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After three days of debate and backroom deals, lawmakers in Oregon delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in unwarranted tax cuts to businesses as part of the state legislature’s 2013 special session on Wednesday.
The Governor’s objective for calling the special session was to increase education spending, reduce public employee pensions, and limit regulation of genetically modified agriculture, among other priorities. But buried in one of the five bills that came up for consideration – all of which passed on Wednesday – were tax rate cuts for partnerships, limited liability companies, and “S corporations.”
As we and the Oregon Center for Public Policy have demonstrated, these cuts far outweighed increased assistance for working families, which came in the form of a modest increase in the state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Moreover, the budget math only works for the first two years. Oregon’s own Legislative Revenue Office expects the costs of those business tax cuts to grow rapidly starting in 2015, eating away at the limited new revenues in the deal. This will likely create another budget crunch a few years down the road. And despite the political rhetoric about jobs and small business surrounding the tax cuts, the beneficiaries are almost exclusively individuals in the top 1 percent.
Rep. Brent Barton, D-Oregon City, himself a lawyer in private practice, asked an important question about the deal: “What is the message that this Legislature is sending when we cut my taxes 20 percent? We cut taxes on thousands of lawyers, doctors, lobbyists, accountants on the same day that we cut benefits for retirees. What message does that send?”
Unfortunately, advocates for working Oregonians will have little time to recover from the special session fight before they’re confronted with Governor Kitzhaber’s next pet project: weakening Oregon’s so-called “over-reliance” on income taxes.