It might as well be spring
Politicians are funny. Most of the time, you have to hit them over the head to get them to pay attention.
And that's pretty much what just happened with the raft of tax and DMV fee increases that the Oregon Legislature gleefully enacted in its last, "special," session, ostensibly to fund basic maintenance of transportation infrastructure. The outraged voters went over their heads and forced the taxes and fees to show up on the ballot in November.
Ha! Ha! That's when the legislators, and the governor, will also be on the ballot, running for re-election. And when the bleak polling numbers on the taxes came down like an anvil n Wile E. Coyote's noggin, well... the politicians listened. They had no other choice.
First the governor, Tina "Comet" Ko(hou)tek, decided that the transportation bill that she forcefully championed, and promptly signed, was suddenly no longer to her liking. And today we learn that the politicians are short-circuiting the November vote by putting the issue to the voters in May. That way, maybe by the fall we will have forgotten who passed the law that the people had to fight to veto.
When the laughter subsides, we should all pause and ask ourselves where all the taxes we already pay are going. They tell us we need new taxes for basics like fixing roads and keeping parks maintained, but what happened to the tax revenue that used to pay for these things?
Well, a lot of it goes to pay bureaucrats' pensions, in the hideous state PERS system, which despite the wicked gouge it takes out of everyone, is still not on solid financial footing. Whenever the spotlight is shone on the growing excesses of PERS – a former Ducks football coach is still collecting a cool $641,000 a year, for example – nobody ever connects them to the deterioration of basic public services in Oregon. But of course they're linked. Money is money.
Money is money and math is math. Nursery rhymes have more logic than these folks:
ReplyDeleteOld Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To give her poor dog a bone.
But when she got there
The cupboard was bare
And so the poor dog had none.
No comet.
ReplyDeleteFor all the bitching about PERS, you all are missing the real growth of local government. It seems every few years there is a new gov fad, a new battle cry, and with it comes new spending.
ReplyDeleteThrough the teens it was the unyielding demand for "data driven decisions". Bureaucrats to analyze, new data collection requirements, more systems, complicated reporting and another layer (or whole department) to add to the bill. Decisions don't get made by these silly Key Performance Metrics or cool graphs, it's political horse trading and back rooms with small tables like it has always been. Data for data's sake ain't cheap.
The other cost is the DEI apparatus in gov. So many Equity Practitioners, Offices of Equity, a massive set of reporting requirements, bloat, while again decisions don't get made by any of these new "lenses" or training decision makers now have on the issue. But we feel better for some reason if we have bureaucrats training other bureaucrats how to better explain poor decisions made through a painfully twisted highlighting of equity pros, cons, etc.
Last is simply the volume of deputies, chiefs, officers of every conceivable type all over cities in this state. It's pushes money that used to pay for services to new layers, committees, stakeholder groups that sub-execs coordinate on calendars filled with do-nothing gab sessions all day.
And if we aren't paying more, we sure are generally raising the level of mid-management to get the same work done. Office Support Specialists are now Coordinator IV's, Every Analyst seems to be an III, or IV, or Analyst IIIXMVI. Every. Single. One. And... Deputy/Chief/Officers for all! Your title gets a Deputy! And your title gets and Officer! It's like an Oprah show for bureaucrats.
PERS? Please... You're missing the point, all of this other nonsense is displacing utility workers, capital projects and any semblance of transformative infrastructure. We have no downtown. Nothing any family would want to enjoy. The Blazers are leaving. It's dangerous to simply grab dinner with your family.
But our decisions will be data-driven... next year when we again promise we'll have better metrics, graphs, staff. Our decisions will show (after the fact) that by some miracle they were all equity enhancing. And all this work was informed by the most highly classified and paid sub-exec staff in the galaxy.
But yeah. PERS. Sure.