I'm all for a look at the tax system and making changes. The kicker is one area we need to look at - it's ridiculous that the state would have to cut services because it thought it was going to have less money, and then have to give it back when the projection was wrong. That money should go back into restoring services and growing the rainy day fund.

There are plenty of loopholes and deductions in income taxes that can be closed or gotten rid of, such as the one that gives you a break on your taxes if you purchase a yacht.

The corporate minimum tax is appalling and needs to be changed. It is ridiculous when an Oregonian on food stamps pays more state income tax than a corporation that made millions (or billions).

But a sales tax is not the answer. All it does is balance the budget on those that can least afford it. Yes, it brings in money from tourists. But study after study shows that those at the bottom of the income ladder end up paying the highest portion of their income in sales tax. Food may be untaxed, but there's still toiletries (shampoo, soap, etc.), cleaning supplies, toilet paper, laundry supplies, clothes, shoes, and so on. These aren't luxuries - they're necessities.

I came from a state with sales tax. And I watched first hand how it affected people who were poor, living paycheck to paycheck, etc. And now I'm watching as my home state continues to stand on the edge of bankruptcy since the state has chosen time and time again to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and the middle class rather than build a fair and progressive tax system.

A sales tax could be just as creatively used as the current income tax. The deduction for buying a yacht seems a prime example.

I've long since lost the URL (and it probably doesn't even exist any longer) to then-candidate Howard Dean's website which talked about how he'd very progressively changed Vermont's sales taxes to make them fairer. There is no reason in the world why Oregon can't do what Vermont did.

I've long favored a sales tax here in Oregon. One distinct potential advantage such a tax would have would be that our growing tourist industry would increasingly help fund services in Oregon. Which underscores the potential for a progressive sales tax. Of course whether a sales tax would be regressive or progressive depends entirely upon how it's crafted.

Seems to me that some form of hybrid sales/income tax system could easily be more progressive than what we have now.

Um... to finish my thought...

What I'm saying is that we don't have to choose between a sales tax OR an income tax. That's an artificial choice which limits the possibilities.

I just don't see how going to a non-partisan legislature is going to fix the 36 problem. You're still going to have Democrats and Republicans. And they're still going to break along party lines.

Democrats are going to be in favor of certain things, while Republicans are against.

And Dem/Repub/Progressive/Conservative groups are going to make their endorsements, which tells the voter a lot.

What it does mean, though, is that in some districts you may end up with a legislator from a different party than you would if you had partisan primaries.

For example, say you have 4 Dems and 2 Republicans running for a House seat. And say the vote typically goes 60% Dem and 40% Republican. You have an open election and the 4 Dems are all great candidates and they split the Dem vote with approximately 15% of the vote each. One Republican pulls 22%, another pulls 18%. You now have a run-off between two Republicans. This is indeed a situation that could happen. I watched this happen a few times in my home county where we lost a seat held by a Dem even though Dem candidates took well over half the vote combined.

"I've long favored a sales tax here in Oregon."

This makes no sense, coming from you. You've argued over and over (incorrectly, IMO) that a user fee such as the tobacco tax would be somehow "regressive," but a literally regressive sales tax--that you're FOR?

There is no practical way to make a progressive sales tax. You can't ask people for an income statement every time they buy a pack of gum. Absent that, you'll have to explain how a sales tax does not tax regressively. Exempting sectors simply raises the revenue-neutral bar, denuding the whole point of a consumption tax in the first place.

Tax people for earning money, not for spending it.

Gee... a sales tax on the purchase of a yacht would be regressive? The purchase of a luxery automobile? The purchase of commercial real estate? The purchase of a second or third home? The purchase of high-end cigars?

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation. - Herbert Spencer

A tax credit doesn't make any sense for poor people.

Why do you think the payday loan system got so far out of hand? It's because people at the bottom have a hard time getting from week to week as it is. A sales tax that sucks even more money out of the pockets of the poor, with a chunk of money promised at tax time is going to strain those people even more.

