Subtracting insult from injury

War is hell. And although Portland is not a war zone, it is hell – tax hell, that is. Every level of government here – and there are several extra ones – are on you like a school of piranhas. You would have to be crazy to open a business in the Portland region unless you had no alternative.

It's not surprising. Voters in Portlandia are fond of electing to public office people who have never had a real job and know nothing about money, or much of anything else that takes place outside their ideological bubble. The other day the feckless City Council had to invite in an expert to teach them Property Tax 101. I hope the instructor started with "Money doesn't grow on trees," because the socialistas who now control the council have probably never thought about that.

The additions to the pile of obscene taxes inflicted on Portlanders in recent years include a county-wide income tax to subsidize private day care businesses. And there's also a regional income tax that ostensibly goes to "homeless services," but in practice is mostly back-door welfare, on two levels. It keeps people from becoming homeless, you see, and it's a nifty payroll padder for the city's vast and largely pointless nonprofit industrial complex.

These two local income taxes would be bad policy even if administered with good judgment, but the politicians in charge of Multnomah County and the inane Metro regional government couldn't get the state to take on the collection duties. And so both the county and Metro are paying Portland City Hall to draft the rules and enforce them. 

You couldn't have chosen a nastier bunch of brutes to do those deeds. The city revenuers are both ruthless and tone-deaf.

Over the summer, though, at least Metro showed faint signs of actually having a clue. They changed the "homeless" tax, which is imposed only on upper-middle-class and wealthy taxpayers, so that the income threshold, for having to pay, at least gets increased every year for inflation. For upper-middle-class taxpayers, Metro also got rid of the vicious requirement that their tax be paid quarterly; now only very-high-income earners will have to make the four PITA deposits a year. And with that requirement removed, fewer folks will opt to have their employers withhold the tax – another chore imposed on those unfortunate enough to maintain a payroll here.

The Metro council at a recent meeting.

Both of the Metro amendments are quite right, and they shouldn't have been necessary in the first place. Inflation adjustments should have been part of the tax from the start, and the quarterly payments are just nickel-and-diming the region to its economic death. (Which is well under way, by the way. The Portland economy is currently on hospice.)

You might think Multnomah County would wise up and follow Metro's suit, but they haven't, and they probably won't. That hideous Chevy Vega who's running the county thinks her pet tax is just fine, she's got the requisite two other votes for what she wants, and when you challenge it, the discussion gets diverted or postponed. Her nursery school operator pals love the checks, and even if the tax scares away people with jobs and real lives, to Council Crest Jess they don't count hardly at all.

It's amazing to me that someone isn't giving the county a harder time about this. There's so much for the businesspeople to complain about around here, I guess they're too busy griping about other insults and scouting real estate in other parts. Anyway, shame on Multnomah County for refusing to loosen the screws. even the slightest bit, on the successful people they're driving away to the distant 'burbs.

Interestingly, Metro has also shelved plans to try to make the "homeless" tax permanent. They were thinking about putting up a ballot measure this year to extend the tax beyond its current expiration in 2030, but when they took a poll, they found out that the measure might fail. Rather than be embarrassed by the truth, Metro's decided to take a few more years to repackage reality so as to fool the true believers yet again.