The Tweety Congress

I'll take the contrary view here.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer re-snarks Sen McCain on a tweet mocking the Oregon Solar Highway and it's a Twitter War?

There's only two remarks there. Of course, Earl's does win the "Nuke 'em From Orbit–it's The Only Way To Be Sure" prize. Sen McCain should know better than to lead with his chin like that.

But I've read the tweets from Rep Earl during the President's address to Congress and aside from the remark about Teleprompter Jindal, I found it all kind of banal.

Sen McCain's tweets, which include such semi-inscrutable awkward stabs at wit such as 150,000 for lobster research - similar to lobster managment?, see the sea turtles on your $238,000 Polynesian Voyage, and $900,000 for fish management - how does one manage a fish..., some of these bon mots separated by an hour or more, just leave me unimpressed.

Now, I don't want to be hating on Rep. Earl–I'm a huge fan. And I guess the thing about Twitter is it's all so immediate! But it just seems to be making the idea of knowing it all right now seems so pointless.

I think Twittering makes you kind of stupid.

Doing Something About the $10 Corporate Minimum Tax

It looks as though the 75th Oregon Lege is poised to do something about the absurdly-low $10 Corporate Minimum Tax.

Governor K has introduced two bills–HB 2119 and HB 2070–that take steps to address the problem.

HB 2119 establishes a new higher minimum for C Corporations only that do $50,000 or less in sales Oregon of $25, with a progressive scale topping out for businesses doing $1,000,000 or more of $5,000.

HB 2070, as defined by Associated Oregon Industries:

proposes to replace the current $10 corporate minimum tax with a New
Hampshire-style business activity tax.  Under this proposal, a minimum
tax would be imposed on C-corporations at a rate of 0.2 percent of the
corporation’s “enterprise value tax base,” defined as the total of the
corporation’s employee compensation, interest and dividends. 
Corporations with less than $100,000 in gross receipts would be exempt
from this new minimum tax.

Either way, corporations would pay the higher of the two tax rates.

In related news, Associated Oregon Industries hates you:

AOI’s board-adopted policy position supports an increase in the
corporate minimum tax from $10 to $300, but does not support a tax
increase on business as substantial as either proposed by HB 2070 or HB 2119.  AOI will therefore oppose both bills.

So suck on that, Mr and Mrs Oregonian Working Person. Take your unfair share of the tax burden or we'll get you a shorter chain. See if we dont!

In Other News: Chuck Sheketcoff writes at Blue Oregon that Oregon, as you might have guessed, the second lowest business taxes in the nation. So, the next time someone complains to you that the tax burden for business in Oregon is just so huge, point 'em over there. Or maybe just look at 'em funny and back away slowly.

I Visited Members Of The Entitled Class Today

Or, as I like to call them, my family.

People who know the price of everything and the value of nothing like to moan and complain all day about how expensive PERS retirees and the poor are and how they're destroying the state and how maybe they don't deserve what they have coming to them.

I'd like to introduce you to a couple of people.

One's my mother. She worked for more than two decades with the developmentally disabled in the Oregon State system, at Fairview. Now, the system assisting the mentally and physically disabled is and was flawed, to be sure. People are still arguing over whether or not closing the Fairview Training Center and Dammasch State Hospital was a good idea. But for the majority of her working life, my mother was in the thick of it and she did a lot of good, not only caring for people in the State's charge but also taking her own time outside of work and helping foster a child or two as far away as Coos Bay.

Thing about my mom is, she can't stop mothering. Some of our most vulnerable citizens are maybe a little better off because of what she cared enough to do. She was paid adequately for it and now lives on her PERS pension. She is far from getting rich on it. They have enough to keep from being homeless and live in an excuciatingly-modest, cosy, well-maintained manufactured home.

She wouldn't feel comfortable in a mansion anyway.

The other person is my nephew. He's a nice, smart fellow with a blazing quick mind but a lot stacked against him. He was rescued by the state foster care system which has placed him with my mom who, as I said, can't stop mothering. After a great many alternatives have been tried to help him get a grip on his emotional problems, he's on a medication and counseling program that have given him real hope. He's as happy today as I've ever seen a kid with so many odds against him.

And how can he do it? The Oregon Health Plan. Without which, I might add, at $800 a prescription, we'd have no chance of getting on it, and he might well eventually go into the state system as a problem, not as a potential success story.

So if anyone wants to come at me with how spending for state retirees and the OHP is a waste on people who don't deserve it, you'll get a deaf ear over it from me.

Do you think I'm too close to the problem? So what? I'd argue that you are too far away from it.

I like to think of it as my tax dollars at work.

Who's Paying the $10 Corporate Minimum Tax? Good Question.

What's galling is that is not just so many corporations do it remorselessly but they then bellyache when they don't get the additional tax breaks they feel they so richly deserve (and get to whine about how unfriendly Oregon is to business).

From the Silverton-based Oregon Center For Public Policy:

More than 5,000 profitable corporations operating in Oregon paid no income taxes in 2006 beyond the $10 minimum, according to the Oregon
Center for Public Policy.

Among the 5,156 profitable corporations that paid just $10 were 31 with over $1 million in Oregon taxable income, OCPP found when reviewing recently released data from the Oregon Department of Revenue. The Silverton-based think tank’s analysis arrives on the eve of a review of the corporate minimum tax by the Oregon House Revenue Committee.

The state does not disclose the names of corporations paying just $10, prompting OCPP policy analyst Michael Leachman to wonder, “Which ones are playing us for fools?” The
new data, he said, underscore the need to require large corporations to disclose how much they pay in taxes.

Here's a good place for transparency to happen. Want to be a leech on the back of the working folks of the state of Oregon? Going on a publicly accessable list seems a fair trade.

But I hear you moaning about class warfare. Now, bunky, if you're the kind of braniac who worries about class warfare then you need to be advised that the class war is over and you're on the losing side. But, for you "business of America is business" types, think on this:

Leachman noted that 136 corporations paid 52 percent of all Oregon corporate income taxes in 2006. “If I were the CEO of one of those 136 corporations carrying half the load, I’d want to know which large, profitable corporations are getting away with paying just $10,” he added.

If I were one of those CEOs, I'd be furious.

More than 5,000 successfully profitable corporations in Oregon got away with paying a $10 income tax bill. The next time business whines against being taxed in Oregon, just remember what a free lunch they've come to see you as.

We're a few years into the most serious budgetary crisis this state has ever seen. Why do we still have this tax rule?

Cascadia: Bobby Jindal Hates You

Let's look inside the Republican "Big Tent" for another moment.

Louisiana Governor Bobby "PBJ" Jindal, Republican Response, Feb 24th 2009:

...and $140 million for something called "volcano monitoring."  Instead of
monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the
eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.

The Oregonian's Jeff "Shadout" Mapes:

But forget that for a moment. As I sit typing this in Portland, I'm
less than 50 miles - as the ash flies - from an active volcano. I'd
like to know as soon as possible if Mount St. Helens is going to blow
again. It's kind of like how Jindal would presumably appreciate the
most advanced hurricane monitoring possible.

Man, this stuff just writes itself, kinda.

But if you live in any city near the I-5, and can look out an east-facing window to see a might snowcapped mountain that was built out of titanic underground forces, which another explosion from has not been ruled out, then as far as Bobby Jindal and the Republican party are concerned ... you're on your own, Joe Oregon and Jane Washington (and parts of California).