What Howard Dean talked about was making Vermont's existing sales tax more progressive than it was. It didn't make the overall system progressive. In fact, I've repeatedly asked people here to provide even one example of a progressive sales tax plan that's been implemented. So far, no takers.

Meanwhile, a report years ago said Washington State's sales tax system "puts a bigger tax burden on the poor than any other state in the nation".

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/103213_taxstudy08.shtml

A progressively-structured income tax is inherently progressive. There is no example of a progressive income tax. An income tax can only be "stable" if it taxes a wide range of the populace and taxes items that are necessities. If it only targets a small portion of the population, or it only targets non-essentials, it's volatile when discretionary spending goes down in a recession.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/14/AR2007091402144.html

In a letter to Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) and legislative leaders, Comptroller Peter Franchot (D) reported that revenue projections for the current fiscal year, which ends next June, had been revised downward by $132.5 million, mostly due to slower-than-expected sales tax collections related to a depressed housing market.

Was he proposing a regressive tax?

Perhaps less regressive than some flavors of sales tax, but yes, I'd say so.

It's very difficult to design a sales tax scheme that is not regressive. If you exempt enough categories of purchases then you don't have a useful tax.

I'm with Paul--if you can't have the discussion when your political life is secure and the coffers are full, when can you have it?

Jeff, I don't think anyone's trying to shut down any discussion. I'm certainly not. But people should provide examples of a non-regressive sales tax plan, not simply some half-baked ideas about how they think it might work. Provide evidence. Crunch some numbers. Do some math. The data is out there.

And no, Buckman Res, you can't control how much you are taxed if you're on the lower end of the income spectrum. The primary problem with the regressiveness of the sales tax is that it impacts people with less discretionary income to a greater extent than it does people with more discretionary income. That's pretty much the definition of a regressive tax.

If a sales tax is broad-based enough to make it non-volatile (the supposed reason the state is considering adding it to the mix) then it has to tax items that people buy even when the economy is adversely affected. Otherwise it goes up and down with the vagaries of the economy just like income taxes do.

Actually, the numbers from the tax that Westlund and the others proposed showed those at the lowest income levels saw their total tax paid increase. It varied in the middle class, with some seeing decreases and some seeing increases. The more money you made, the greater the percentage in decrease you saw.

Any tax that requires you to either keep every single receipt throughout the year just to get your sales tax back or charges the poor more than they pay now is just plain wrong. Doing the sales tax with a refund at the end is not going to be used by many poor people - many won't have the time or the resources to be able to save all those receipts and do the refund forms. Most do the simple tax forms right now as it is.

I don't think people realize how hard it is to be poor and survive as it is unless they've done it recently.

I'm with LT -- put it all on the table. Not just Measure 5 for residences, but the different and lower property taxes paid by businesses.

But if you go to the very long list of exemptions from a sales tax proposed by TJ, why not turn it around -- call it a luxury tax and make the list additive rather than assume everything and subtract?

How about tying a "rainy day fund" not to current policy expenditures, but to repaying bonds, and giving the legislature a certain degree of automatic bonding authority, only triggered by certain kinds of economic activity or revenue declines? Rather than abolish the kicker altogether, reform it so that unexpected surpluses go first to bringing the bond repayment fund up to the full level needed to cover extant bonds and interest plus a safety margin, at which point the kicker comes back?

How much of Oregon's tourism & tourist spending reflects our lack of sales tax? What about "commuter" spending by near-Washingtonians?

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TorridJoe, you are simply wrong in calling the tobacco tax a user fee. It's a rhetorical trick, spin, but basically a lie.

If I go to a state park and pay a day pass fee, that's a user fee. If I vote to pay for a state bond measure for parks and never go to a state park, that is not a user fee.

A tobacco tax doesn't charge smokers for using the health care system. It charges them for buying cigarettes. A smoker who NEVER uses the health care system nonetheless pays. She is not paying for using the system.

