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by NW Spotlight
This week KATU reported [2] that “a group of Portland-area lawmakers think the time is right to propose a sales tax in Oregon,” even though Oregon voters have rejected a sales tax nine times. Three Democratic state legislators are backing the idea: Sen. Mark Hass, Sen. Ginny Burdick and Rep. Tobias Read.
The 5% sales tax [3] proposal calls for (initially) cutting property and income taxes in half, and (initially) cutting the capital gains and corporate taxes. Willamette Week reports [4] that the sales tax, combined with the other tax cuts, would raise an extra $1.9 billion a biennium for the state budget. The current state General and Lottery Funds’ budget is [5] $14.8 billion (biennium).
The addition of a sales tax for Oregon would give legislators another knob to turn to increase tax revenues.
As was noted [6] in Oregon Catalyst back in November, state spending in Oregon doubled in ten years, growing from $30 billion to $60 billion. The Oregon All Funds budget doubled from the budget ending in 2001 to the budget ending in 2011. The state’s General and Lottery Funds’ budget, a subset of the All Funds budget, went up by 35% during that same time.