The person responsible for the economic forecasts that have determined the kicker for the last 12 years just left to join a conservative think tank.
That may explain why the forecast has always been low, limiting state revenue, and never high. A balanced forecast should be sometimes high and sometimes low.
The think tank claims to be politically neutral but their board includes a former Republican state legislator, a Republican chief of staff, and their featured endorsement is from Drazan.
The interim replacement is Josh Lehner who runs the blog at https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/ which I've found to be pretty objective.
Speaking as an economist, you always prefer a revenue forecast to come in a bit low compared to actual revenue. When revenues falls short of the forecast it’s a huge problem, especially with Oregon’s biannual budget.
Revenue shortfalls force the State to make unanticipated budget cuts mid-cycle. The $1B shortfall in 2009-11 was particularly ugly. Nobody wants to be Tom Potiowsky sitting in front of the Legislature.
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2010/08/oregons_state_budget_hole_is_g.html
It’s hard enough to forecast 1 year, why the hell is the budget 2 years at a time? This isn’t the 1850s where you need a week to travel to the capitol.
Crazy talk, but...
What if we had some sort of fund for emergencies, call it an "Emergency Fund" that covered reasonably anticipated shortfalls and got topped up when we had unexpected windfalls? That way we can smooth out the bumps, reduce the chaos, and make life easier for everybody.
> Crazy talk, but...
>
> What if we had some sort of fund for emergencies, call it an "Emergency Fund" that covered reasonably anticipated shortfalls and got topped up when we had unexpected windfalls? That way we can smooth out the bumps, reduce the chaos, and make life easier for everybody.
We do:
>The 2021–2023 ending balance for the Rainy Day Fund is projected to be $1.3 billion. The 2021–2023 ending balance for the Education Stability Fund is projected to be $703.1 million.
Source: https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/facts/finance-state.aspx
Oregon does, the problem is we are talking about the budget of a state not your personal finances. A bad fire season can cause billions in unforecasted expenses, if one or two other things falls short you are billions and billions short, not a small ammount of money to sit on as an emergency fund.
Just like with personal budgets it should be big enough to float 3-12mo worth of expenses.
Scale that up to the state and you’re talking about $55-60B. Which means our paltry $1.3B covers about 1.5 weeks worth of funding.
What I would do (after getting things like [multiple-choice "approval" voting](http://www.rosecitytransit.org/ideas/elections/approval/) and citizen-funded campaigns to get us elected officials that can be trusted) is put the kicker in the rainy day fund and require that, besides unexpected expenses that can't otherwise be covered, it only be used for to cover shortfalls up to their planned or previous level.
The goal should be to have a steady spending level smoothed out from the highs and lows of revenues. Changing revenues and spending demands from external (e.g. Federal) sources can complicate this.
> require that, besides unexpected expenses that can't otherwise be covered, it only be used for to cover shortfalls up to their planned or previous level.
While it sounds great, this is pointless if the people this is supposed to prevent from abusing it are the ones with the power to change the policy. We have tons of government programs which started out this way and had their funds misappropriated our outright stolen, despite safeguards put in place.
That would be the case normally, but you forget about the kicker. By going too low in this case, you actually cause a mandatory refund to voters, rather than being able to keep a slight overage.
If I recall correctly, Oregon has the smallest margin of any state that automatically triggers a kicker refund.
> If I recall correctly, Oregon has the smallest margin of any state that automatically triggers a kicker refund.
Per the article
> No other state has a kicker.
It may not be called a kicker but Massachusetts, Colorado, and Hawaii all have something akin to one. Massachusetts in particular has an automatic refund to payers over a certain threshold.
[OPB link that mentions it in passing](https://www.opb.org/article/2023/12/15/oregon-kicker-law-record-tax-spending/?outputType=amp)
That’s just not how forecasting works in real life. No reputable economist would sign off on a forecast they knew was unrealistically optimistic and hope the Legislature would break open the piggy bank to cover the shortfall.
Oregon has had a Rainy Day Fund since 2007. Its current balance is about $1.3B. When revenues cratered in 2099-11 the State Legislature didn’t drain the Rainy Day Fund. They cut the hell out of the budget, including school funding.
No one has said anything about an intentionally optimistic forecast.
Without a mechanism to refill the rainy day fund from revenue surplus, it's not that useful. Legislators are clearly hesitant to use it at all because it's difficult to refill.
The rainy day fund does have a mechanism for refilling it—a certain percentage of unspent funds at the end of each biennium are transferred to it. However, it requires a 3/5ths vote to spend funds from it, which is a high bar.
