Election afterthoughts – the sky is still there

The gloom-and-doomers, naysayers and other prognosticators of negativity have all danced like Chicken Little announcing the sky is falling now that Oregonians solidly approved two tax measures on Tuesday.

Here’s the forecast: cloudy with a chance of rain.

Is it ever any different in Oregon?

In other words, in a nod to The Beatles, life goes on, within you or without you.

It’s time to be part of the solution to what ails our economy.

Newspaper pontificators, sounding like politicians, say we need “real tax reform” without offering any feasible ideas. Just saying the word “reform” doesn’t make it so.

Well, the voters have spoken. They trust government more than business because business failed them. Voters back their elected representatives who took the bold step to tax the rich.

Yes, even rich voters opted to tax themselves. The measures passed overwhelmingly in the “richer” districts of the Portland are and the north Willamette Valley. This means that they’ll send more state money to the “poorer” rural areas that voted overwhelmingly against the measures. (Of course, rural Oregon is sparsely populated. Most citizens in Oregon live in the Portland area and along the I-5 corridor.)

Also, the measures had stronger support than expected in the rural areas, including Central Oregon where 35 percent in Crook County, 39 percent in Jefferson County and 41 percent in Deschutes County voted for the measures. Usually, those percentages are in the 20s and low 30s on statewide tax measures, even on local measures.

Not surprisingly, Bend showed the strongest support for the measures and it is considered the richest city in the region.

Economists, who are paid to state the obvious, say times will be tough.

One such economist from California spoke to about 300 people yesterday in Bend. People paid good money to hear him say things reported in the daily newspaper like, “We’re at a very low base. We’ve been losing jobs here for a long time.”

Bill Watlkins, from Pacific Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, predicted that growth would be slow. How insightful.

He claimed that the passage of Measures 66 and 67 are exactly the wrong thing to do at exactly the wrong time. He compared Oregon to California which he said is unattractive to business. “Oregon is dangerously close,” he said in the paper.

California has a sales tax that varies from region to region, but it’s getting close to 10 percent in much of the state. Oregon sales tax is 0 percent. California also has high income and property taxes like Oregon does. Still, California is one the highest tax states and Oregon is one of the lowest. Tuesday’s vote doesn’t change that fact.

The difference between California and Oregon is that Californians routinely vote for programs while voting against funding those things.

Oregon is saying we’ll pay for the programs we want. Oregonians showed pragmatism.
We pay as we go. We said we won’t borrow endlessly like California and the federal government do.

Oregon is now better poised to have a more measured, sustainable economy than California because it is willing to avoid massive debt that plagues California and the federal government.

This isn’t to say that Oregon, with an 11 percent unemployment rate, is paradise. There will always be funding problems because lobbyists and special interests prevent the state from enacting true reform.

Oregon’s beer tax, the second-lowest in the country, hasn’t been raised in decades because the beer lobby gets its way. Oregon could triple its beer tax and it would still be below the national average.

The state has a “kicker” law that says if any state revenue exceeds the state’s two-year projection, the overage amount must be kicked back to the taxpayers.

There is a move afoot to take that “kicker” money and put it in a “rainy day” fund. It won’t happen because various business and anti-tax groups still wield much power in Salem.

And then there is the sales tax. The well-off say this is the most equitable, but it means that the poor would pay a greater share of their income in taxes than the rich. Oregonians have rejected such a regressive tax nine times.

To claim that taxes are the greatest threat to business is bogus. In the 1950s, when prosperity rained down on all strata of American life, the federal income tax rate in the country for the wealthiest was 90 percent. During this “Great Recession,” it is lower than 40 percent. In the 1950s, high taxes paid for the interstate highway system. Today, relatively low taxes force us to borrow from the Chinese to fund two wars.

We are in a recession because we borrowed to prolong the party - and the wars. Well, the chickens have come home to roost.