By Taxpayer Foundation of Oregon

12-15-08

Only 8 years after our last big financial boom ended in a bust we have an even bigger bust in the housing and debt markets that has brought us to the edge an entire collapse of the financial system. Millions have lost houses, jobs and Retirement savings and the carnage has only just begun.

Well what the hell happened? You’d think with that with our ever growing financial sophistication that we’d know better by now.   Every time this happens we think it will be the last.  But it never will be.   The 1979-80 oil and commodity spike offered many lessons about commodity bubbles.   Those who were victimized by it learned to be skeptical of “peak oil” quacks, and other forms of Malthusian analysis.   The 80’s saw the Junk Bond bubble. 

  Read more…

Oregon’s Big Land Use Swindle

By Margaret Goodwin

The Oregon Land Use Act required every city and county in Oregon to implement a Comprehensive Plan, and created a taxpayer-funded bureaucracy, the Land Conservation and Development Commission, to impose mandatory statewide standards with which all Comprehensive Plans must comply.  One of their goals was to prevent urban sprawl, so the LCDC mandated the establishment of Urban Growth Boundaries and restricted all new commercial and industrial development to within the UGBs . To enforce the perpetuation of the traditional economy, the LCDC required every county to “protect” any undeveloped land outside the UGBs by zoning it exclusively for forestry or agriculture, thereby precluding future development. Read more…

By Richard Leonetti,

If you got the impression from headlines that spending by the State of Oregon had to fall by almost $1 billion in the next two years you would be wrong. What the revenue office really said was that revenue was expected to fall by $946 million from earlier projections but the new projection still was for an increase of $900 million or so. Instead of falling, revenue is expected to increase 3.5% per year for the next two years. This means the state revenue will increase from $15.2 billion to $16.1 billion.

In this very low inflation, maybe deflationary, time a 3.5% increase each year is short of what the Governor  would like to spend. He is in this box because of wage increases slightly more than this amount and new programs he would like to start. 

Given the current times most taxpayers cannot expect this size of raise (if they are fortunate to keep their jobs) so maybe the state should renegotiate their labor costs and look closely at the need for new spending before they start raising fees and taxes.

And in the trickle down to K-12 teachers, if you do maintain the raises, maybe the school teachers could help the kids out by adding 3.5% each year to the length of the school year. They would lose no income, and the kids and they would still have an extremely short work/study year.