Wednesday January 27, 2010

RAPID RESPONSE TEAM. Gotta say, I'm impressed that Megan McArdle didn't even take the time to devise a clever headline for this:

Oregon's Rich Tax is Not a Victory for Liberals

And there's your elevator summary! To the details:

Trying to close the gap with only taxes on high income makes state revenues very dependent on a very small group of people. Ask New York and California how that's going.

This is the you'll-be-sorry argument, implying that Oregon is about to become a festering hellhole like New York and California. (Michelle Malkin has a version of it: "Look for affected business owners to start Going Galt en masse." That Gulch is gonna be awful crowded, and wait'll they try to keep their lawns up without any illegal immigrants.) Here in the Empire State, however, the Governor wants to cut the bejesus out of school and social service spending, and create tax incentives for businesses. Hell, he wants to cut more than Haley Barbour.

That sounds like enlightened libertarian thinking to me, and should exempt us from McArdle's wrath. But maybe it looks like too little, too late from her own low-tax haven in D.C.

Should that fail to convince, there's always the no-big-deal argument:

The Tax Foundation says that pre-tax, it was on the top ten list for business tax climate. That suggests that it has relatively more room to increase taxes than other states.

She has seven of these, and one is sure to fit your needs.

Even some less-blue states have been hit hard by the recession, and will have to find new ways to get by. Federal stimulus payments have masked this condition somewhat, but as it looks like we're not going to get any more of that action, eventually nearly everyone is going to have to come to reckoning. Maybe Oregon is further delaying its own, or maybe its citizens judged that the kind of high-earning immigrants it hopes to continue attracting would be more inclined to relocate to a place with extensive social services than to a rainier version of Mississippi.

One thing's for sure: As impatient as the voters may be getting with Big Gummint lately, few are ready to bargain on the magic Ayn Rand beans just yet.