Oregon Politics News

By John in Oregon
Oregon Tax News

Humorist P.J. O'Rourke's latest effort in the Wall Street Journal satirizes that "The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies." With a razor sharp keyboard O'Rourke drills down to the heart of the problem saying;

"We became sick and tired of our cars and even angry at them. Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden."
Continue reading "Portland Oregon makes national news, Again"

I want climate change. No, I’m not talking about an increase in Earth’s temperature that would melt the polar ice caps. I’m talking about a change in the political climate in Oregon that would melt lawmakers’ reluctance to reform our corporate tax system — change that would fulfill Oregonians’ desire to see large corporations doing business here pay their fair share in taxes. Oregon's corporate income tax system is broken. It’s so riddled with loopholes that big corporations today are paying about half of the income taxes, as a share of their profits, that they paid in Oregon a generation...

One of the problems with relying upon static analysis is that you assume a box. And that all the variables inside the box are the only variables you need to worry about.

That's why you hear folks say things like, "you need to think outside the box."

Another feature of the static box is that it tends to become an echo chamber. You hear the same responses to the same variables over and over again. Of course this leads to both self-reinforcement of certain opinions and another popular antidote for static box echo effects, "if you're digging yourself into a hole, stop digging."

At some point one needs to think outside the box and to stop digging a deeper hole.

Continuing our series on executive salaries at government agencies and nonprofits in the Portland area, today we spotlight the Port of Portland. They've got quite a payroll over there, as indicated by the list they have furnished us of non-union employees whose base salaries are in excess of $100,000. There are 79 individuals in that category at the Port. Nine of them make more than $150,000 a year; 22 over $125,000. The average exec in the top 20 is paid $161,161. At the top of the Metro pyramid is the executive director, Bill Wyatt (right), at a base salary of $269,910.