‘They’re moving out’: Curley on WA residents leaving the state to avoid steep death tax

Following reports of a unique real estate strategy, a realtor who targeted Gig Harbor residents seeking to avoid estate taxes ended up selling properties out of state, driven by Washington having the highest estate tax in the country.

Rather than moving from one quaint city to another, KIRO host John Curley claimed the reasoning behind most late-life out-of-state moves is that residents are forced out in an attempt to avoid the steep estate taxes in Washington.

“It’s not about the quaint feeling. It’s about the feeling of not having Bob Ferguson up your butt taking money,” Curley said on “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio. “What you’ll see is people moving out, moving to Idaho, Montana, they’ll go to Nevada,” Curley said. “Think about it, if you were just walking along, working hard, putting money away, and then all of a sudden, boom. You have a heart attack and die. They tax all the assets, whatever it is, your house, everything else you have. It’s all combined in there.”

From income to investments to inheritance: How WA government keeps taking its cut

John Curley laid out the ludicrous estate tax in full, beginning with the first $100 a person makes, and all the times that same $100 gets taxed away before it is once more taxed after your death.

“If I go to work and I earn $100 and the government says, ‘OK, we’re going to tax your income.’ OK, now the money left over is mine. Then I decided I’m going to put it in the stock market. The business gets bigger, and I want to sell it. The government says, ‘Oh, that’s that apple we took a bite out of earlier, when you made your first $100. Oh, you’ve made some more money.’ They take another bite out of the apple.

“Then you die. You die, and the government says, ‘OK, let’s see. You’ve been working all your life and working really hard. You want to leave money for your kids,'” Curley continued. “The government in the state of Washington comes along and says, ‘Now you’re dead. So sorry. You’re not generating any more money for us, so we’re going to take a giant bite out of all the money that you saved, and get a big piece of it before we give it to the people that you love.”

Washington’s estate tax is currently the highest in the country, taxing assets exceeding $3 million at a rate beginning at 10% and as high as 35% for assets over $9 million.

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to John Curley weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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