Novick poll: Tax the rich to repair streets

– Portland Tribune, written by Jim Redden 

Commissioner Steve Novick has finally found a street fee that most Portlanders support — one that only the rich pay.

Novick and Mayor Charlie Hales have struggled for months to find a new source of revenue for funding street maintenance and safety improvement projects. They started by proposing a transportation user fee that assessed a flat monthly fee on households and a fee based on vehicle trips on nonresidential properties. Outraged reactions from residents, business owners and nonprofit organizations forced them to pull their proposal back for more work, however.

Now Novick has released a new poll that shows 60 percent of Portlanders supporting taxing those who earn more than $125,000 to pay for maintenance and safety projects…

That’s the highest level of support of any new revenue source measured by the poll…

Significantly, the majority of those who responded to the poll would not pay anything under the funding proposal they support…

Our Response & Your Comments

Yeah, that’s the ticket! Just tax the rich! They don’t pay their “Fair Share” anyway. Right?

Let’s see…According to the IRS, in 2011 the top 1% paid just over 35% of all Federal income taxes. Did they make that share of all earnings? No – their share of all Adjusted Gross Income was just under 19%.

How about the top 50%? They paid 97% of all income taxes paid.

And the bottom 50%? They paid about 3% of all Federal income taxes.

How’s that for “Fair”?

Now re-read the last paragraph (above). Like most people who want to “tax the rich”, Portlanders are just itching to raise taxes that somebody else will pay as long as the goodies the taxes buy go to them.

http://portlandtribune.com/pt/9-news/227788-90656-novick-poll-tax-the-rich-to-repair-streets

Comments are closed.