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Current Headlines
How is the LGBT community affected by Oregon’s economic crisis?
With the economy in bad shape, state governments are strapped for cash they need pay for services.
How does the budget crisis affect the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community?
What kinds of state services are important to LGBT people? We looked into it and here’s a few things we found:
- HIV treatment and prevention programs. Over 2,000 Oregonians who are HIV positive receive help paying health care premiums, paying for medication, and being reimbursed for co-pays through the Oregon CAREAssist program.
- School counselors. For queer and questioning youth, having a supportive school counselor can have a life-changing impact. If Oregon school districts are forced to go back and cut more from their budgets, on-campus counselors are likely to be among the first to be laid off. This will affect all students, but especially LGBT students, who may not have anyone else to confide in.
- Services for homeless youth. A disproportionate number of kids on the street are LGBT teens. The Oregon Commission on Children and Families coordinates statewide programs that reach out to homeless and runaway youth with food, shelter, prevention services, education, job training, counseling, etc. The commission ensures a stable network of services around the state, but was targeted for deep cuts by the legislature.
What kinds of state services do you and your family rely on?
How can our state come up with a balanced approach to get through this once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis?
How can we protect the vulnerable without shifting the burden to the middle class?
Let us know in the comments below
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
How about we use this opportunity to re-examine the role of government in our lives? Perhaps, as decent human beings, rather than send the product of our labor to Salem or DC, or Metro, or Multnomah County, or Portland City government in the hopes that they will spend it on things we value (and not, say, murdering children with bombs on the other side of the world, propping up sadistic, brutal dictators, putting troops in 165+ countries, paying retired government workers 110% of their final salary, building trams for rich doctors, putting floating outhouses on lakes for fisherman, denying basic rights to peaceful people…).
What say we minimize government coercion, both social & economic, and take care of each other without subsidizing evil?
Am I really a better citizen for having sent a third of my paycheck to George Bush for the past year? Have my property taxes funded quality education? Is it good to give 10% of my paycheck to a state that has recently enacted laws againt equality?
In Portland, do we need to support 5 layers of government?
It is through the mechanism of government that the haters deny us our rights.
Let’s disarm them.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Dan, while I agree with you almost completely on the things that our governments do that are bad, “disarming” government hurts us, too, especially in a relatively progressive state such as Oregon.
The best example, I think, is the kicker. The 1995-97 surplus was $432 million. That meant that over $62 million was returned to the taxpayers at an average of about $30 per taxpayer. Yay, let’s take the whole family out to Taco Bell! But the state could have saved that and invested it in a rainy-day fund for recession times, such as now. Since the beginning of the kicker (the ’79-’81 biennium), we could have put aside about $156.640 million. The average taxpayer took in a grand total of $78 over that time.
Despite the flaws of our government, I would much rather it had that money than that it had been given back to taxpayers.
“What say we minimize government coercion, both social & economic, and take care of each other without subsidizing evil?”
How exactly to you propose to do this?
“Have my property taxes funded quality education?”
Based on talking to people who have kids in PPS, I would say yes. Could it be better? Yes. Would it be improved by removing our taxes from the pot? How could it possibly?
“Is it good to give 10% of my paycheck to a state that has recently enacted laws against equality?” Oregon recently enacted laws FOR equality; the maximum tax rate is 9%; the average effective tax rate is about 5.6% of adjusted gross income.
“It is through the mechanism of government that the haters deny us our rights.”
It is through the mechanism of ballot measures that bigotry was put into our constitution, but it is because of the ballot measure that we don’t have a sales tax, a tax that hits the poor much harder than the well off.
As is true with so much, government is a mixed bag. But I think you would be throwing out much good for the removal of a smaller amount of bad.
We should increase corporate income tax, which has a minimum of $10 (yes, ten dollars).
From Oregon Center for Public Policy:
“In the next budget cycle (2007-09), corporations will pay just 4.5 percent of Oregon’s income taxes, while personal income taxpayers will pay 95.5 percent. In the 1973-75 budget cycle, corporations paid 18.5 percent of all income taxes. In the current 2005-07 biennium, corporations are expected to pay 6.3 percent of Oregon’s income taxes, while personal income taxpayers will pay 93.7 percent. Over the current decade, as corporate income taxes are projected to fall by $24 million, personal income tax revenues are projected to grow another $4.6 billion.”
It is time to get the corporations to support the state they are in, not be welfare recipients. It is time to redo our tax rates so they don’t max out at 9% no matter how much you make. Here’s the top rate: over $13,000 is taxed at 9%. So, you make $13,000.01, you’re taxed at 9%. You make $130,000,000, you’re taxed at 9%. There’s a problem there.
This, too, is a nationwide problem: the rich are protected from taxes: Income subjected to Social Security taxes tops out at $106,800. The maximum withheld is $6,621.60. You make a billion dollars and $6,621.60 is withheld. If there were no maximum, the billion dollar earner wold give $62 million to Social Security, leaving the poor dear with only $938 million to struggle through until the next pay check.
Or what about our health care system? In countries with universal health care, the cost per capita is about half of what it is in the US—and they’re giving health care to everyone, mostly without co-pays or that other nonsense that happens to us here.
Meanwhile, the political discourse here is so twisted that people are saying they are willing to pay HIGHER taxes to get universal care. The reality is civilized health care could lower taxes, but we don’t hear that on television or read it in newspapers.
I think we should be all over the politicians and media about the big lies they spread. Then we might not have to figure out how to do what you, Dan, are looking at: creating an entirely new way of dealing with our economy. Not, mind you, that we shouldn’t change things radically, but we should force our governments, especially the federal, to stop screwing us, and force the media to stop lying to us.