A user fee on the health system is something like a co-payment. Insurance deductibles are semi-user fees. You know, the stuff that pushes low-wage & fixed income people to delay care & ultimately raise costs.

The "average" cost of packs of tobacco in health care costs combines the much higher costs of people who get really, really sick (like my grandfather did) with much lower costs of smokers who don't get really, really sick. Some particular packs of tobacco cost much more than other particular packs, in terms of their association with individuals who use the health system.

Not all smokers get the chronic diseases that have increased incidence among smokers. At best the tobacco tax is a kind of risk fee, on top of additional health insurance premiums insured smokers already pay.

I suppose you could turn tobacco taxes into a kind of insurance pool to cover smokers' use of health-care resources; maybe combine it with a special tax on tobacco company profits.

Likewise I have no problem charging a risk fee to pay for programs of risk reduction (smoking prevention and cessation).

But the "user-fee" rhetoric is very much a blame-the-victim kind of talk that tries to evade the fact that this unfair measure I've just voted for turns smokers literally into scapegoats for our failures as a society to protect our kids, by placing the burden for that sin on the smokers and having them pay for all of us.

"An injury to one is an injury to all" "To each according to their need, from each according to their ability"

Oh, one more thing -- how about taking up an idea advocated by Robert Heilbroner but I also believe some more conservative economists: creating separate accounting and funding mechanisms for capital and operating expenditures, as businesses do?

If you had a distinct capital account that was directed to public infrastructure and equipment construction, acquisition, maintenance, depreciation and replacement, it would create more transparency about where money goes and probably garner greater public support.

Chris--

I've heard some people bring up the idea of some kind of luxury tax like that, which would also include some services.

Of course the problem is the people who are buying that stuff can often afford to go out of state to purchase it.

Here's a creative idea...

If it's true that the budget is going to grow to $16 billion by the 2013/2014 biennium, how about controlling spending during the next 2 legislative sessions and using some of that revenue for the rainy day fund?

If the Democrats can impose that kind of fiscal discipline on themselves, it will take traction away from the Sizemore's of the world the next time they try to implement some TABOR-like variant here in Oregon.

The discretionary budget grew by nearly 30 percent in the last biennium, surely we can live with a 10-12 percent increase or less during the next 2 sessions with anything above that set asie for a rainy day or major capital expenditures down the road without having to ask taxpayers for additional revenue.

PS...

I don't think that the aforementioned suggestion should stop us from a permanent elimination of the corporate kicker with a portion of the proceeds going to a rainy day fund and a portion of the proceeds going to higher ed.

I would hope that legislators on both sides of the aisle will oppose any efforts to eliminate the personal kicker until the first look to fiscal discipline and reform of taxes for multi-state and multinational corporations operating in Oregon.

"A smoker who NEVER uses the health care system nonetheless pays"

I'm pretty sure such an animal exists in numbers too small to count. Surely you do not deny that smokers use the health care system, and do so disproportionally to the rest of society in general.

A gas tax is also a user fee--for transport--despite the fact that some people may only use gas to run their generator and mower.

"But the "user-fee" rhetoric is very much a blame-the-victim kind of talk"

That's frankly just ridiculous, Chris. Blame the victim, in 2007? Stopping is devilishly hard, but starting is well controllable and even quitting has been done by millions (including both my parents, long before hypnotism and gum).

It's "blame the cost center" rhetoric. It's a pretty simple equation: state pays $X for public health care, smokers are responsible as a group for $X-Y, which means if we save $Y then we can either pocket the money, pay off something else, or maintain a neutral balance for total health care dollars by plowing Y back into X and using the money to address other health care needs.

It's a cost recovery user fee. And it works very well.

"One possible way to make a sales tax progressive is to give a refundable tax credit on your Oregon income tax form 40 for the first, say $500, of the sales tax paid in Oregon."

