Issues
To Drill or Not to Drill? That is the Question
Leave Arctic oil untapped
Let the next generations balance need and risks
– The Register Guard editorial
…Exploiting the fossil fuel resources of the Arctic involves several types of risk, all of which should deferred until better judgments on technical, economic and environmental issues can be made…
The economic risks are also large…The resources of the Arctic are the patrimony of every American, and leasing exploits them at a time when oil prices are low.
…Shell clearly expects prices to be higher when Arctic oil production ramps up, but Americans also should play a long game and realize that the longer the oil stays in the ground, the more valuable it will be in terms of income from leases and royalties…
… The Shell project would lock in decades of Arctic oil production at a time when the United States and the world are awakening to the need for a steep reduction in fossil fuel consumption…
We Respond & Your Comments
Listen up, Shell Oil execs – You’ve ignored the basic economics of oil exploration and production! But thank heaven The Register Guard is setting you straight on:
- Economic risks of exploring in the Arctic
- Judging when oil should be extracted for maximum profit
- Failure to account for future reductions of fossil fuel consumption
But before you plug up those exploration holes, bring your ships back to port and fire all those MBAs whose projections sent you on that fool’s errand up north, click on http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/08/arctic_oil_drilling_vital_for.html.
Here you’ll learn that declining Alaska Pipeline production is causing West Coast imports of foreign oil to skyrocket and that the only way to secure a safe, reliable, affordable supply of the energy Oregon (including The Register Guard) needs to grow jobs is to drill in… the Arctic.
Maybe those guys and gals at Shell aren’t so dumb after all.
We’re #5! We’re #5!
The hardest states to find full-time work
By Thomas C. Frohlich, finance.yahoo.com/news
…The traditional unemployment rate does not include all jobless individuals, nor is it a percentage of all the people available for work…To account for people left out of the calculation, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides alternative measures of labor underutilization.
The underemployment rate, also known as U-6, includes the standard unemployed population as well as marginally attached workers and persons employed part-time for economic reasons…
To determine the states where it is hardest to find full-time work, 24/7 Wall St. examined average underemployment rates for the 12 months through the second quarter of this year measured by the BLS…
These are the states where it is hardest to find full-time work.
10. Rhode Island…
9. Georgia…
8. Michigan…
7. South Carolina…
6. Mississippi…
5. Oregon
> Underemployment rate:12.8%
> June unemployment rate:5.5% (tied-20th highest)
> GDP growth 2007-2014: 15.3% (3rd largest growth)
> Labor force growth 2007-2014: 1.1% (21st largest decline)…
We Respond & Your Comments
We hope you’re as flummoxed by this as we are. How on Earth can it be harder to find a job in this wonderful state than in 45 others?
Here’s some of what we have in Oregon:
- Fine universities
- Educated work force
- Two deep water harbors
- Mild weather
- High tech sector
- Natural resources
- Viable transportation system
So what’s wrong? What’s holding us back? Herewith a few possibilities:
- Tax structure that discourages risk taking
- Environmental extremism
- Urban growth boundaries that artificially inflate housing prices
- Decades of single party governance
- Add your ideas below
Every one of these obstacles to job creation can be changed so that the dormant potential of this great state can be turned loose to make Oregon the economic powerhouse it should be – and make our state the #1 place in America to find a job.
Print this and read it again whenever you vote.
Bugs Bunny, White Squirrels and the Gas Tax
EDITORIAL
Just raise the gas tax
It’s the obvious choice to pay for America’s roads
…National gas prices are averaging around $2.85 a gallon. There has not been a better time in recent years for Congress to take the difficult but necessary step of increasing the federal gas tax to put the nation’s Highway Trust Fund on sound long-term footing.
A growing number of federal lawmakers — mostly Democrats but with a sprinkling of Republicans — have begun calling for an increase in the federal excise tax of 18.4 cents per gallon on gas, which has not been increased since 1993. They include Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat who has proposed nearly doubling the current fuel tax…
…an increase similar to the one proposed by Blumenauer could provide a long-term extension of the trust fund…
Lawmakers should stop avoiding the obvious and raise the federal gas tax.
We Respond & our Comments
For Progressives like Rep. Blumenauer (we used to call them “Liberals”) the answer is usually simple: “Just raise the (fill in the blank) tax.” Any tax. Any time.
But we have a few questions for Rep. Blumenauer and his merry crew of taxers about how Highway Trust Fund money has been spent:
Might we have more money for highways if the Feds hadn’t blown:
- $850 million for 2,772 “scenic beautification” landscaping projects?
- $1.6 million for morning cartoon cruises with Bugs Bunny in Oklahoma?
- $112,000 for a white squirrel sanctuary?
- $84 million for road kill prevention & similar programs?
- $313 million for “behavioral research”?
- $16 million for transportation museums?
- $520 million for sidewalks and bikepaths?
We could save tons of your and our dollars by foregoing projects such as those above. Or we could “Just raise the gas tax.”