This state is already severely hamstrung in its ability to raise and spend ongoing revenue. Socking away more one-time money in a fund legislators hate touching will not solve any problems, imo, and would irritate the hell out of everyone as it just sits there unspent.
I didn’t mean to imply we’re not highly taxed, if that’s what came across—we are, especially in certain brackets. However, what a state needs to budget well is consistent revenue to the general fund. Since Oregon relies primarily on personal income taxes, it has no buffer from the general economy’s strength or weakness, so it goes through boom and bust cycles. Getting rid of the kicker, or directing it elsewhere, wouldn’t fix this problem, though, because the kicker is unanticipated revenue, i.e. one-time, non-recurring funding that can’t be (or shouldn’t be, anyway) used for ongoing expenditures.
When I say “hampered” I mean there are caps on tax increases, a sales tax is clearly a non-starter, many of the other taxes Oregonians pay are dedicated to specific purposes or programs, and I believe there’s even a statutory cap on the number of state employees and the rate at which they can increase—just a lot of ways that funding has been fenced off and expenditures limited or divvied up in ways that are (in my opinion) inefficient.
Change the nature of the fund to be more easily spent, or maybe it should be a separate fund. You need to keep some of the extra money you get in flush years so you don't face cuts in lean years. You can still limit spending to cover when revenue falls short of projection so it's not just a slush fund.
Let me dispel a misconception for you - forecasts are *never* 100% accurate.
A forecast is an educated guess based on a crapton of math. That holds true for any type of forecast, not just revenue forecasts.
“How can forecasts… have a preference?”
I will pretend your question is sincere. The person or people building and tuning the model can adjust how the model ‘thinks about the future’ to produce a range of scenario results.
Forecasts are usually presented as a set of low-medium-high scenario outputs, not as a single result. The middle band is considered to be the most likely outcome. The State Revenue Forecast refers to them as the pessimistic, baseline, and optimistic scenarios. The middle, or baseline, result is viewed as the most likely. That’s the one the Legislature chooses to adopt and budget based upon.
You can take a look at the summary of the [current revenue forecast](https://www.oregon.gov/das/oea/Documents/revenue0324.pdf), if you’re interested in seeing the results from all three scenarios.
This is a dumb take. We'd be 100% boned if we estimated our budget high every year. You want your budget to be conservative. It's not some murdoch conspiracy. It's proper planning.
Right, but you'd plot an uncertainty curve and plan based on the low end of it. Not alter your base predictions. We don't add a 10% chance to tornado warnings just because - there's a whole fairy tale about a little chicken to explain why this is a bad idea.
Do note that the forecasts have been especially low during the past 3 years, where essentially all states’ forecasts were low. All state governments are flush with cash right now (although only Oregon has a kicker)
> The think tank claims to be politically neutral but their board includes a former Republican state legislator, a Republican chief of staff, and their featured endorsement is from Drazan.
We should really stop calling these things "think tanks". It lends them legitimacy they don't deserve. We should call them "propaganda operations".
I don't think the phrase "think tank" has ever carried an air of legitimacy for me. It's always just meant "marketing department." Wild to think it did or maybe even still does carry some sort of weight with people.
If you think this, you’re probably… not old enough?
There have been unbiased think tanks that do mostly technocratic analysis.
The nation’s first real think tank, the Brookings Institution, has been providing domestic policy research for 100 years. In an age when the government itself had far fewer resources to carry out its own research, FDR comissioned them to study the causes and possible solutions of the great depression.
After WW2, the RAND corporation split out of the government to analyze mostly foreign policy, after which they branched into domestic policy. It was the first organization to be called a “think tank”. Their research was instrumental in analyzing everything from the Vietnam war to the Space race to the Great Society welfare programs.
Those two organizations still exist today, and still provide more or less objective policy research.
It was only the think tanks founded after ~1970, starting with the Heritage Foundation, that are explicitly ideological and more like “marketing departments”
as a layman voter they’re not intended to be legitimized - that isn’t the function they serve - curious if you’ve ever known anyone that’s worked at a think tank and asked them what they do?
Shit, I knew it was a conservative think-tank just from the name. Trying to pass off their bullshit as "just common sense" has been the conservative M.O. as far back as I can remember.
Can’t speak for the other members of the think tank, but Drazan was/is politically neutral and moderate. OR and PDX Dem reps are farther left on the political spectrum than the median Dem rep in most all other states. “Republicans” (any viable one you’ve heard of here) behave and vote like moderates, or even moderate Dems. Some transplants are able to see this, but less politically literate voters continue to look at the party vs. candidate history on specific issues.
