Smith: Oregonians will be voting on another tax increase – this time, the largest tax increase in the history of the state, estimated to bring in an additional $3 billion per year in new revenue.
Dear NFIB/Oregon members,
I spend a lot of time both in the State Capitol building, lobbying for small business, and traveling the state listening to small-business owners—and what I hear are two different conversations.
When in the Capitol, the prevailing talk is, “What more could government do if only it had the resources to do it?” In conversations with Oregon small-business owners, however, I hear an inverted version of the same statement: “What more could we do with our business, if government wasn’t always changing the rules on us?”
Wasn’t it enough to raise Oregon’s minimum wage in 2002 and forever tie it to the Consumer Price Index? Evidently not. We now have a complicated three-tiered system based on different regions of the state, thanks to new legislation passed in 2016.
Weren’t the revenue reforms of 2010’s Measures 66 & 67 enough to ensure that all Oregonians pay their “fair share” in taxes? Again, just six years later Oregonians will be voting on another tax increase – this time, the largest tax increase in the history of the state, estimated to bring in an additional $3 billion per year in new revenue.
I can’t fault legislators for thinking the way they do. After all, they come to Salem specifically to deliver results for their constituents. But neither can you blame small-business owners – the economic engine of our state – for feeling the way they do.
Exacerbating the problem of an already slow economic recovery is the temptation for government to try and fix the problem with an old remedy: Spend more. To do that it needs to take more from the private, wealth-generating sector of the economy, thereby sapping job-growth and business expansion.
And here we have the big question of self-governance: How do we balance the needs of the public sector without overburdening the private sector? How much is “enough”?
Try asking this question of politicians whenever the opportunity arises, just to see what they say. The more tortured their answer, the more likely what they are really trying to say is “it’s never enough – we need more.”
Thank you for support – together we can change the conversation,
Anthony K. Smith
NFIB/Oregon State Director