I'd buy that, but it would need to go to non-income-tax payers as well to be truly progressive. If you don't file, you still pay sales tax but you don't get the credit.

Surely you do not deny that smokers use the health care system, and do so disproportionally to the rest of society in general.

Compared to the general population, yeah. But smoking deaths have been trending downwards for some time now, and the associated health care costs with it. But obesity-linked deaths are trending upwards. In 2004 the prediction was that by the following year obesity deaths would surpass smoking deaths and continue trending upwards while smoking deaths continue trending downwards.

Obviously obesity is linked to a myriad of profound and expensive health care needs long before death. Childhood diabetes is a particularly vexing (and expen$ive) problem. Surely you can't have missed all of the many, many news reports on these things!?!

So... you wanna talk about "user fees" that you might have to pay? Or would you prefer to restrict it to just those terrible smokers?

What WOULD work? I don't know, but a backwards state like KY (no real slam, I moved from there 20 years ago) has found a way to balance out the tax bite with some income tax, some property tax and some sales tax. Of course they also have the Lottery as well.

That's exactly the kind of thing that I'm advocating. It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition where we either have an income tax or we have a sales tax.

One thing that tends to get lost in these discussions is the reality that many property taxes simply get passed on to consumers anyway. Apartment complexes and any other housing which is rented being a prime example. Ditto for virtually all commercial property, whether it be business or restaurants or move theaters.

"So... you wanna talk about "user fees" that you might have to pay? Or would you prefer to restrict it to just those terrible smokers?

Fat is a dietary necessity. Tobacco is not.

Fat is a dietary necessity. Tobacco is not.

So you oppose recovering the huge and growing societal co$t$ associated with obesity, including those caused by a growing national epidemic of obese children? Surely you don't deny that they use the health care system, and do so disproportionally compared to the rest of society in general.

So which is it, TJ? Do you really advocate "user fees" to recover societal costs or do you just hate smokers and the "user fee" thing is nothing more than a smokescreen to disguise it?

There are three ways you can tax, on income, on wealth, or on outgo.

We tax income, but badly. Oregon's income tax is essentially "flat" for individuals, because its "progressiveness" tops out so low. Plus, we give breaks for those whose income is based on wealth breeding more wealth relative to people whose income comes from work. Add to that our taxing individuals over corporations, with corporations having myriad tools with which to avoid paying any significant taxes. ("Corporate personhood" only applies when it gives advantage to the corporation.) And since individuals are paying a greater share of taxes than they were a few years ago, even as government buying power has gone down, when it comes time to vote the voters can't understand why they should give more.

We tax wealth, but badly. We chiefly tax wealth in the form of real property. Since that is no longer the predominant way that people hold wealth that it once was, we tax homes rather than wealth. Then, Measure 5 severed the connection between tax levies and tax assessments and Measure 47/50 severed the connection between actual value (wealth) and assessment; our tax on wealth is dysfunctional. And, again, corporations, especially since M 5, have ways to avoid or reduce property taxes that individuals do not.

To look back even farther in time, the stage was set for M 5 in the recession of the early 80s when the Legislature abolished the Homeowners And Renters Relief Program, which gave low income homeowners and renters a rebate from their income taxes based on either their property taxes or their rent. The loss of that program made it possible to showcase low-income, especially elderly, homeowners for whom property taxes were burdensome. Then, M 5, while limiting the tax rate, separated it from the levy and tied it directly to property value. As property values rose fast during the 90s, taxes did too. That set up the conditions for M 47/50. Now, we all pay different rates, depending on how much our property used to be worth. Check out PortlandMaps.com, and make some comparisons. I know my home, in an area that experienced a price surge before the mid-90s, is taxed at a higher rate than those of several of my friends, who live in neighborhoods that saw their boom later. Now ponder this, from the Oregon Constitution, Section 20:

Equality of privileges and immunities of citizens. No law shall be passed granting to any citizen or class of citizens privileges, or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens.