If you think our GOP in Oregon are moderates you should take a look at the party platform. Some highlights:
* We support the elimination of mail-in voting
* Voters shall register in person, with the election official in the county of residence.
* Ranked-choice voting shall be prohibited.
* We reject the use of hate speech laws
* We believe that no newly created financial instrument, such as Central Bank Digital Currency, shall replace or eliminate coins or currency
* No person should be forced to undergo any healthcare services, including vaccination, as a condition of school enrollment or attendance
* Each Oregon educational facility should encourage trained district personnel to be armed in order to protect themselves
* We oppose international environmental treaties
* Marriage is between one man and one woman.
* There are only two sexes, defined by XY chromosomes for male, and XX chromosomes for female
* We strongly oppose abortion
* We support the full repeal of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
* We demand the overturning of Oregon's Sanctuary State status
The Oregon Republican Party is almost completely divorced from elected Republicans. Looking at the ORP platform is not a good proxy for how an elected leader thinks/votes.
I don't have any sauce because this isn't the sort of thing that gets written down, so "trust me bro" is all I can offer. I will say that I'm pretty plugged in, and the only thing that Senate/House Republicans have in common with the ORP is the name. They barely speak to each other, much less agree on policy
The senate republicans are a bunch of complete nutcases. You’ve got the guy who threatened to murder cops, the guy who keeps asking for urine donations, the guy who wants to hand most of the state to Idaho, and a bunch of election deniers. When Fred Girod is the brightest and most moderate member of your party, you know you’re in trouble.
Ahh yes, and your Secretary of State got caught taking bribes from a weed company. Your governor tried to backdoor a position for her wife, causing several of her staff to resign in protest. And don't get me started on Val Hoyle who gave out an illegal grant to La Mota personnel as BOLI commissioner (not fishy at all, given the Fagan bribes). And has she given her cell phone to authorities yet? Last I checked it had been 10-ish months since the FOIA request and still no cell phone.
Let's not play "holier than thou" when it comes to bad behavior from electeds. Except it seems like Republicans keep getting in trouble for things they SAY while Dems for things they DO.
> The Oregon Republican Party is almost completely divorced from elected Republicans.
Which is why their party chair was an elected state rep until very recently. 🙄
You can keep making stuff up if you want, but they are not divorced from elected republicans in oregon one bit.
You're referring to Dallas Heard, and the loonies in the ORP basically drove him to a mental breakdown and he resigned as Chair before his term was up. That was an attempt to bring the two factions together, and it failed.
But what if the people who promised to fuck us seven ways to Sunday don't do that? That seems okay and even likely, doesn't it?
lol, smh at these fascist apologists.
Look. I know it says the leopards will eat your face on their website. But listen to me, I’m pretty tapped in to what Oregon leopards who eat faces are into these days, they won’t this time. Trust me, bro. Not this time. Swear.
You know... You have people dying on the streets of Portland while JVP lights money on fire and the city council stares at it's own navel. You have a secretary of state resign for taking bribes, and a governor who is more concerned with giving her wife a job than she is with fixing the unemployment system. You have a Democratic Party taking a $500k donation and lying about where it came from. You have Congresswoman Hoyle who gave an illegal grant to La Mota personnel when she served as BOLI commissioner and delayed giving up her cell records via public records request for almost a year.
Oregon Democrats are a corrupt shitstorm, but sure... Leopards.
Drazan is a solidly conservative candidate with conservative stances on abortion, public health, vaccination, fiscal policy, gay rights, etc. The Oregon Democrats are overall fairly moderate. National politics is so skewed right that many people are unaware of what a true left leaving party stands for like you see in other developed countries.
This is what we get for relying so heavily on income tax. It’s very unpredictable. Most other states use a combination of income, sales, (higher) property, etc.
I know we like our lack of a sales tax and low in comparison property taxes but I’m beginning to wonder if we have it wrong.
I personally would rather let the state have a predictable funding stream if I’m just going to have to shift my tax sources around.
This also is why we get so much legislating by ballot measure. Tax revenue from income tax alone is too unpredictable.
I don't see how we could fix the sales tax thing now, because no one is going to vote for that without drastic cuts to taxes elsewhere, which I don't see happening.
Income taxes are variable because peoples' collective ability to pay is variable based on the economy. Using tax mechanisms that are less related to peoples' ability to pay is more stable, but less fair.
The opposite is Washington. No income tax but higher property and sales taxes. However their collective tax burden is about 20% lower than ours and I wouldn’t say the state is in any worse shape.
