Legislative Special Session Report
Salem – …The carefully balanced, bipartisan package, which Gov. John Kitzhaber and key lawmakers have been working on since late last year, centers on curbing public employee pension costs and some targeted tax increases. Also included in the deal to garner more Republican support are a tax cut for certain businesses…
The Register Guard, October 3, 2013
Lane Solutions Responds and Leave Your Comments
Gosh, Don’t You Wish You Were as Smart as These Guys?
“Targeted tax increases” and cuts for “certain businesses.” Sounds good – Tax hikes for schools and cuts to help some businesses.
But who‘s doing the “targeting” and which are the “certain” businesses?
This is where government always runs into trouble. Because when it comes to picking winners and losers it does a very bad job.
“Targeting” is what got us Solyndra, Brightsource and Geothermal – who went belly up with more than $2.2 Billion of your tax dollars. These and other greenies burn through upwards of $5 Billion in “targeted” subsidies yearly. And that’s not counting 600,000 birds chopped up annually in windmills.
What do we get for these diced birds and billions of bucks? Excluding hydropower, less than 1/10 of our energy.
Why “targeting” fails:
- No group of people (even wizard politicians) can direct the economy, which is a result of billions of individual decisions each day.
- It usually rewards friends or punishes enemies;
- Politicians target with your money. So what if they lose it?
As for “certain businesses”: This usually means “In my district,” “Gave me money,” or our favorite – “My brother in law.”
So – Don’t worry if you’re not smart enough to target other people’s money or figure who should pay what taxes. Neither are they!
PERS was not reformed, it was tinkered with a little in an attempt to make the average tax payer think that they were doing something. This is another one of those deals that was done way ahead of time and all the actors played their parts. There are so many things wrong with PERS that it is hard to know where to begin on fixing it, but the first thing I would do is remove the Judges and the Legislatures from PERS. The Governor should also have a separate plan as well as the Attorney General. This would rid the state of conflict of interest issues and reduce corruption slightly. The next thing that needs to be done is each employee needs to contribute to their PERS. Go back to the plan before 1980 when employees matched the state contribution of 6%. This would address some urgent fiscal issues. The next thing is to abolish public unions and put the state employees on par with the private sector work force. We have to be fair to the state employees but being fair on an equal basis. Unions are killing the state and everyone knows it but does not have the guts to do anything about it. Now that I have said these things, do I expect any change? No, it will not change until the state is bankrupt. No it will not change until our educators are not indoctrinating but teaching. No it will not change until there are strict term limits. No it will not change until common sense is brought back into Government. The question is who has the Guts to do the correct thing?