So what's up with that?

We hardly bother to tax outgo at all.

And then you have the kickers. The kicker is not based on whether collections exceed budgetary needs, but on whether they exceed projections. For the corporate kicker, projections are based on projections provided by the corporations themselves. Anybody doubt the incentive to low-ball those? If State economists predict that State tax receipts will fall far short of requirements, the kickers return the money if the actual receipts are more than 2% less bad, no matter how severe the program cuts involved.

It's been part of the anti-government playbook for about three decades to starve government until it can't do the jobs that are expected of it. The next step is to accuse government of being ineffective, and seek to privatize government functions, so that somebody can profit. American "conservatives" long ago adopted Gordon Gekko as their paragon. And some of them have made Oregon their demonstration project.

it seems to me that the fairest way to determine the amount of taxes someone owes is by looking at the amount of resources they remove from the economy by purchasing consumable goods.

The first problem that springs to mind is that looking at the amount of resources an individual removes from the economy by purchasing consumable goods doesn't really corrolate with wealth, particularly with extreme wealth. Huge amounts of money are tied up in investments. With some folks the net amount is way beyond what they could even consume.

A related issue would be retirees who have scrimped and saved all their lives in order to enjoy their golden years. A consumption tax would place a disproportionate tax burden on them because devoid of context they would appear to be greedily consuming resources when the reality is that in context they really aren't if you broaden the picture to include the years that they scrimped and saved.

djk:

Actually, since it's pretty common to pass along increased taxes to renters, just about everyone does it. As such, the market bears it. Since rates went up pretty much across the board, it's not as if you can just move somewhere else and avoid the fee.

And you'd be surprised what the "market" can handle, which is why we just got word that when our lease ends in December that the new one will be an extra $102 a month (that's more than 12%).

Often times, at least in complexes, you'll lose services in lieu of rent going up. For example, at our old complex they ended their cable contract and used the funds to pay for a tax increase. To get the exact same service it was approximately $40 plus taxes and fees. Based on our rent at the time, we saw a 6% increase in our expenses to be able to keep at the same level of service we'd had previously.

Sometimes it's less noticeable, such as less maintenance work done around the property, less lights around the property, and the like.

But believe me, landlords do indeed pass along increases in taxes. Having lived in apartment units for more than 8 years now, I've see it happen time and time again.

Darrel Plant wrote, If a sales tax is broad-based enough to make it non-volatile (the supposed reason the state is considering adding it to the mix) then it has to tax items that people buy even when the economy is adversely affected. Otherwise it goes up and down with the vagaries of the economy just like income taxes do.

Thank you Darrel. That is definitely an interesting and useful observation. And one that I think is worth discussing.

If we're looking to a sales tax for tax stability, are we inherently talking about a steeply regressive sales tax? And if we try to make it less regressive (if not progressive), then are we inherently talking about instability?

I'd love to see a BlueOregon column by Chuck Sheketoff on this question.

The cost of the sales tax is its regressivity. I'd be happy to couple a sales tax excluding food and medical with a more progressive income tax. But the sales tax is still regressive.

An excellent point from Paul G. It's not the regressivity of a particular tax - but rather the regressivity of the overall tax structure.

Would a somewhat regressive sales tax be OK, if it was coupled with a steeply progressive income tax?

I commented on the Schrader et al. "Hopeful' tax reform plan in a column titled The First Step for a Truly Hopeful Tax Reform Plan for Oregon.

That sales tax centerpiece of that tax plan is not much different from a plan that has been kicked around the legislature numerous times. OCPP analyzed them in detail when they last were under serious consideration (2003) and you can see our analyses in Addressing the Regressivity of Sales Taxes: Hard to Overcome and Made Worse by Income Tax Cuts (PDF) and On Whose Backs?: Tax Distribution, Income Inequality, and Plans for Raising Revenue (PDF).