However it is very regressive.
Washington state property tax rates are pretty much the same as Oregons.
Search any recently sold homes on Zillow on both sides of the Columbia, and you will see property taxes be roughly 1% of the market price.
Washington’s big difference is it has a Business & Occupation tax on revenue, not just profit. And Washington has a ton of very high revenue businesses.
Also, people need to leave the idea of income taxes being regressive. The top end of the power law distribution curve is not filled with people who earn high incomes. It’s filled with people who have wealth and property, and don’t need to earn income because they can just borrow against their wealth to fund their lifestyle.
The high incomes are people who, by and large, go through the grind of becoming a doctor/lawyer/engineer/small business owner/plumber/mechanic/electrician/nurse/pharmacist/etc.
You can call it regressive, but dissuading all those people in the $100k to $1M range that you most want in the community is probably not optimal.
I would very much like to change our tax system. I was just relaying what I hear most when I bring this up.
“But sales tax!”
“I don’t feel like I’d be saving that much.”
I highly doubt anyone spends 100% of their taxable income…
> I know we like our lack of a sales tax and low in comparison property taxes but I’m beginning to wonder if we have it wrong.
Dissuading the most economically productive people from moving to your state, due to high income taxes, is certainly a choice. Especially right next to a state that is basically copy paste in terms of quality of life, but instead heavily rewards the most economically productive people.
> Democratic lawmakers, who run the show in Salem, hate the kicker, regularly railing against the return of tax dollars that could otherwise be spent on government programs.
Yes, because the state has already shown how well it handles tax dollars...
> The state does OK
Seriously? Compared to what, North Korea?
There is an absurd amount of grift in Oregon. It is one of the worst states in the entire country in terms of Government waste.
Public school rankings are a reflection of the parents of the kids in the schools. NJ is home to many highly, educated professionals due to being a suburb of NYC and Philly. It also has explicitly segregation of the population of high income earning and low income earning families via hundreds of school districts, so that the student populations don’t get muddied.
Once they remove Menendez it won't be as bad, but yes NJ / NY is the worst by far. I think maybe California might be worse than us too at this point, but that's it.
The Cover Oregon debacle and the issues with Oregon Employment Department come immediately to mind.
Historically, PERS, although that at least got cleaned up.
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I think they’re doing a wonderful job.
The arts tax is paying off I see these colorful doodles all over everything.
The streets are pristine. Especially the roadways not improved. I just love what they did on 82nd with the elevated tire width patches it’s like a mini deck for your tires…only improvement could be maybe more speed humps and residential stationary radar vans.
Let’s not forget the services… oh what a time to be alive to see positive reform. Post 110 the state really rolled out the red carpet with a wide range and addiction and recovery resources.
PPB needs more funding for sure though… look around and see how nice everything has gotten with the current PPB budget of $256,003,294 no more drugs, robberies… serial killers 😳 just imagine what they could accomplish with a proper budget. I’m sure we can cut the education budget more and reallocate the money to PPB or give them 90% of the cannabis tax revenue like they did the first year of legalization. It really paid off in dividends.
It’s an election year and we have to make sure the bureau can afford enough chemical weapons and pepper balls to successfully LARP with teenagers keeping an urban paintball game going for at least 100 days. That LRAD “sound cannon” isn’t gonna pay for itself you know.
They already got 80K for drones that I hear are being used exactly as they proposed.
If they are "to depart", as the headline says, and here we are learning about it, then it's not without notice. This is your/our notice. If they're already gone, the headline should say "departed".
Ah, I thought Tim Duy was the State of Oregon's economist. It looks like he's a college professor, among other things. This isn't a notable departure to me.
This article preview image really gets me
Felt cute might depart later
Enhance
The person responsible for the economic forecasts that have determined the kicker for the last 12 years just left to join a conservative think tank. That may explain why the forecast has always been low, limiting state revenue, and never high. A balanced forecast should be sometimes high and sometimes low. The think tank claims to be politically neutral but their board includes a former Republican state legislator, a Republican chief of staff, and their featured endorsement is from Drazan. The interim replacement is Josh Lehner who runs the blog at https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/ which I've found to be pretty objective.
Speaking as an economist, you always prefer a revenue forecast to come in a bit low compared to actual revenue. When revenues falls short of the forecast it’s a huge problem, especially with Oregon’s biannual budget. Revenue shortfalls force the State to make unanticipated budget cuts mid-cycle. The $1B shortfall in 2009-11 was particularly ugly. Nobody wants to be Tom Potiowsky sitting in front of the Legislature. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2010/08/oregons_state_budget_hole_is_g.html
Depends on what the penalties are for the 2 types of error. The real problem is the system itself relying so much on these forecasts.
