What could Oregon do with an additional $2.7 billion in revenue each year? That’s about how much Portlander Jonathan Tasini says would be generated with a 2 percent wealth tax imposed on Oregon taxpayers with assets at or above $30 million. Now, as the state faces a fiscal crisis affecting everything from public schools to transportation safety programs, Tasini is hoping to get that wealth tax on the Oregon ballot—and win.
Tasini, a longtime labor advocate who ran for Portland City Council in 2024, is the chief petitioner behind Initiative Petition 70, or The Very Rich Pay Their Fair Share Act. The initiative would impact roughly 0.2 percent—or 4,600—of Oregon’s taxpayers, according to 2022 data collected by the Institute on Technology and Public Policy. The tax would be levied against assets including properties, stock options, bonds, and businesses.
In order to make it on the November 2026 ballot, IP 70 supporters must gather at least 117,173 signatures before July 2. Petitioners are currently waiting for the Secretary of State to give them the final sign-off to begin collecting signatures.
While Oregon has a relatively high personal income tax for high earners already, largely to make up for the lack of a sales tax, the state frequently suffers from a lack of revenue to support its programs. Some lawmakers have suggested fixes like repealing the state’s “kicker” tax refund or changing Oregon’s restrictions on property taxes. Tasini’s wealth tax proposal aims to address Oregon’s budget woes in a different way.
Tasini’s initiative stands out during a period of apparent tax skepticism—and sometimes outright hostility—in Oregon. A group of Republican lawmakers and anti-tax advocates were successful in their attempt to refer state gas tax and DMV fee increases to voters, gathering well over 100,000 supportive signatures in less than a month. Tasini says IP 70 is different, targeting what he sees as a growing, and bipartisan, distaste for the very rich in the United States.
“I am convinced that the same people who don’t want to pay a gas tax and signed that petition will also support taxing the very wealthy,” Tasini told the Mercury. “They don’t want to pay out of their pockets, but they have no problem at all in saying that people who have $30 million or more in assets should pay a wealth tax.”
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IP 70 aligns with other efforts to tax the rich that are gaining momentum nationwide. Right now, advocates in California are pushing to get a wealth tax on the state ballot, with a measure that would enact a one-time, 5 percent tax on billionaires. Earlier this month, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and US Rep. Ro Khanna of California introduced a wealth tax proposal of their own, though the national initiative faces particularly strong headwinds.
Another indicator more people are getting on board with taxing the rich? Last week, Washington legislators passed the state’s first income tax. Though not a wealth tax, per se, the policy focuses on residents earning more than $1 million annually. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson has pledged to sign the bill.
A broad wealth tax, like the one described in IP 70, has never been implemented in the United States, and the policy has been used in a limited number of countries around the world. It has proven to be an administrative challenge for many governments to collect taxes on general wealth, with a risk of task avoidance or evasion. Wealth tax proposals have also faced the kind of pushback many taxes face, from those alleging the levies would deter entrepreneurship and lead to a wealth exodus.
Advocates say there are ways to combat evasion. They also argue a wealth tax is the best way to minimize the enormous wealth gap in the US, and pass the financial benefits along to the rest of society. With the idea growing in popularity on a national level, it seems inevitable that whether or not this ballot measure takes off, the wealth tax conversation will make its way to Oregon at some point soon.
Alex Stegner is a teacher at Portland’s Lincoln High School who has volunteered with the IP 70 campaign. Stegner said, as a teacher in a district currently suffering from an immense budget crisis, he feels the impacts of Oregon’s financial woes very acutely.
“I’m living in the wreckage of the state budget right now,” Stegner told the Mercury. “I’m watching as Portland Public Schools is cutting teachers from an already depleted staff, I’m watching them cut programs. I know the lack of money coming into our government has real impacts on families, on students, on teachers, on everybody.”
Stegner said he hears people in progressive spaces use “tax the rich” as a rallying cry, often without much substance behind it.
