liveonearth (liveonearth) wrote,
liveonearth
liveonearth

Oregon Ballot Measures 66 and 67


I expect my votes to tick off some people and my thinking about it to tick off another group. Here in Oregon PROP 66 is to increase taxation on higher income individuals and businesses to shore up a pretty major budget shortfall. PROP 67 is changing the tax on corporations from $10/year to $150/year. I voted yes on both, in spite of my libertarian leanings. Why? Because I don't want Oregon to have to cut its social services, and I don't want the Middle Class to fall off the edge into poverty. And that is about to happen.

But are my votes fair? Absolutely not. I apologize to those high earners, who are already paying a ridiculous fraction of their incomes, for my vote in favor of burdening them further. I apologize for all the small corporate businesses, because really they should not have to give another $140/year, rather we should extract that money from giant insurance companies, banks and credit cards, pharmaceuticals and military corporations. Unfortunately there was not a ballot measure that proposed to shift the burden in that direction.

I hope that the aristocracy of our nation will send some of their highly educated youth into a life of service, and help us recover our democracy. In all fairness, the increased taxation should be applied to multinational corporations, and not to small, local corporations, nor to our local upper-middle and upper class people. So I willfully voted to increase the unfair monetary burden on our aristocracy because I want that aristocracy to help to extricate our democracy from the corrupt corporatocracy that currently owns both our political parties and (ahem) rules the world. It's a big project, and we need the rich and educated on board. We have to politically separate the middle rich from the outrageously rich who are shielded behind layers of corporate protections.

OK, now you can tell me why my rationale is nuts. Educate me. What should we do?
Tags: america, corporations, democracy, elections, government, middle class, oregon, revolution, taxes, wealth
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