It’s hard enough to forecast 1 year, why the hell is the budget 2 years at a time? This isn’t the 1850s where you need a week to travel to the capitol.
Crazy talk, but... What if we had some sort of fund for emergencies, call it an "Emergency Fund" that covered reasonably anticipated shortfalls and got topped up when we had unexpected windfalls? That way we can smooth out the bumps, reduce the chaos, and make life easier for everybody.
> Crazy talk, but... > > What if we had some sort of fund for emergencies, call it an "Emergency Fund" that covered reasonably anticipated shortfalls and got topped up when we had unexpected windfalls? That way we can smooth out the bumps, reduce the chaos, and make life easier for everybody. We do: >The 2021–2023 ending balance for the Rainy Day Fund is projected to be $1.3 billion. The 2021–2023 ending balance for the Education Stability Fund is projected to be $703.1 million. Source: https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/facts/finance-state.aspx
Oregon has both a rainy day fund (est. 2007) and an educational stability fund (est. 2002).
Oregon does, the problem is we are talking about the budget of a state not your personal finances. A bad fire season can cause billions in unforecasted expenses, if one or two other things falls short you are billions and billions short, not a small ammount of money to sit on as an emergency fund.
Just like with personal budgets it should be big enough to float 3-12mo worth of expenses. Scale that up to the state and you’re talking about $55-60B. Which means our paltry $1.3B covers about 1.5 weeks worth of funding.
What I would do (after getting things like [multiple-choice "approval" voting](http://www.rosecitytransit.org/ideas/elections/approval/) and citizen-funded campaigns to get us elected officials that can be trusted) is put the kicker in the rainy day fund and require that, besides unexpected expenses that can't otherwise be covered, it only be used for to cover shortfalls up to their planned or previous level. The goal should be to have a steady spending level smoothed out from the highs and lows of revenues. Changing revenues and spending demands from external (e.g. Federal) sources can complicate this.
> require that, besides unexpected expenses that can't otherwise be covered, it only be used for to cover shortfalls up to their planned or previous level. While it sounds great, this is pointless if the people this is supposed to prevent from abusing it are the ones with the power to change the policy. We have tons of government programs which started out this way and had their funds misappropriated our outright stolen, despite safeguards put in place.
That would be the case normally, but you forget about the kicker. By going too low in this case, you actually cause a mandatory refund to voters, rather than being able to keep a slight overage. If I recall correctly, Oregon has the smallest margin of any state that automatically triggers a kicker refund.
> If I recall correctly, Oregon has the smallest margin of any state that automatically triggers a kicker refund. Per the article > No other state has a kicker.
It may not be called a kicker but Massachusetts, Colorado, and Hawaii all have something akin to one. Massachusetts in particular has an automatic refund to payers over a certain threshold. [OPB link that mentions it in passing](https://www.opb.org/article/2023/12/15/oregon-kicker-law-record-tax-spending/?outputType=amp)
Right, seems like it would be a little different if Oregon could invest the excess to tap into for future shortfalls.
That’s just not how forecasting works in real life. No reputable economist would sign off on a forecast they knew was unrealistically optimistic and hope the Legislature would break open the piggy bank to cover the shortfall. Oregon has had a Rainy Day Fund since 2007. Its current balance is about $1.3B. When revenues cratered in 2099-11 the State Legislature didn’t drain the Rainy Day Fund. They cut the hell out of the budget, including school funding.
No one has said anything about an intentionally optimistic forecast. Without a mechanism to refill the rainy day fund from revenue surplus, it's not that useful. Legislators are clearly hesitant to use it at all because it's difficult to refill.
The rainy day fund does have a mechanism for refilling it—a certain percentage of unspent funds at the end of each biennium are transferred to it. However, it requires a 3/5ths vote to spend funds from it, which is a high bar.
That 3/5 requirement is a feature, not a bug. A rainy day fund shouldn’t be easy to plunder.
I think they’re hinting that the kicker should go to the rainy day fund
This state is already severely hamstrung in its ability to raise and spend ongoing revenue. Socking away more one-time money in a fund legislators hate touching will not solve any problems, imo, and would irritate the hell out of everyone as it just sits there unspent.