“Wealth inequality is one of the most glaring problems in our society,” Stegner said. Here’s something we can do about it, because otherwise, it just becomes a slogan that we hear chanted on the streets, or that politicians will give vague lip service to.”
When attempting to get an initiative on the Oregon ballot, petitioners must first gather 1,000 sponsorship signatures for the potential measure. IP 70 was verified with 1,453 sponsorship signatures, which Stegner and Tasini both said they collected with ease.
“For the most part, people are like, ‘Yeah, sign me up,’” Stegner said. “As soon as I describe that this initiative is on wealth in excess of $30 million in assets, they usually kind of laugh, and they’re like, ‘Oh, so not me.’ Everyone’s kind of skeptical, and they think maybe they’re part of the group that’s considered rich. But it’s like, no, most people are not.”
More about IP 70
The wealth tax, if passed, would collect revenue for the Oregon general fund—not for a specific program or initiative. The initiative text says its chief purposes are twofold: To “address state budget shortfalls and make the state’s tax system more equitable by modestly shifting tax obligations away from working-class and middle-class individuals” and toward the state’s wealthiest people.
“I thought the wisest approach, given that our budget circumstances are dire in every corner of the budget, is to [direct it to] the general fund, which then allows groups of all sorts to coalesce around funding issues and push legislators to allocate that money,” Tasini said. “It wouldn’t be money sitting there separate. To me, that’s embracing the whole notion that we as a society are in this together, and that we have to figure this out together.”
In order to collect the tax, the Oregon Department of Revenue would need to develop new reporting mechanisms and adopt strategies to prevent evasion. It’s unclear exactly what the collection process would look like, but it would likely require taxpayers to report the value of their assets, including art and collectibles. Similar reporting requirements in other wealth tax programs or proposals have been criticized for being overly complicated and subjective, but advocates say the people subject to such a levy are not normal taxpayers, and already deal with complexity in their accounting. The Oregon Secretary of State determined that the asset reporting requirements in IP 70 would not constitute a “more significant effect” than the income and deductions taxpayers are currently responsible for reporting.
The initiative would also exempt Roth IRA-type accounts up to $1 million, and other personal property up to $100,000. Tasini said this is to ensure that if someone with millions of dollars in assets loses their wealth in a bad investment, they would still have up to $1 million in an untaxed account to retire on.
So far, since it’s still in the beginning phases, the initiative hasn’t garnered much attention, negative or positive. The Oregon Secretary of State received three comments about IP 70, which the state considered while drafting its certified ballot title for the initiative, issued March 16. An attorney writing on behalf of Oregon Business & Industry (OBI) called the initiative “complex and confusing.” OBI requested certain changes to the ballot title, specifically alleging the initiative sets an unclear definition of “asset.” Another commenter asked for the ballot text to clarify who the current estate tax applies to. The certified ballot title—which can be appealed until March 30—took both these comments into consideration.
“It’s really about moving the conversation, but we can actually make it a reality.”
Tasini said he feels confident that he can gather support to get the initiative on the ballot even under a short timeframe—the petitioners will likely have roughly two months to collect the required signatures. He compared the effort to the anti-gas tax referendum, which found significant support in a short period of time.
“It would be a complete embarrassment and a monumental failure on the part of progressive movement, or people who believe in sanity about taxes, to fail to collect more signatures than those people who collected [more than 200,000] signatures to repeal the transportation bill,” Tasini said. “We should be able to do the same thing with this. And I think we can pass it.”
Regardless of the success of the initiative, however, Tasini said he thinks it’s important to help move the Overton window in the direction of a wealth tax—particularly during a time when the issue is getting national attention.
“It’s really about moving the conversation, but we can actually make it a reality in Oregon this year,” Tasini said. “And if we win it here, we could win it in a whole host of other states.”
Stegner said he’s excited to get out and ask people to support an initiative that he thinks would be so beneficial for so many people.
“It seems like every problem that we talk about in our state or in our city, it’s about a lack of money,” Stegner said. “This could help so many things, this could help so many people who are struggling, who are suffering. And I’m really excited about that.”
