Greed in the New Gilded Age
By 
Oregon is a blue state, but like a lot of blue states, it has a lot of voters, especially in its wealthier classes, who believe Republicans have a lot of good points on the economy. Meanwhile, because Oregon is just purple enough that if you squint, you can pretend a Republican can win the governor’s race, which hasn’t happened in 40 years, the state’s political class wants to know what the rich corporate scum think. Will it shock you that the only way for Oregon to not be “anti-business,” according to the capitalist ghouls, is to give them all the money like Donald Trump was governor?
Gov. Tina Kotek’s Prosperity Council will meet May 15 in Eugene to finalize its recommendations for release next month.
But in advance of that meeting, the Oregon Journalism Project has obtained a confidential draft of the 16-member panel’s calls for action, and that draft proposes significant changes to Oregon’s tax system, which the document calls an unbalanced “one-and-a-half legged stool,” overly reliant on income taxes and a distorted property tax system and lacking a sales tax.
The 20-page draft includes 10 specific recommendations that it says are necessary to reform Oregon’s tax system and reverse the state’s economic ills.
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On the estate tax: The draft calls on Kotek and the Legislature to “reform Oregon’s estate tax,” which OJP has reported is the most aggressive of any of the 12 states (and the District of Columbia) that levy taxes when people die. The goal: “to align more closely with West Coast states in order to reduce the out-migration of Oregon-based business owners, investors and multigenerational family enterprises. This recommendation appears most clearly aimed at reducing current taxes.
On the corporate activities tax: The draft suggests that the tax—which acts as a corporate sales tax and raises $1.5 billion annually for schools—should be streamlined to reduce “pyramiding,” which stacks taxes as goods move through the supply chain.
Reconnecting to the federal tax code: In the February legislative session, lawmakers disconnected Oregon’s tax code from Trump-backed tax breaks related to depreciation of new capital investments and the sale of stock in small businesses. That saved Oregon about $300 million in revenue for the current biennium and the same amount over the following four years. That’s revenue the state would otherwise have forgone, so reconnecting would constitute a de facto tax cut.
Other tax reforms: The draft recommends looking longer term (in the 2029 legislative session) at a “consumption-based” (i.e., sales) tax, “property tax reforms,” and the elimination of “distortive unequal local tax regimes across the state.” That last item appears to refer to Multnomah County’s Preschool for All Tax, a big target of the business community. A recent study by Reed College finds more evidence that buttresses fears the tax is driving high income earners away.
In other words, if only Oregon was governed by Ron DeSantis, corporate leaders might be happy.