A potent political agenda
Fair Shot group unites social, economic issues
A lobbying group that wins enactment of 80 percent of its agenda can congratulate itself for having had a highly productive legislative session. Oregon’s Fair Shot Coalition will celebrate that level of success today, when Gov. Kate Brown is scheduled to sign four of the five bills the group promoted in Salem…
Brown will sign Senate Bill 454, mandating paid sick leave for most employees; House Bill 3025, which makes it illegal for employers to include questions about applicants’ criminal histories on job applications; House Bill 2002, which will establish a system for collecting data about racial profiling by police, and House Bill 2960, which takes the first steps toward creating an employee-funded workplace-based retirement savings system for workers without access to a savings plan…
The Fair Shot Coalition emerged from a recognition that the two groups heavily overlap. The coalition is made up of labor organizations such as the Service Employees International Union and the Oregon AFL-CIO, and social justice organizations such as the Urban League of Portland and Basic Rights Oregon…
We Respond & Your Comments
Let’s think about “Fair.” Here’s why we avoid that word:
- Ask 5 people if something’s “fair” and you’ll get 6 answers;
- People usually think what’s “fair” is what works for them;
- When a politician tells us something’s “fair” – we grab our wallets. You should too.
Now let’s look at the “Fair Shot Coalition.” We doubt any of these “Fair Shooters” could say with a straight face that their union pals wants what’s “fair” for companies. Unions are paid to get the best deal for worker members. Fine. But let’s not confuse that with “fair.”
“Social justice organizations”? Economist F.A. Hayek hit the ol’ nail on the head: “(Social justice is)…conveniently used to assert that a particular claim is justified without giving any reason.” Amen.
“Fair” is a good word for 6th graders to use on the playground. But because it’s usually a code word for justifying the unjustifiable and/or extracting money from our wallets, let’s avoid it when discussing public policy.
Lottery Funds Show State Is Terrible Investor
When Oregon politicians pretend to be experts on venture capital investing, it ends up costing the state millions of dollars in education money.
This is exactly what is going on with the Oregon Growth Board, a project of the Oregon Business Development Department. Tasked with generating a return on investment by financing venture capital funds in Oregon, the Board receives 10% of state lottery profits that are supposed to be apportioned to a state education endowment fund. Unfortunately for students, the Oregon Growth Account boasts a measly 1.5% return on investment over a 15-year period…
Perhaps the Oregon Growth Board would have a more reasonable ROI if they just flew to Vegas and put our education money all on red.
Does That Mean They Stop Investing?
State Treasurer Ted Wheeler has shifted his position on energy investments…
Wheeler…recently announced he would (1) seek to double Oregon’s investments in renewable energy…
“As a fiduciary of Oregon’s $90 billion portfolio, I am responsible for choosing investments that financially benefit our taxpayers, schools, communities and retired public employees…”
No – It Means They Do More of It
Oregon Legislature approves state-run retirement plan
Legislation that would create a state-sponsored retirement savings program is heading to Gov. Kate Brown for final approval.
House Bill 2960 requires businesses that don’t offer a retirement plan to automatically enroll employees in the state program and deduct a portion of their wages for it.
We Respond & Your Comments
So these guys can’t earn much more than some junk bond funds when they have buckets of lottery buck to invest.
They actually do worse on “Green Energy” investments. Think Redco, where they blew $11.8 million in tax credits. Or the Small Scale Energy Program, where they’re smoking about $20 million over 5 years.
But did these Warren Buffett wannabees learn anything? Sure – They learned they could grab 10% of your salary if your employer doesn’t offer a retirement program and “invest it.”
Will they make 1.5% on it? Probably not. Will they use it to bail out some green energy fantasy? Maybe. Will they use it to bail out PERS? Does a bear relieve himself in the woods?
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/02/oregon_signature_solar_project.html
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2012/01/oregon_taxpayers_must_bail_out.html
We Meant for You to Pay Minimum Wage – Not for Us to Pay Minimum Wage. Got It?
Minimum wage advocates struggle to walk the talk: Editorial
– The Oregonian Editorial Board
House Speaker Tina Kotek acknowledged last week that the 2015 Legislature will adjourn without increasing the minimum wage. But the issue is likely to remain at the forefront of political discussion…
Even some minimum-wage advocates are finding it hard to live by the rules they propose. One recent example, pointed out by Portland public affairs consultant Cody McLaughlin: Advocacy group Working America advertised through Facebook for field managers for the $15 minimum wage campaign. McLaughlin asked what the pay was. The answer: $12.25 an hour, increasing to $15 after 90 days…
Consider what happened in Los Angeles. Last month, the city council approved a five-year plan to boost the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Late in the campaign for that increase, labor unions, which had led the push for a higher wage, made a surprising request: They wanted collectively bargained contracts to be exempt from the new standard…
We Respond & Your Comments
The irony simply couldn’t be more delicious – the “advocacy” group that wants everyone else to pay workers $15/hour wants to pay its workers $12.25/hour.
Unions that scream themselves hoarse lecturing about “fairness,” “living wages” and “the little guy” want to negotiate contracts at less than minimum wage.
