Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson speaks on Sept. 22nd, 2026 at her first budget proposal speech.
As Workers Strike Back co-founder Kshama Sawant explained repeatedly during her 2014-2023 decade as a revolutionary socialist on the Seattle City Council, a budget is a moral document. That’s because a budget is a clear representation of the actual priorities and class allegiances of a politician and their political party.
The budget is almost always where Democratic Party politicians with progressive rhetoric expose themselves for what they actually are: careerists who are unwilling to stand up against the rich and the capitalist state, including its institutions like the police. This is also true of Democratic politicians who describe themselves as “socialist” or “democratic socialist” on the campaign trail, including Seattle’s current Mayor, Katie Wilson.
Democratic Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s recently proposed first budget is a shockingly pro-police, anti-worker, and anti-poor budget, and is a damning indictment of her actual politics. Wilson has had a long career as an NGO leader, during which she purported to support the Black Lives Matter movement and oppose bloated police budgets. She has led organizations that were meant to advocate for affordable housing and taxing the rich. Through her budget proposal, Wilson is turning her back on all those positions.
The budget proposes cutting $65 million from funding for affordable housing and profound cuts to a number of social services that working people and the poor rely on, alongside ZERO new taxes on the rich.
Shamefully, in contrast with this austerity for working people, Wilson’s budget proposes a major expansion of funding for the Seattle Police Department (SPD), giving the police an additional $68 million. This 14% increase would bring the already highly bloated police budget to a total of $556 million. This is, in fact, far higher than former Mayor Bruce Harrell’s increases, which averaged just over 9%. Ironically, Wilson ran against Harrell last year as a progressive and socialist, against the pro-wealthy and pro-police Harrell. This proposed increase for the Seattle Police would make this the first time the city’s “public safety” spending would represent a majority of the city’s general fund.
The complete lack of any increase in taxes on the rich is no accident. Wilson explicitly rejected the idea of raising the Amazon Tax that working people won in 2020. This was a historic victory won through the Tax Amazon movement launched by Kshama’s revolutionary socialist office after Kshama defeated billionaires like Jeff Bezos to win her re-election to the City Council in 2019. Wilson has also opposed any other taxes on the rich, saying: “Right now, we don’t have good options to raise more progressive revenue that don’t also come with great risks. Our economy and especially our downtown are fragile.”
This comes at a time when Seattle was just ranked fourth in all cities globally by Oxford Economics, a fact widely reported on in local media, and based on Seattle’s economic metrics, including that it has “one of the highest levels of GDP per person” in the world.
Washington is home to 12 billionaires and over 130 centi-millionaires, centered in the Seattle area. Seattle’s economy is dominated by a heavy presence of some of the wealthiest tech corporations in the world, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Wilson has put forward her anti-worker austerity budget in a state which has the second most regressive tax system in the country. This means that working people and the poor in Washington State pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes, while the wealthy pay a lower proportion than in any other state except Florida. The Democratic Party is fully responsible for this, having presided over this windfall for the ultra-rich for decades, despite frequent majorities in all three branches of government.
When Wilson says that taxing the rich comes “with great risks”, what she’s saying is that big business and the billionaires are completely hostile to the idea of an expansion of the Amazon Tax or any other means of taxing their wealth. But that’s the point! Capitalism means that gains for the working class can only come out of the massive profits and wealth of the bosses, who accumulate all that in the first place by exploiting workers.
So we shouldn’t expect the rich to like taxes on themselves, any more than they liked our 15 Now movement that won the highest minimum wage in the country. Far from expecting that the rich or their political representatives will agree with us, working people need to fight them.
This shows the fundamental difference between “democratic socialists” like Wilson and the approach of Kshama Sawant, who won historic victories over her decade on the Seattle City Council by going to war against big business and the political establishment, rather than attempting to make peace with them. By building militant mass movements, Kshama was able to lead the way in winning the highest minimum wage in the country, the Amazon Tax, unprecedented renters’ rights, and countless other victories. Again and again, Democratic Party leaders and other mouthpieces of big business, foretold economic disaster if our movements won. History has shown the opposite.
This is why Kshama Sawant and Workers Strike Back believe that we need a new party for working people, that is not only independent of the Democratic Party, but fighting against it. The Democratic Party is one of the two parties of U.S. capitalism and imperialism, and is tied by a thousand threads to big business and the billionaires. Its representatives, including those in its “progressive” wing like Katie Wilson and Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani, base themselves on what is acceptable to the billionaire class.
We need to urgently fight back against Wilson’s attacks on working people with her anti-worker, pro-police budget.
We should not have the illusion that this fight will be easy. The Democrats are determined to ram through major budget cuts, including additional attacks on the services working people rely on.
But we cannot allow these attacks to go unanswered, and it’s our responsibility in Workers Strike Back to provide a lead in this fight and to expose the role of “democratic socialist” politicians in defending the interests of the billionaires and their police.