The bottom line: it is hard to make a general purpose sales tax be not regressive, and you certainly don't want to offset a sales tax with taking away progressive features of our tax system (the income tax on capital gains and the estate tax). Unfortunately, most sales tax proposals have done that.

Is there such a thing as a progressive sales tax? Only if you only tax items and services that are predominantly used by those with the greatest ability to pay taxes. Attorney fees. Accountant fees. Commissions on stock transactions. You get the point.

you certainly don't want to offset a sales tax with taking away progressive features of our tax system (the income tax on capital gains and the estate tax).

Hmmm... I see the capital gains and estate tax portions of the income tax as progressive - but they only really affect the upper end of the income scale.

I wonder if we can/should make the income tax more progressive on "regular" income... after all, we basically have a flat tax here in Oregon, since the top bracket starts at such a low level.

Um, Buckman Res, I think you've misunderstood Senator Wyden's fair flat tax. He keeps the progressive brackets that raise the rate as income goes up (thus, "fair"). But he eliminates nearly all the deductions and credits and loopholes (thus, "flat").

Go to his site to learn all about Ron Wyden's tax reform plan.

(Full disclosure: I manage that site for Ron, but I speak only for myself.)

I think Mr. Sheketoff's last paragraph gets into some of the same territory as I discussed earlier, only not explicitly. Washington's use taxes (which tax some services and goods not covered by the general sales tax) are more subject to economic fluctuation, as are taxes on discretionary spending like luxury taxes.

The problem is that if the sales tax is structured in a manner that it is at all more regressive than the income tax for Oregon residents on the lower end of the economic scale, then the overall effect of the addition of a sales tax shifts more costs to them. That's just the law of averages.

TJ,

Sorry, no dice. A user fee is a fee paid at the point of use. A gas tax approximates that because the uses that don't go to running vehicles on roads are pretty small (though perhaps less so in rural areas where people need to use combines & tractors). But N.B. that a different kind of tax reform than we're talking about here has recently been debated, both in proposals for reforming the road-mile tax for trucks and proposals to tax not gas per se but distance travelled measured electronically -- both actual user fees.

Nothing wrong with talking about blaming the victim in 2007, except that too many people now think that it's impolite (or impolitic?) to talk about it when it happens -- very much like the Republicans yelling "class war" when we call them on policies that actually are conducting class war.

My parents quit too. My grandfather couldn't. With all the anti-smoking pressures, most of the people who can quit relatively easily or who can start young & then give it up do. The folks who are left are the ones with the more serious physical addictions. It is PHYSICAL, BIOLOGICAL ADDICTION. Failure to be able to quit easily is not a character flaw. Treating it as if it is is the same kind of politics and moralist reformers of the early 19th century who saw being poor as the poor's own fault.

"Personal responsibility" is overrated. The whole point about health insurance reform and health-care reform is that we need more collective mutual responsibility for one another to make our country more decent and civilized. Helping smokers quit is part of that mutual responsibility, but the ways that work aren't the ones based on treating them like quasi-criminals, free-riders or cretins.

I'd have a lot fewer moral issues with taxes on cigarettes if they targeted the people who sold cigarettes instead of the people who were addicted to them. Measure 50 is the equivalent of going after street-level users of heroin and ignoring the dealers and distributors. It says it's fine and OK to sell harmful products -- and to make an obscene profit off of it so long as the state gets a big chunk too -- but it sucks the money out of the pockets of the politically-weakest link in the chain. Heaven forbid that we should go after the dealers themselves, they've got lobbyists!

What if retailers were hit with an after-tax fee of $1/pack for contributing to the health care burden of the state? Make it come out of retailer and distributor profits, not as something that they can pass along to the consumer (price competition would make it difficult for retailers to raise prices too far above standard profit margins).

That'd make the people who are making money off selling tobacco actually responsible for their actions, and I suspect there would be a lot of people who would decide that it wasn't really worth their while to sell them any longer.

Just a thought.