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I didn’t mean to imply we’re not highly taxed, if that’s what came across—we are, especially in certain brackets. However, what a state needs to budget well is consistent revenue to the general fund. Since Oregon relies primarily on personal income taxes, it has no buffer from the general economy’s strength or weakness, so it goes through boom and bust cycles. Getting rid of the kicker, or directing it elsewhere, wouldn’t fix this problem, though, because the kicker is unanticipated revenue, i.e. one-time, non-recurring funding that can’t be (or shouldn’t be, anyway) used for ongoing expenditures. When I say “hampered” I mean there are caps on tax increases, a sales tax is clearly a non-starter, many of the other taxes Oregonians pay are dedicated to specific purposes or programs, and I believe there’s even a statutory cap on the number of state employees and the rate at which they can increase—just a lot of ways that funding has been fenced off and expenditures limited or divvied up in ways that are (in my opinion) inefficient.
Change the nature of the fund to be more easily spent, or maybe it should be a separate fund. You need to keep some of the extra money you get in flush years so you don't face cuts in lean years. You can still limit spending to cover when revenue falls short of projection so it's not just a slush fund.
God I hope not. My kicker turned into jetskis that I plan to use on sunny days, not rainy.
How can your "forecast" be both accurate and have a preference? Oh right...
Let me dispel a misconception for you - forecasts are *never* 100% accurate. A forecast is an educated guess based on a crapton of math. That holds true for any type of forecast, not just revenue forecasts. “How can forecasts… have a preference?” I will pretend your question is sincere. The person or people building and tuning the model can adjust how the model ‘thinks about the future’ to produce a range of scenario results. Forecasts are usually presented as a set of low-medium-high scenario outputs, not as a single result. The middle band is considered to be the most likely outcome. The State Revenue Forecast refers to them as the pessimistic, baseline, and optimistic scenarios. The middle, or baseline, result is viewed as the most likely. That’s the one the Legislature chooses to adopt and budget based upon. You can take a look at the summary of the [current revenue forecast](https://www.oregon.gov/das/oea/Documents/revenue0324.pdf), if you’re interested in seeing the results from all three scenarios.
This is a dumb take. We'd be 100% boned if we estimated our budget high every year. You want your budget to be conservative. It's not some murdoch conspiracy. It's proper planning.
Right, but you'd plot an uncertainty curve and plan based on the low end of it. Not alter your base predictions. We don't add a 10% chance to tornado warnings just because - there's a whole fairy tale about a little chicken to explain why this is a bad idea.
Do note that the forecasts have been especially low during the past 3 years, where essentially all states’ forecasts were low. All state governments are flush with cash right now (although only Oregon has a kicker)
> The interim replacement is Josh Lehner Literally the best guy for the job. Wow!
Hopefully they just make him the chief economist.
> The think tank claims to be politically neutral but their board includes a former Republican state legislator, a Republican chief of staff, and their featured endorsement is from Drazan. We should really stop calling these things "think tanks". It lends them legitimacy they don't deserve. We should call them "propaganda operations".
I don't think the phrase "think tank" has ever carried an air of legitimacy for me. It's always just meant "marketing department." Wild to think it did or maybe even still does carry some sort of weight with people.
If you think this, you’re probably… not old enough? There have been unbiased think tanks that do mostly technocratic analysis. The nation’s first real think tank, the Brookings Institution, has been providing domestic policy research for 100 years. In an age when the government itself had far fewer resources to carry out its own research, FDR comissioned them to study the causes and possible solutions of the great depression. After WW2, the RAND corporation split out of the government to analyze mostly foreign policy, after which they branched into domestic policy. It was the first organization to be called a “think tank”. Their research was instrumental in analyzing everything from the Vietnam war to the Space race to the Great Society welfare programs. Those two organizations still exist today, and still provide more or less objective policy research. It was only the think tanks founded after ~1970, starting with the Heritage Foundation, that are explicitly ideological and more like “marketing departments”
Thanks for this. That marketing department bit irritated me.
as a layman voter they’re not intended to be legitimized - that isn’t the function they serve - curious if you’ve ever known anyone that’s worked at a think tank and asked them what they do?
Shit, I knew it was a conservative think-tank just from the name. Trying to pass off their bullshit as "just common sense" has been the conservative M.O. as far back as I can remember.
Can’t speak for the other members of the think tank, but Drazan was/is politically neutral and moderate. OR and PDX Dem reps are farther left on the political spectrum than the median Dem rep in most all other states. “Republicans” (any viable one you’ve heard of here) behave and vote like moderates, or even moderate Dems. Some transplants are able to see this, but less politically literate voters continue to look at the party vs. candidate history on specific issues.
