I can hardly believe my ears. Our consumer-driven economy is in a recession and people like Emerald columnist Jeff Oliver are seeking to take money away from consumers and trust it in the hands of state
bureaucrats (“Back-to-school sales tax,” April 15). An economy that feeds on consumer confidence, activity and spending must not be starved. If our economy was a sick child, would we, in its already unhealthy state, deny it the resources that it needs to survive?
A sales tax would rip funds out of our desperate economy. Paying a few extra pennies for fast food is one thing, but this is not just a hamburger tax. When Oliver went to Michigan, did he try to buy a car? The sales tax from that kind of purchase would turn out to be much more than his “few dollars on larger purchases.” For some, like me, who live below the poverty line and work ourselves to the bone, a sales tax even on inexpensive items steals from what little we have earned. I budget $2 per meal; a 7 percent tax would make me pay for a meal I did not eat about every 14 meals. If I keep this meager budget standard all year, which is very difficult, then by the end of the year I will have lost $153.30 (a lot more than a “few pennies at a time”) and not eaten about 26 meals. What about a person who lives on the street? How much more would this hurt them?
And what about the public school dilemma? Would a sales tax really help? Nationally, salaries of public school administrators last year
increased 5.7 percent to $112,158,
according to the Department of Research at www.aft.org. This is more than the average for a lawyer, a full-time professor or an engineer and more than twice the state average
for teachers. I thought education
was about teaching children, not about providing administrators with early retirement.
There are 1,277 public schools in Oregon. If there is one administrator per school and that administrator takes a 10 percent pay cut, the revenue earned would be $14,322,576.60. I did not add in a bonus or even the projected percentage increase, which, when factored in, only has them losing about $4,000 rather than $10,000. This seems a much better solution than picking the pockets of the poor. Oregonians have rejected the sales tax time after time because it is unfair and just plain wrong. Besides, if Oregonians “are afraid of change” as Oliver alleges, then why would we have “formed a nationwide identity of being progressive,” as he states in the same column?
This kind of rhetoric is just as hypocritical as the idea of a sales tax saving education. A sales tax earmarked for education would probably just
increase the aforementioned percentage of administrators’ salaries. Why? Because it would go to a department, or an agency that could almost do whatever it wanted with that money. The word “earmarked” does not guarantee that sales tax revenue would go toward teaching children.
Trust me, sacrificing more money to an ever-increasing government is a bad idea. Taking this money from the poverty-stricken, the weary, and the heavy-laden is more than that — it’s an atrocity.