By Nicole Stevens
Here in Oregon we’re going into an election season where taxes are the hot topic, and, let’s face it, nobody is a fan of taxes.
Taxes are a necessary evil and, as Justice Brandeis put it “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” The things we want and need our government to do for us must be paid for – and this is done with taxes. Road construction/Repair, infrastructure, police and fire services and more – the things that maintain our way of life.
A referendum before us on the ballot next week is to raise the gas tax another 6 cents, which given the current prices does seem to empty the wallet, but, the average at the pump cost is $2.5-5/mo more. These taxes would fund ODOT, and right now they have a $297 budget shortfall because of the ‘no-taxes’ attitude that some people carry.
People at ODOT are not getting rich they are primarily blue collar people who work outdoors to fix roads – consider that the next time you drive over Cascade Head or the Wilson River Highway.
Because of the ODOT budget shortfall ODOT will be laying off workers, delaying projects and more. This reduction in workforce is not immediately fixable if the budget were restored after layoffs – people don’t wait for the job to return they get new ones, which means, potentially less experienced people will be filling their shoes should the budget get restored.
Let’s talk about tax breaks that are given. Google receives an annual tax break of nearly half a billion dollars and subsidies from BPA and Pacific Power who make up that same offset in high rates for you and me. Even if you never use it, you are paying for AI. The laws used to create these massive incentives were meant for manufacturing. The Google data center in The Dalles is not manufacturing and they are not employing thousands of people.
These sorts of breaks were made for companies like Intel whose Washington County facilities employ over 22,000 people – employees who are part of the community and the tax base, whereas the Google facility in The Dalles employs 30.
I have worked in data centers and these are warehouses of computers.
Let’s be clear, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Inc. had a market capitalization of 2.5 trillion dollars last years – that is more money than New York has! We are feeding the ultra-rich corporations huge incentives to employ very few – the average tax payer in Oregon is not getting the benefit of these incentives given to mega-corporations, we just take it in the shorts when budgets have to overcome the burdens of making these incentives to big business.
So next week we get a choice to fund our critical services or not. I am not trying to tell you how to vote, rather just describing what the stakes are and how the tax inequality in Oregon is affecting everybody’s bottom line.