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(It might not look like it, but there were four in there. I dug)

It’s two nights ago, and what do I find after a long day of slaving over a warm laptop at the Mercury? Why, a pile of discarded arts tax mailers.

That’s right. A pile of thrown-out mailers exhorting Portlanders to pay the new $35-per-income-earner arts tax was sitting in the trashcan directly beneath my apartment building’s mailboxes. A tax that was designed to fund arts programs at Portland schools and nonprofits, and a tax that, yes, 61 percent of us voted for in November.

Now, I don’t want to think of these thrown out pleas for revenue as a sign of things to come. But assuming the four discarded mailers are indeed portentous, then, as many have suspected, the city is going to have a hell of a time getting people to pay. And they really, <a href=”
http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2013/02/28/ready-to-pay-portlands-new-35-arts-tax-because-now-you-can”>really want people to pay. (They set up a website and everything, albeit one that doesn’t take debit cards—and charges a buck if you want to use a credit card.)

The thing is the city knows not everyone is going to pay, just like my building’s trashcan kind of proves.

So let’s assume for a moment my trashcan is in fact a representative sample—it’s not, this is very unscientific and my math skills aren’t much better than a third-grader’s, but stay with me. There are 14 units in my building. I saw four discarded mailers. In this scenario each thrown-away mailer represents someone who either doesn’t know about the tax, doesn’t want to pay the tax, or thought the mailer was just more junk mail (which seems very likely). This means roughly 28 percent of my building probably isn’t going to shell out for the city.

This number get slightly larger when you consider about half the units have two residents. Since the tax is expected to be paid per income earner, but the mailer is sent to only one box per resident, that means the actual number of people in my building who won’t pay could be as high as eight. Or about 38 percent of the residents in my building.

Now, for argument’s sake, let’s say everyone else in my building is a good, civic-minded individual like myself, who placed the mailer on a magnetic dry-erase board to remind themselves, “You know, dumbass, you did vote for this. So now you need to pay.” And that means 62 percent—or about the same percentage of voters who backed the tax—will be like me and (perhaps grudgingly) pay.

The thing is that’s not too far off of the city’s own estimate.

The city has told me it’s assuming a lot of people won’t pay. Of the roughly 400,000 folks eligible to pay, the city guesses—at least in the beginning—that only about 85 percent will comply, and maybe only three-quarters of those people will do it during the first fiscal year. This means by the end of the fiscal year the city only expects to get about $8.9 million in revenue. Our trashcan estimate is only slightly smaller, netting the city about $8.7 million.

(As an aside, that $12.2 million you’ve been seeing in other outlets? Don’t buy it. That’s based on everyone paying the arts tax at the same rate as they pay their county taxes, or about 91 percent.)

So—keeping in mind these numbers literally came out of the garbage—what’s the lesson here? Maybe it’s that Portlanders are only slightly more cynical about paying the arts tax than their political leaders expect. Or maybe it’s going to be way worse. Considering I haven’t gone back to the trash to see how many more mailers were thrown out later in the evening, that’s entirely possible. Or, maybe, just maybe the city’s got our number after all.

16 replies on “Trashed Arts Tax: A Very Unscientific Look at How Many Portlanders Will Pay”

  1. What irks me about this tax is that the City is setting up rules for who pays that are different from the rules that the State and IRS uses. If it is actually an income tax (it’s not, but that is another story), why establish yet another way for a resident to measure their annual income? For example, gifts that would otherwise be considered non-taxable by the state or the IRS are considered “taxable” by the City. I assume this is all to determine whether someone falls above the income threshold that the City has established for payment of the tax, but why not just accept that person’s 1040? No, we need to set up a whole ‘nother review process.

  2. I’m fairly new to paying taxes in Portland (as opposed to other counties/cities), so forgive my ignorance, but is this a weird situation, paying a tax entirely outside the normal tax day bundle? I feel like it is, but no one else seems to be commenting on it, so maybe I’m wrong.

    Anyway, I think they’re run into a lot less grumpiness if the tax was somehow bundled. Telling people to give you 35 bucks on a random Thursday is a pretty good way to get most folks grumbling.

  3. Those are just advance notices, and I believe they were sent out without specific names and addresses (I don’t have mine handy). That makes them a lot easier to trash, psychologically, than an actual tax bill with your name and address on it (which will soon follow).

  4. @Todd – No, they had names and addresses on them. I received two yesterday. I immediately binned one of them, of course, which apparently alarmed poor Nathan.

  10. Commenting here because comments are closed for some reason on the post about the former OSPIRG worker convicted of sex crimes:

    Nathan, obviously without condoning anything Neel did and recognizing you work for a paper that encourages subjective reporter viewpoints: I think it’s unprofessional to end of your post agreeing with Neel’s self-assessment as a “fucktard.”

    You could have ended the post a sentence sooner and achieved everything you wanted to achieve. Now, when I finish reading your post, I’m thinking less about what Neel did, and more about you being needlessly self-righteous. I doubt I’m the only one. Beyond all questions of professionalism, it’s just more powerful/effective to let the facts speak for themselves.

    (And after all, who knows effectiveness better than an anonymous internet commenter?)

  11. So I guess there are more Libertarians in Portland than one might assume, huh? Can’t think of another reason why a fucking head tax would have passed in a supposedly liberal city.

    I know the real answer is that 61% of the city aren’t Libertarians who think it’s a good idea for all citizens to pay the same amount of tax regardless of income. They just didn’t actually bother to read or think about the tax they voted to approve. 61% of Portlanders saw the words “ARTS TAX” and couldn’t vote yes fast enough. Fuck the fine details. That shit is hard to understand, right guys?

  13. “USUCKPORTLAND,” OBVIOUSLY THERE COULDN’T BE ANY OTHER REASON TO OPPOSE THIS PARTICULAR TAX THAN BEING A “LIBERTARIAN.” FUCKING AMERICANS AND THEIR FUCKING IDENTITY ISSUES.

  15. I threw it away because it didn’t even occur to me that the letter I barely looked at was THE letter. I had no idea until this post that there wouldn’t be a way to pay the tax when we do our taxes, I just assumed there would be a way to have it come out of the refund, or something. Yeah, it is definitely going to be harder for them to collect if this is how they are doing it. Just dug it out of the recycling and my husband says he is happy to pay it.

  16. It could conceivably be a income tax because it has two ‘brackets’, zero and $35.00, based on income. But it is more likely to be ruled a head tax because people who pay zero are likely to be ruled as being in a virtual non-income class. Why they didn’t bracket it based on income listed in ones state Income Tax return into ~ three brackets is crazy. They could have raised the exclusion and made up with it by increasing the amount the upper brackets pay. And had a legal tax. I give it ~78% chance of being thrown out.

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