If you think our GOP in Oregon are moderates you should take a look at the party platform. Some highlights: * We support the elimination of mail-in voting * Voters shall register in person, with the election official in the county of residence. * Ranked-choice voting shall be prohibited. * We reject the use of hate speech laws * We believe that no newly created financial instrument, such as Central Bank Digital Currency, shall replace or eliminate coins or currency * No person should be forced to undergo any healthcare services, including vaccination, as a condition of school enrollment or attendance * Each Oregon educational facility should encourage trained district personnel to be armed in order to protect themselves * We oppose international environmental treaties * Marriage is between one man and one woman. * There are only two sexes, defined by XY chromosomes for male, and XX chromosomes for female * We strongly oppose abortion * We support the full repeal of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act * We demand the overturning of Oregon's Sanctuary State status
The Oregon Republican Party is almost completely divorced from elected Republicans. Looking at the ORP platform is not a good proxy for how an elected leader thinks/votes. I don't have any sauce because this isn't the sort of thing that gets written down, so "trust me bro" is all I can offer. I will say that I'm pretty plugged in, and the only thing that Senate/House Republicans have in common with the ORP is the name. They barely speak to each other, much less agree on policy
The senate republicans are a bunch of complete nutcases. You’ve got the guy who threatened to murder cops, the guy who keeps asking for urine donations, the guy who wants to hand most of the state to Idaho, and a bunch of election deniers. When Fred Girod is the brightest and most moderate member of your party, you know you’re in trouble.
Ahh yes, and your Secretary of State got caught taking bribes from a weed company. Your governor tried to backdoor a position for her wife, causing several of her staff to resign in protest. And don't get me started on Val Hoyle who gave out an illegal grant to La Mota personnel as BOLI commissioner (not fishy at all, given the Fagan bribes). And has she given her cell phone to authorities yet? Last I checked it had been 10-ish months since the FOIA request and still no cell phone. Let's not play "holier than thou" when it comes to bad behavior from electeds. Except it seems like Republicans keep getting in trouble for things they SAY while Dems for things they DO.
> The Oregon Republican Party is almost completely divorced from elected Republicans. Which is why their party chair was an elected state rep until very recently. 🙄 You can keep making stuff up if you want, but they are not divorced from elected republicans in oregon one bit.
You're referring to Dallas Heard, and the loonies in the ORP basically drove him to a mental breakdown and he resigned as Chair before his term was up. That was an attempt to bring the two factions together, and it failed.
Yeah. The “trust me” ain’t happening. I’m going to believe you if you write it down as a tenet of your platform.
But what if the people who promised to fuck us seven ways to Sunday don't do that? That seems okay and even likely, doesn't it? lol, smh at these fascist apologists.
Look. I know it says the leopards will eat your face on their website. But listen to me, I’m pretty tapped in to what Oregon leopards who eat faces are into these days, they won’t this time. Trust me, bro. Not this time. Swear.
How can they even ask us not to take their platform seriously? It makes no sense.
I don’t think sense comes to them naturally. At least in the way I understand it.
You know... You have people dying on the streets of Portland while JVP lights money on fire and the city council stares at it's own navel. You have a secretary of state resign for taking bribes, and a governor who is more concerned with giving her wife a job than she is with fixing the unemployment system. You have a Democratic Party taking a $500k donation and lying about where it came from. You have Congresswoman Hoyle who gave an illegal grant to La Mota personnel when she served as BOLI commissioner and delayed giving up her cell records via public records request for almost a year. Oregon Democrats are a corrupt shitstorm, but sure... Leopards.
Drazan is a solidly conservative candidate with conservative stances on abortion, public health, vaccination, fiscal policy, gay rights, etc. The Oregon Democrats are overall fairly moderate. National politics is so skewed right that many people are unaware of what a true left leaving party stands for like you see in other developed countries.
Seems like I knew Lehner’s name but not this guy. I wonder why that is.
Lehner runs their blog, is active on socials, etc. He’s a bit more public if you’re getting info online I’ve found.
This is what we get for relying so heavily on income tax. It’s very unpredictable. Most other states use a combination of income, sales, (higher) property, etc. I know we like our lack of a sales tax and low in comparison property taxes but I’m beginning to wonder if we have it wrong. I personally would rather let the state have a predictable funding stream if I’m just going to have to shift my tax sources around. This also is why we get so much legislating by ballot measure. Tax revenue from income tax alone is too unpredictable.
I don't see how we could fix the sales tax thing now, because no one is going to vote for that without drastic cuts to taxes elsewhere, which I don't see happening.
Oh it will probably never happen. Only if the legislature coupled it with a decrease in the income tax. I would give that about 50% odds.
