This excellent essay was posted on X yesterday, and I think it deserves posting in its entirety. This is what we are experiencing here in Washington State. [emphasis mine]

Tariffs aren’t affecting my small business, we manufacture custom cabinetry right here in Washington. What’s hurting us is Democrat tax increases. Everything we create is made and sourced in the Pacific Northwest with American labor. If anything I’m more competitive because I don’t use cheap Chinese goods. It’s those blue state taxes and regulations that are crushing. Here’s another thing I know, and it’s pretty simple to understand—if my customers pay higher prices in their daily lives, if they have less disposable income, or if we don’t build enough homes because of crazy regulations and taxes—then I don’t build as many cabinets. That means less taxes I will pay because I make less sales, less trade jobs for me to offer because it’s harder to grow, less opportunity for me to pay my employees more, and of course my own family suffers. Gov. Ferguson says he “spoke to many business owners” about affordability. Yet time and again, he and his party fail to understand even the most basic economic principles—then they do exactly the things to make it worse. I even heard a Democrat state “we budget on hope” during a tax debate. I even watched as they established grant programs to assist small business to survive their policies. Logic would tell normal people that if you must do that then that’s a major red flag, and an admission of failure. We don’t want to apply for a grant to save us from you, we just don’t want you to harm us in the first place. I’ve come to believe that there are too many in the legislature without much real world experience, instead substituting experience for activism to pass policy. So no, try as Democrats might to gaslight every citizen of Washington that it’s Trump over 3,000 miles away that is causing economic hardship, the rest of us know the truth. The largest tax increases in state history, passed by Democrats, will harm people and commerce far more than anything else. It’s over $9B stolen and ripped from our economy to quench the never ending thirst of more Democrat spending. And you know the winners of that spending: politicians, bureaucrats, and criminals. It’s disturbing to me that a group of radical Democrats find their constituents to be so ignorant and apathetic that they feel emboldened to blatantly lie and deflect right to their faces. Literally blaming others for things they have actually done just days prior. I hope people see right through it.

Here’s the link to the X post, for those who want to read it over there.

Tariffs aren’t affecting my small business, we manufacture custom cabinetry right here in Washington. What’s hurting us is Democrat tax increases. Everything we create is made and sourced in the Pacific Northwest with American labor. If anything I’m more competitive because I…

— Travis Couture (@TravisSCouture) May 24, 2025