Should
Multnomah County residents choose to get rid of the income tax levied at
the county level last year?
That is what some have suggested in light of Ballot Measure 30, the vote
of the people that eliminated an $800 million-plus income tax surcharge.
Multnomah, along with 35 of 36 Oregon Counties, rejected Ballot Measure
30.
In addition to the vote on Feb. 3, payment of the additional
Multnomah tax has met wide resistance by its tax paying residents.
If such an action is taken, it would take the form of an initiative
petition. Sponsors would need to collect 14,714 valid signatures,
according to Multnomah County elections. That would then place the
initiative to place repeal of the tax before the voters.
State's version of the $250 hammer?
State of Oregon
Personal Service Contracts
Rep. Jeff Kropf (R-Sublimity) has
requested and received a line by line play-by-play of personal service
contracts for purchases made by a number of the largest departments for
the State of Oregon
How much did each of those Reimer
ergonomic office chairs cost (Line 94)?
What were all those Ford F350 trucks used for and were they necessary
when the state claims it is broke (Line 464-466)?
Oregon,
like most U.S. states, suffers from diminishing tax revenues and a
historical lack
of spending restraint.
Currently, Oregon has the dubious distinction of having the nation's 2nd
highest unemployment rate.
When people don't work,
both personal and business tax revenues suffer.
The state
budget increases have managed to far outpace personal income growth during good
times over the last decades. So now, legislators have the task of funding
or pulling back on those compounded,
excessive increases of the past.
And to date, there has been no real and aggressive review of waste and
vast counterproductive middle management positions. That's due, in part, because the tools are
not there to expose what is actually occurring within the departments'
budgets being reviewed.
Without the great benefits of ABC as a budget
clarifier, there is little possibility of legislators (or even department
heads) to see the true accounting picture of what is really being
produced by the departments, what is or is not a core function, and what
is the unit cost to perform functions that are even agreed upon that the
government should be doing in the first place.
The Oregon Legislature is crisis management with virtually useless
budgets. Legislators know this truth, but seem to ignore this underlying
principle, as most remain in the dark as to how to repair a broken system.
Hopefully, that latter fact will quickly change.
And while spending was
out of control then,
revenues have fallen off now. To make matters worse, the
revenue side has experienced an ongoing glut of special exemptions to the basic tax
structure. The current result is billions of dollars this biennium that are left
untaxed via a complicated patronage game
of playing favorites, as well as choosing incentives to create special
behavior patterns.
