking one more tax, one more rule, one more regulation…The one thing businesses don’t need is a lack of predictability.

Schultz adds:

The theory appears to be that prosperity can be mandated through redistribution rather than generated through growth.

Politicians in Richmond should read all of this carefully — because the same pattern is taking shape in Virginia.

With unified Democratic control of the governorship and General Assembly for the first time in years, the 2026 legislative session has produced a cascade of new employer costs and policy instability that, taken together, tells a troubling story.

Democrats advanced two sweeping workplace mandates — a state-run paid family and medical leave program funded by a new payroll tax, and a statewide paid sick leave requirement — that analysts say will ultimately show up as lower wages, fewer hours, slower hiring, and higher prices for Virginia consumers.

The session also brought proposals to repeal Virginia’s long-standing right-to-work law, restrict non-compete agreements, regulate employer use of AI in hiring, and phase in a $15 minimum wage — representing what employment lawyers called the most significant potential overhaul of Virginia workplace law in decades.

The highest-stakes fight, however, has been over the data center industry — the single largest engine of Northern Virginia’s economy.

Senate Democrats have moved to eliminate a $1.9 billion annual tax exemption that has made Virginia the data center capital of the world, an industry responsible for 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income, and more than $9 billion in annual GDP.

Governor Abigail Spanberger and House Democrats resisted, warning that eliminating the exemption would damage Virginia’s business-friendly reputation and breach commitments the state had already made to the industry.

The impasse sent an unmistakable signal to every company considering Virginia for its next major investment: the rules can change, and political priorities can override contractual expectations.

Then there is the arena.

Remember the Monumental Deal?

Governor Glenn Youngkin negotiated a deal to relocate the Washington Wizards and Capitals to Alexandria’s Potomac Yard — two major franchises, a corporate anchor, thousands of construction and hospitality jobs, and national attention for the Commonwealth.

The Democratic-controlled Senate killed it.

Concerns about public bonds and taxpayer risk were legitimate.

But when scrutiny hardens into partisan denial of a governor’s win, the Commonwealth’s pro-business brand absorbs the damage regardless of the merits.

This is the Schultz/Sonics lesson applied to Virginia: at a time when other states are cutting taxes and lowering barriers to growth, Virginia Democrats are moving in the opposite direction — increasing the cost of employment, threatening the incentives that built a dominant industry, and blocking a marquee economic-development opportunity.

No single item breaks the Commonwealth.

But as Gregoire warned about Washington: it is the cumulative signal that matters.

Employers, investors, and franchises do not wait for a final straw.

They read the trend line — and they go where they are wanted.

Chris Saxman is executive director of Virginia FREE. This commentary is excerpted with permission from his Substack account, The Intersection.