C'mon Buckman... it's not "duplicitous". There are two kinds of "flat". There's the kind proposed by Steve Forbes - flat on the rate. And there's the kind proposed by Dick Gephardt and Jerry Brown - flat on the deductions.

If you're going to go around supporting or opposing a policy based on the three word description of it, instead of reading even a one-page description handily available through the tubes 24 hours a day.... well, I guess we know not to listen to you.

Would a somewhat regressive sales tax be OK, if it was coupled with a steeply progressive income tax?

You're still forgetting about the poorest people in the state. The ones that already get their taxes back because they don't make enough. Or the ones that pay very little tax. It doesn't take purchasing much clothes, toiletries, etc. before they're already paying a considerable amount more in taxes than they do currently.

We'd have to spend a considerable amount of time on the "sales tax" and what would be included and excluded. Because the poorest among us have seen their dollar covering less and less every year, especially with basics like milk, bread, juice, meat, and gas going up. Ten dollars more in taxes could mean days worth of groceries. It could be the difference between having electricity and not having electricity.

Having been in that position not too long ago (and still only hovering not too far above that), I understand the position those people are in. I understand how any increase in taxes can be more than just a small problem to them - it can mean them going hungry, without electricity, and more.

It's hard to understand those at the bottom of the income scale unless you've had to go hungry recently - and I mean really hungry, not just skipping a meal or two. I'm talking about prolonged hunger that comes from weeks, or months, of inadequate food supplies. And unless you've had to live in the cold - whether it be on the streets, in a car, or in an apartment/house where you can't afford even the tiniest bit of heat.

I have politically active friends who have said they could easily sketch out a detailed sales tax plan which would be fair to all--if anyone ever asked them.

LT, please please please ask them to write up a short BlueOregon guest column doing just that. It would provoke excellent discussion around here.

It may come as a surprise to some who make that claim, but people who are barely making ends meet tend to make their clothes or buy them at Goodwill, may buy the toiletries at Big Lots, etc. They may go to grocery outlets, buy in bulk at Winco, and otherwise be very economical.

Actually, having been one of those people for several years, and knowing dozens of people in that situation, that's not all that true. I don't know a single person who makes their own clothes. Many people who are the lower income levels don't have the time necessary to make clothes. They may patch, take in, let out, etc. clothes, but making new clothes? Not likely. Even 11 years ago when I was still in school - in a district where probably half the household incomes didn't top $20,000 and a huge chunk of the kids received a free lunch - there were maybe a handful of kids who wore homemade clothes.

And places like Goodwill often aren't that much cheaper than buying cheap, but new, clothes at stores like Wal-Mart, K-Mart or Target. When we were on food stamps and WIC, our daughter was growing out of clothes like we were rich. I priced clothes at Goodwill and other local thrift stores, and I ended up buying most of it at the stores mentioned above and the occasional garage sale. Many of the thrift stores have gotten out of catering to the poor and have prices that are too high - that's long been the complaint out here in Gresham.

And it doesn't matter where you buy or how economical you are - you're still going to pay taxes. And having watched as my sister and friends stretched their money while on welfare (before it went away in the 90s) and my parents stretch their dollar when work was extremely slow, I know first hand how this affects poor people.

I'm not talking in hypotheticals, how I imagine this would affect poor people, or how I think poor people shop. This is coming from my own direct experiences as both a poor person and having shopped with those who are poor. I lived in a state with a sales tax for over 22 years, so I definitely know how it can affect people at the lower incomes.

It may come as a surprise to some who make that claim, but people who are barely making ends meet tend to make their clothes or buy them at Goodwill, may buy the toiletries at Big Lots, etc. They may go to grocery outlets, buy in bulk at Winco, and otherwise be very economical.

What, you don't think you pay sales taxes if you shop at Goodwill, Winco, or Big Lots?

It may surprise you, but the people who are already economizing by shopping at those kinds of places will still have to pay the additional percentage. See what happens if you go thrift shopping in Vancouver.