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Our View: State budget will require tradeoffs Tuesday Feb 28, 2017 at 12:01 AM Members of the Oregon Legislature's Joint Ways and Means Committee got an earful Friday night from advocates for key state services. Backers of education, health care and other state services urged the committee to find new sources of revenue — read taxes — to avoid painful cuts, but that will be far from easy. The occasion was the biannual "road show" by the committee, which holds hearings around the state early in each odd-numbered year as work begins on the budget. Speakers packed the room at Stevenson Union on the Southern Oregon University campus, imploring committee members to maintain schools, health care, services to the disabled and mental health care, among others. The state faces a $1.8 billion shortfall in the next two-year budget despite an improving economy. Some of that is the result of rising costs for health care as federal assistance declines under the Affordable Care Act, and some of it is due to soaring pension costs under the Public Employee Retirement System. Several speakers said the current funding system is unfair because it forces education to compete with health care and law enforcement for scarce state dollars. Their answer: increase taxes on out-of-state businesses and large corporations. That was tried in November, in the form of Ballot Measure 97. Voters resoundingly rejected it. It's easy to say, raise taxes on big corporations, especially those headquartered elsewhere, because it's easy to believe Oregon residents won't have to pay more. The problem is, all tax increases tend to affect more than just those they are aimed at, and big corporations have deep pockets with which to campaign against increases, as they did last fall. The Legislature can raise taxes on its own, but only if three-fifths of both houses vote to do so. Democrats control the House and the Senate, but their majority is not big enough to raise taxes without some help from Republicans, who are not fans of tax increases. That means either crafting a proposal that will attract the needed Republican votes — which likely means agreeing to PERS reforms and other concessions — or going to the voters again. The chances of tax increases generating billions — as Measure 97 would have — are slim. As painful as it may be, advocates for state services of all kinds are likely to have to prepare to live with less funding than they want.