The tax increases will continue until morale improves

Of all the hideous local taxes scaring businesses and normies away from Portland, the city's ludicrous head tax "for the arts" is the most outrageous. It's $35 a year per person, unless the person is living on less than $1,000 a year or in a household with income below the federal policy level. It is perhaps the most hated tax in the world.

But the socialistas on the City Council never met a tax they didn't like, and they just voted to increase it to $50 a head per year, raising the low-income exemption to a princely $20,000 a year of income ($40,000 for a married couple). The vote to increase the tax was 7 to 5, as follows:

Yes:  Kanal, Pirtle-Guiney, Koyama Lane, Morillo, Green, Avalos, Dunphy

No:  Ryan, Novick, Clark, Zimmerman, Smith

The defector among the grown-ups was Pirtle-Guiney (pictured), who's from my district, No. 2. Duly noted.

The chamber of commerece is threatening to fight the increase in court, but as a veteran of an unsuccessful years-long court battle to have the tax invalidated on the most obvious ground of its illegality, I wouldn't get their hopes up. About a dozen state court judges had a crack at the arts tax in the original lawsuits, and not a single one showed the slightest bit of interest in taking a hard look at any aspect of it. The business lobby's time and money might be better spent trying to get a ballot measure going to repeal the tax, leaving the door open for replacing it with something else. 

And there's also the matter of having the Ché Guevara types voted off the council. Half of them are up for re-election in November: Green on the west side, and Morillo and Koyama Lane in southeast. Given the grotesque "rank choice" voting "system," it's hard to figure out how to get rid of bad apples, but canning one of those three while keeping the three grown-ups on the ballot would help Portland start to dig out from its deep, deep, hole.