Oregon votes for healthcare tax increase

Oregonians this week voted overwhelmingly, by a 62 percent to 38 percent margin, to increase taxes for Medicaid.

In the era of Trump, where it's fashionable to spit on those less fortunate, Oregonians emphatically said bullshit to that by backing Measure 101.

Over that past 40 years, Americans have been conditioned to believe that tax cuts cure all ills. We're told that a giant tax cut like the corporate one that Congress barely passed in December, boosts the economy, reduces the deficit, decreases income inequality and reverses male pattern baldness.

We now know, thanks to Reagan's slash-and-burn tax cut of the 1980s, that the opposite actually occurs. Yes, bald men still roam the streets of this land.

The so-called "trickle-down" economics leaves us with a national deficit so impossibly large that it will eventually ruin the country. China owns us now.

Because we pay less federal taxes, we have crumbling infrastructure, unaffordable college education and income inequality the likes of which the world has never seen before.

Just three Americans, Bezos, Buffett and Gates, are worth more than the combined assets of 50 percent of their countrymen and women.

Worldwide, just 42 people own the same wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the population.

No wonder the Doomsday Clock is now just two minutes 'til midnight, or the hour of reckoning.

In Oregon, a 2016 report showed that the state ranks 29th in income inequality, with the Bend-Redmond corridor the worst metro area in the state.

And yet, Deschutes County, home to Bend and Redmond, voted 54 percent to 46 percent for Measure 101 on Tuesday. That is a profound shift from historical patterns here.

Naturally, the local daily newspaper along with the state's largest newspaper repeatedly urged Oregonians to vote "no" on the measure. This just shows how out of touch they are with their readerships and why they are hemorrhaging subscribers.

This county narrowly voted for Trump (46 percent) over Clinton (43 percent) in 2016, although Bend went with Hillary.

Deschutes joins seven other counties in Oregon that favored Trump in 2016 and said yes to Measure 101.

Even southern Oregon's Jackson County, a conservative stronghold, backed the tax increase.

This could bode well for Democrats in the November election. Perhaps even Greg Walden, the GOP congressman who represents the huge, rural 2nd District in Oregon, could be vulnerable this time around.

Wouldn't that be sweet.

Let the anti-Trump movement flourish.