Portland mayoral candidate David Schor last week made news with his announcement that, if elected, he’d propose a citywide tax on Portland’s millionaires.
In the interview with KGW, Schor said he thought the tax could generate up to $200 million a year and said he’d use the revenue to build as many as 10,000 public housing units in the first five years the tax was collected.
That’s a whole lot of money and an ambitious goal. I was curious where he got his revenue projections, so I sent an email asking Schor how his camp had come up with the numbers. His campaign manager, Keith Haxton, replied on Sunday.
Haxton said the state estimates that Oregon’s highest earning 1 percent make at least $350,000 per year. Those 1 percenters brought in an average of 14.7 percent of the city’s $17 billion in taxable household income, according to estimates. That means Portland’s ultra rich 1 percent made about $2.5 billion of untaxed money, according to Haxton.
“With these figures, a reasonable [8 percent] income tax on Portland’s wealthiest would result in about $200 million of additional revenue to the city each year, which would also be about $1 billion over five years,” Haxton wrote in the email.
Haxton says Schor’s working on a program called the Community Housing Initiative and says more details will be released in January.
“Though we plan to add 10,000 units of community housing in our first five years, we believe that exactly how many units of affordable housing will be required to make Portland as whole affordable is still an open question,” he wrote. “None the less, we will do our best to answer that question when we release our detailed presentation to the public.”
I reached out to Thomas Lannom in the Portland Bureau of Revenue and Financial Services to see if Schor’s numbers checked out, but he declined to comment.
I just wanted to clarify one point made in the 4th paragraph of this story. The State of Oregon makes much more than $17 billion annually. As I said in my email, “Portland’s total taxable household income after state and federal taxes, was about $17 billion.” And it is our estimate that 14.7% of Portland’s total household income is captured by Portland’s wealthiest 1% and equals about $2.5 billion of taxable, yet untaxed income.
So this candidate would seriously load an EXTRA 8% privilege income tax on anyone making $350k/year. That would be in addition to the top marginal rates for both the feds and the state? So, a minimum EXTRA $28k/year just to live in Sodom on the Willamette? Candidate Schor is hoarding some of southern Oregon’s finest product.