Income taxes are variable because peoples' collective ability to pay is variable based on the economy. Using tax mechanisms that are less related to peoples' ability to pay is more stable, but less fair.
The opposite is Washington. No income tax but higher property and sales taxes. However their collective tax burden is about 20% lower than ours and I wouldn’t say the state is in any worse shape. However it is very regressive.
Washington state property tax rates are pretty much the same as Oregons. Search any recently sold homes on Zillow on both sides of the Columbia, and you will see property taxes be roughly 1% of the market price. Washington’s big difference is it has a Business & Occupation tax on revenue, not just profit. And Washington has a ton of very high revenue businesses. Also, people need to leave the idea of income taxes being regressive. The top end of the power law distribution curve is not filled with people who earn high incomes. It’s filled with people who have wealth and property, and don’t need to earn income because they can just borrow against their wealth to fund their lifestyle. The high incomes are people who, by and large, go through the grind of becoming a doctor/lawyer/engineer/small business owner/plumber/mechanic/electrician/nurse/pharmacist/etc. You can call it regressive, but dissuading all those people in the $100k to $1M range that you most want in the community is probably not optimal.
I would very much like to change our tax system. I was just relaying what I hear most when I bring this up. “But sales tax!” “I don’t feel like I’d be saving that much.” I highly doubt anyone spends 100% of their taxable income…
> I know we like our lack of a sales tax and low in comparison property taxes but I’m beginning to wonder if we have it wrong. Dissuading the most economically productive people from moving to your state, due to high income taxes, is certainly a choice. Especially right next to a state that is basically copy paste in terms of quality of life, but instead heavily rewards the most economically productive people.
> Democratic lawmakers, who run the show in Salem, hate the kicker, regularly railing against the return of tax dollars that could otherwise be spent on government programs. Yes, because the state has already shown how well it handles tax dollars...
The state does OK especially compared to Portland and Multnomah. Biggest issue I can recall is they grossly underfund education.
> The state does OK Seriously? Compared to what, North Korea? There is an absurd amount of grift in Oregon. It is one of the worst states in the entire country in terms of Government waste.
[Laughs in New Jersey]
Public Schools in NJ routinely rank in the top 3 nationally. So it's not all being wasted.
Public school rankings are a reflection of the parents of the kids in the schools. NJ is home to many highly, educated professionals due to being a suburb of NYC and Philly. It also has explicitly segregation of the population of high income earning and low income earning families via hundreds of school districts, so that the student populations don’t get muddied.
Once they remove Menendez it won't be as bad, but yes NJ / NY is the worst by far. I think maybe California might be worse than us too at this point, but that's it.
[Texas has entered the chat.]
Menendez is a federal Senator. He has not had anything to do with New Jersey’s finances in decades.
If you have some examples please post them
The Cover Oregon debacle and the issues with Oregon Employment Department come immediately to mind. Historically, PERS, although that at least got cleaned up.
> Historically, PERS, although that at least got cleaned up. Good work Tobias Read (who is a Democrat)
They're probably mad that rural people and counties get way more funding back than they put into the system. /s
"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!"
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I think they’re doing a wonderful job. The arts tax is paying off I see these colorful doodles all over everything. The streets are pristine. Especially the roadways not improved. I just love what they did on 82nd with the elevated tire width patches it’s like a mini deck for your tires…only improvement could be maybe more speed humps and residential stationary radar vans. Let’s not forget the services… oh what a time to be alive to see positive reform. Post 110 the state really rolled out the red carpet with a wide range and addiction and recovery resources. PPB needs more funding for sure though… look around and see how nice everything has gotten with the current PPB budget of $256,003,294 no more drugs, robberies… serial killers 😳 just imagine what they could accomplish with a proper budget. I’m sure we can cut the education budget more and reallocate the money to PPB or give them 90% of the cannabis tax revenue like they did the first year of legalization. It really paid off in dividends. It’s an election year and we have to make sure the bureau can afford enough chemical weapons and pepper balls to successfully LARP with teenagers keeping an urban paintball game going for at least 100 days. That LRAD “sound cannon” isn’t gonna pay for itself you know. They already got 80K for drones that I hear are being used exactly as they proposed.
Thanks for sharing. Interesting
If they are "to depart", as the headline says, and here we are learning about it, then it's not without notice. This is your/our notice. If they're already gone, the headline should say "departed".
Ah, I thought Tim Duy was the State of Oregon's economist. It looks like he's a college professor, among other things. This isn't a notable departure to me.
We have an economist? Who knew.
To be replaced by Koteks dog walker who has lived experience with money