What's Going On Elsewhere (Oregon)

You people are starting to believe your own lies, deceptions, manipulations and propaganda.

It was the public employee unions that were well-financed and used the fears of gutting education, public safety, and the human services safety net to instill the fears in the public, while the largest contributor to the resistance of the taxes against the "rich," were logically the grocers who have a high volume business but earn less than 5 cents on the dollar -- but now are taxed on the gross receipts.

The only other state that taxes all business activity at the gross instead of just at the retail (sales tax) is the Hawaii General Excise Tax, which largely accounts for the cost of everything being 4 times what it is everywhere else -- because every business tacks it on at every level as a multiplier effect.

Already there is talk among the public employee unions in every state that that is the "successful" tactic to use in promoting their own salary and benefit increases -- that the people won't mind if it is perceived as only a tax against the rich (a few), rather than in fact, the most entrepreneurial, and not necessarily the rich. In fact, in poor economies, they are even likely to be operating at a loss -- and then being taxed at the gross to exacerbate their woes.

Such is the case with the farmers who have to be big time players or they can't be players at all because they also have to do things on massive scale or it's not worth doing at all. That's very different from the wage earners who don't have to take a loss ever -- because they get paid upfront, before any profit is made. So there is this huge distinction, in being an enterprise (corporation), and just being a wage earner -- guaranteed their income regardless of whether they're highly productive or not.

That is particularly true of the public employee unions where the median of government workers is significantly greater (double) than the median for the population at large, and thus composing the ranks of the upper half of the socio-economic makeup, yet claiming they are the poor and underprivileged because they are not making as much as the top 2% -- as though everybody is entitled to be in that top 2%, of anything, much less income and wealth.

We don't expect that of athletic competitions, or talent contests, but somehow, a few self-designated elitists, think that their worth is comparable to Bill Gates -- if they weren't sacrificing themselves to work for practically free in a government sinecure.

And while the government does perform many essential services, it should be eliminating many problems rather than overseeing them growing out of control -- and requiring even more experts at higher guaranteed salaries while these problems become perpetual.

Good solutions invariably eliminate the problems, rather than perpetuating them, and increasing the need for more of the solution, which then becomes the problem. Education is a big one -- in which the solution shouldn't be the need for evermore education -- endlessly. At some point, the student needs to know how to be their own teacher, rather more dependent on evermore costly education to tell them the political correctness of what to do -- providing job security and wealth for a new entitled class.

When Robin Hood used to steal from the "rich" to give to the "poor," what modern liberals like to ignore, is that he was addressing the entitlement and injustice of "government" (authority) to take whatever they wanted from the people, which is also the revolt against a "taxation without representation" -- which is one group deciding that another should provide for them, which is something different from people deciding to tax themselves equally for their mutual benefit.

In such a plan, some will do better than others. But then to change the rules so that those who do, now have to pay more because they do because others will gang up on them otherwise, is very troubling.