Cha-ching!
The Oregon Legislature's current session is one sick puppy. The State Senate just vomited out a state income tax increase, which seems doomed to failure in the House. This looks to be about the same size as Measure 28, which you may recall failed miserably at the polls on a statewide basis just seven months ago.
Some estimates of what the new bill can be expected to cost individual taxpayers and married couples can be found here.
Members of the Oregon House now get to decide whether to raise taxes and go home, or to say no and stick around Salem, where it's starting to smell a little stale.
I predict they'll say no and stay. Unfortunately, this one won't be over until the governor shuts down the state government for a few days. Which is starting to sound like a good idea to me, actually.
| Posted at 1:19 PM | Permalink |
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Comments (1)
Well said J-Bog!
We have a kind of civil war going on in Oregon and it's pretty outrageous and dreary. Recall in the last election, with all the many rural counties voting for mannix/ Repubs, and all the few populous urban counties voting Dem, we have a bitter, decisive compete divide. More recently, rural rightwingers tried to pass a vindictive, meanspirited state law just to keep Portland from deciding on its own energy future free from Enron's vampiric creditors. I don't leap to simple world views, but it seems that the rural leaders constantly promote ideas that are bad for Oregon (example, give out kicker in a recession, example, pass a budget based on bonds, example, try again and again to destroy portland's urban growth boundary). I'm tired of it. I often feel that we're under siege.
After the election the new gov'nor talked about "we're one Oregon" but I haven't seen any substance to that. If we could somehow politically divide (a fantasy experiment), then maybe Portland could go its own happy prosperous way, perhaps picked once again by a prominant money mag as #1 for livability/desireability, while rural oregon can be #1 in hunger, #1 in joblessness, #1 in obesity. Sad, but maybe, without "satannic liberals" to blame, rural oregon could discover that its radical right ideologues have nothing but disaster to offer them.
Portland's like a powerful swimmer but there's a crazed fat redneck, rural oregon, clinging to our arms, using us to keep afloat, screaming at us, and punching us in the head. I'm getting a little tired of it, in case you couldn't notice.
Posted by ILP: I love Portland | August 19, 2003 3:37 PM