Read about this judge on Wikipedia, specifically the Criticisms section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_de_Moraes

I’m banned so I don’t know if anyone will see this, but I wanted to share more details on this capital gains tax. In Washington, income taxes are different based on income levels are unconstitutional. So you cannot have a capital gains tax that only applies to income levels above some threshold, like this one is. To get around that, Washington’s Democratic legislators started claiming that capital gains tax is an excise tax rather than an income tax, and therefore no longer subject to the constraints of the state’s constitution.

In every state and the federal level, capital gains are a form of income tax. This includes Washington state, where the department of revenue explicitly classified it as such in line with the common definition of this tax. However, the state’s Supreme Court has become highly activist over time, due to a long history of WA being a one-party blue state. And in one of the lawsuits against this unconstitutional tax, the state Supreme Court surprisingly agreed with the legislators in redefining capital gains tax as an excise tax instead of an income tax (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-suprem...).

This tax is now being collected for the first time, and it is much larger in its collections than expected. Most of the money will go to K-12 schools, which is strange because school funding in WA has more than doubled in the last 10 years with little to show for it (see https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/states-...). Also, although school funding follows the student typically - meaning reduced enrollment at a public school leads to reduced funding - the first $500m of this tax will only go to public schools.

I expect this tax will see its thresholds reduced over time. Its initial proposal was to apply to any capital gains over $25K, not $250K. It was changed to the higher limit to give it a better chance of passing and sticking. But with the state Supreme Court redefining words and setting this precedent, the legislature is free to change the tax threshold and rate in the future.