There’s nothing we can add to this, so we’ll just quote 19th century cleric Frederick William Robertson:
“There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy: hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.“
Oregon to test pay-per-mile idea as replacement for gas tax
– AP, By Gosia Wozniacka
…The program [“OreGO”] is meant to help the state raise more revenue to pay for road and bridge projects at a time when money generated from gasoline taxes is declining across the country, in part because of greater fuel efficiency and the increasing popularity of fuel-efficient, hybrid and electric cars.
Starting July 1, up to 5,000 volunteers in Oregon can sign up to drive with devices that collect data on how much they have driven and where. The volunteers will agree to pay 1.5 cents for each mile traveled on public roads within Oregon, instead of the tax now added when filling up at the pump.
Some electric and hybrid car owners, however, say the new tax would be unfair to them and would discourage purchasing of green vehicles…
The OreGo program is projected to cost $8.4 million to implement…
We Respond & Your Comments
We’re not taking sides on OreGo. But we do want you to anticipate this program’s unintended consequences…
- A big reason people buy green cars is that they save on gas taxes. OreGo will decrease or eliminate these savings;
- Green cars are mostly affordable because of government subsidies (that means the govt. takes your money to give to people who buy green cars). So will government goose lower sales of green cars by increasing subsidies with more of your money?
- Or will government let the price of green cars rise as demand falls, thus decreasing green car sales and increasing sales of gas cars that release more carbon?
- The more that sales of green cars decrease, the less the value of OreGo. So in the end will Salem junk it and just raise the gas tax for everyone?
Please join us in thinking through these “sounds-good-costs-millions” programs and anticipating what the real results might be.
The School Lunch Program With an Unappetizing Report Card
The first lady’s project is plagued by complaints of inedible meals, wasted food and misspent funds.
– wsj.com
Nearly five years after passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010…. is an attempt to stem childhood obesity and hunger by providing healthier school meals…
The…Act funds a number of child-nutrition programs including the National School Lunch Program, which costs $12 billion a year—plus $3 billion for breakfast programs—and serves nearly 32 million children, about 45% of the total U.S. youth population…
…an official with the USDA’s Office of Inspector General testified that the National School Lunch Program has “high rates of improper payments.” Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) has pegged the waste in the billions of dollars…
…There has not been a significant decline in childhood obesity rates since 2010, and some data show obesity going up. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, five states had childhood obesity rates from 15%-19% in 2009. In 2013 eight states had rates that high.
We Respond & Your Comments
We’re all for feeding hungry kids. Nor do we object to paying taxes to do so.
Here’s what we do object to:
- Walking into a room ¼ mile from our Eugene house and seeing well off teens scarfing up free hamburgers all summer because their parents are too lazy to feed them;
- The program’s goal being changed from finding hungry kids and feeding them to advertising free eats for everybody so the local district can suck more of our money in;
- Washington D.C. money vacuums telling us that 45% of the total U.S. youth population would go hungry if we didn’t feed them.
This is simply another government program sold to Oregonians as something “for the children” and morphing into a money pit that exists to take money we earned and spread it around to cities like Eugene to get votes in the next election.
Oregon Legislators Discover, Rush to Eradicate Emergency
What? You missed the emergency? No, it’s not our home team – “The Salem Spendthrifts” – running out of money to tell owners how to run their businesses. It’s not even running short of your bucks to fund another “green energy” boondoggle.
No – This time it’s a shortfall of “Cyber-Excellence.” But Senator Floyd Prozanski and other Salem braniacs, ever scrounging for problems in search of expensive solutions, have sponsored House Bill 2996 A, which establishes the “Oregon Center for Cyber-Excellence.” It will, among other essential tasks, “…conduct biennial performance review[s] of investments…” Hey, Floyd – we can do that with a handheld calculator.
Prozanski and his profligate pals labeled their bill an “emergency” so that it can’t be referred to us idiot voters, who might not want to blow $2,500,654 on yet another technical money-eater. Cover Oregon 2.0, anyone?
Read About it Here:
https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2015R1/Downloads/MeasureAnalysisDocument/28447
https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2015R1/Downloads/MeasureAnalysisDocument/31154
City, alliance offering loans to arts groups that may not be eligible for traditional loans
– Jack Heffernan, The Register-Guard
In tandem with the nonprofit Arts and Business Alliance of Eugene, city of Eugene officials have announced they will offer loans to arts-related organizations, businesses and artists who often cannot get traditional bank loans.
Depending on factors such as project size and the amount of money the program has, loans will range from $5,000 to $50,000 each, city officials said in a statement…
We Respond & Your Comments
We love art. We have art in our homes. But we object to the City Council grabbing money we worked for and “loaning” it to their pet “artists.” Here’s why…
These groups can’t get “traditional”, or bank loans. Why? Because they’re lousy credit risks.
Would our mayor or city councilors loan their own money to strangers who’re lousy credit risks? Stupid question. But they’re itching to loan them our money. Maybe because it’s no big deal to them if they lose it.
Our City Council may fantasize that they’re the Medici clan tossing coin to Leonardo da Vinci so he can paint the next Mona Lisa. They’re not. They’re elected officials who confiscated money we earned to manage our city (think potholes). It’s time they doff their 15th century velvet Italian robes and funny hats and do the jobs we elected them to do.