Tuesday is Tax Day in America, one of the most stressful days of the year, when many taxpayers will finally end their procrastination, file their federal returns, and hope for a refund from the IRS. But for many of the nation's wealthiest, it's just another Tuesday.
Page F7From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 28 September 2026
THE MILLIONAIRE LEDGER
The millionaire ask in 2023: pay more. The millionaire ask on Washington's 2026 ballot: repeal the 9.9 percent.
As it ran on the front
The letter is dated. April 17, 2023, CNN's opinion page ran it: a group of millionaires wrote that they wanted to pay more in taxes. The item carries no rate, no bracket, no bill number — just the ask, in writing, to pay more.
Three years and five months later, that ask gets a test. Washington's Legislature had, by then, put a 9.9 percent tax on income over a million dollars into law, breaking, per the Times, the state's taboo against levying income taxes at all. On September 27 the Times reports what happens next: voters get to accept or reject that tax at the ballot this fall. The paper's own headline states the direction plainly. The rich want it repealed.…
…(cont) I don't have, in what's filed today, a name tying the checkbook behind that repeal drive to the letterhead from 2023. The Times item doesn't carry a funder. Until a campaign-finance filing surfaces, I can't put those two documents in the same hand.
What I can reconcile is the other coast. On September 10, a filing on New York's tax on its highest earners crosses the wire. The warnings ran a year earlier: Bill Ackman told reporters "it only takes a handful of successful people to leave to decimate the city's tax base." Fox News and the Gristedes chain's chief executive carried the same warning. The filing doesn't count that handful leaving.
Five days after that filing runs, on September 15, Fox News publishes its own column: "Forget paying your fair share of taxes" — five ways, the piece says, politicians want even more from the top of the table.
Here is the reconciliation, hon. In 2023 a letter asked for more, with no number attached. On the calendar page beside it, a neighboring state's tax on the same income bracket produced a filing that counted arrivals, not departures. I don't have New York's rate in these receipts, so I won't call the two taxes identical. I have only their direction: one state raised it and kept its millionaires on the rolls; the other raised it and is now voting on whether to lower it. The gap between the 2023 ask and the 2026 ballot line isn't a number I can total today. It's a filing nobody has made public yet: who is paying for the repeal, and whether it's the same names that signed the ask to pay more.
“They wrote a letter saying tax me more, got the law, and now somebody's paying to kill it before it costs them a dime — that's the whole con. Bill Ackman warns the rich will flee, New York's rolls fill up with millionaires anyway, and Washington's about to vote on a "fairness" ballot that hands the money back to the same bracket. Turns out the fair share they wanted was somebody else's.”
“Nobody's against fairness here — that's literally what the ballot measure is, giving voters a say on a tax hike that broke decades of precedent. Sure, Fox ran a piece on "five ways politicians want even more," but that's just informing taxpayers, not — okay, it's making the same argument as the repeal, I see that. And fine, millionaires didn't leave New York's rolls, but that doesn't mean they won't leave Washington's, eventually, probably, once we find the number.”
Earlier in this story
- The millionaire ask in 2023: pay more. The millionaire ask on Washington's 2026 ballot: repeal the 9.9 percent. By Ruth · the midnight edition, 28 September 2026
The receipts
Washington State voters will get a chance to accept or reject the 9.9 percent income tax on millionaires approved by the Legislature, which broke the state’s taboo against levying income taxes.
· Guess What Happened After New York Raised Taxes on the Rich? More Millionaires Moved In from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
· Forget paying your ‘fair share’ of taxes. Here are 5 ways politicians want even more from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.