Hall Monitor

Almost everyone at city hall was on vacation last week—me
included—but there’s another hall that was firmly in session down
in Salem: The Hall of Satan. That’s right. An (almost certainly
Satanic) right-wing anti-tax group filed two referendum
proposals on Tuesday morning, July 21, to refer Governor Ted
Kulongoski’s two recent tax hikes to the ballot.

One of Kulongoski’s measures would modestly raise targeted taxes
on corporations and the other would slightly increase income taxes
for the richest Oregonians. I know: HARSH. Oh, no… you’re right…
they’re tiny changes in a year where Oregon has faced a $3 billion
budget hole for vital services like health care, public safety, and
education. The tax increases are only expected to bring in roughly $750
million statewide.

Nevertheless the subtly titled group, calling itself Oregonians
Against Job-Killing Taxes, has raised $200,000 to fight the tax
increases in a January election, says spokesperson Pat
McCormick. McCormick’s group has also hired tobacco lobbyist Mark
Nelson as its treasurer—Nelson was named most satanic
lobbyist in the Mercury‘s recent survey of lobbyists’
integrity in Salem. [“Advocates, Mercenaries, or Minions of Satan?”
Feature, July 9].

The group will spend half a million bucks to gather the
necessary 55,179 signatures by the September 25 turn-in deadline, says
McCormick.

“This is the most energized and angry I’ve seen the business
community on any issue,” he says, adding that businesses approached
Salem legislators with more “broad-based” plans for temporary tax
reform, but that they were denied. McCormick says public employee
unions put pressure on legislators to use the economic crisis as a way
of forcing through permanent tax hikes.

“Oregon’s corporate minimum tax has been an embarrassingly
low $10 since 1931,” responds Scott Moore, communications director
for Our Oregon (and former Mercury news editor)—an
activist group which plans to campaign for the tax measures. “The
opponents of these measures would rather cut a month off the school
year than ask corporations to pay more than $10 a year in taxes.
That is not a temporary problem.”

In order to convince voters to side with them, the anti-tax folks
are going to have to spend a lot of money on a misleading
campaign. Still, lobbyist Nelson did it before in 2007, when big
tobacco spent $12 million defeating a tobacco tax increase to pay for
children’s health care. As we now know, underestimating the devil
is always a bad move.