This is fascinating stuff. As someone who has been a Westlund skeptic, I've been impressed with his performance so far. He was a solid progressive in the last session, and he's earning the progressive and union endorsements to prove it.

It's also interesting to note that a bunch of these Republicans (though not all) are the ones on the outs with the more conservative wing of their party. Certainly, Paulus and Lundquist are barely welcome at the right-wing conclaves. Bob Jenson used to be a Democrat, etc.

Today we also announced the support of State Treasurer Randall Edwards and SEIU.

This is in addition to Gov. Kulongoski, Gov. Roberts, Dan Gardner, Former Treasurer Jim Hill, Phil Kiesling, Rep. Jeff Merkley, Rep. Dave Hunt, Rep Jackie Dingfelder, Rep Peter Buckley, Rep Tina Kotek, AFSCME, AFL-CIO, Firefighters, Nurses, Sen. Margaret Carter, Sen. Floyd Prozanski, Sam Adams, Wa County Commissioner Desari Strader and many more.

Ben has been a solid advocate for Democratic issues like health care, renewable energy, consumer protection and workers issues. Although he doesn't see these as partisan issues. But he does want to continue working across the aisle with people committed to finding solutions that work for Oregon and we'll take every Republican and independent who want to join the team!

Stacey: got a generic error when trying to submit an endorsement. Using Safari on a brand new Mac.

Go Ben!

Thanks Pete! We're on it!

I support and endorse Ben Westlund. As a "Yellow Dog Democrat" of course I was skeptical when Ben switched his registration. However I've come to believe in Ben because of his actions. Be it his support of Governor Kulongoski's Campaign, Measures 49, 50 or his role in passing Civil Union legislation Ben has been right on the issues that are important to Oregon Democrats. Plus his important role on the Ways and Means Committee makes him a perfect fit for Oregon State Treasurer. A wise man once said:

"They will never remember what you said but they will always remember how you made them feel"

I feel Ben Westlund is a strong Democrat.

Is anyone running against Westlund?

Yes.

Westlund also fought for mortgage reform.

To those who are saying that Westlund has disproven their earlier skepticism... I would just like to say that I told you so. But I can empathize with your earlier skepticism. The thing is, as a recovering Republican it seemed patently obvious to me that Westlund had left that stuff behind him and was for real.

As for these endorsements... They strike me as partly exactly what Kari said upthread and partly a means of mitigating the losses the RPO expects Oregonians to hand them this year. As Bob Dylan once sang, "the times they are a changing." They'll inevitably swing back sooner or later. But the handwriting is on the wall for conservatives especially.

My 3 cents worth...

I have a hard time trusting someone as a progressive Democrat when they've so recently supported (and as far as I know still support) a regressive sales tax as a part of an overhaul of the state tax system, particularly when there has been evidence for years that the claims they used to support their proposals were false.

Darrel, I consider Westlund's tax reform proposals one of the strengths of his candidacy for Treasurer. Your characterization of it as a "regressive sales tax" is a major oversimplification. As I understood it, the most significant aspect of it would have been to reverse a good bit of the damage done by Measure 5, shifting tax burdens from individuals to corporations, bringing Oregon closer to other states. A sales tax would have been one of many components, and its regressive aspects would have been mitigated by the others, resulting in tax relief for all tax brackets, especially the poor.

Your allegation that it relied on false claims is interesting; more detail or citations would be welcome.

Pete, the proposal he was floating around the time he ran for Governor was very regressive. It not only included a sales tax, but the personal income tax indexes that it set up would have had higher rates for lower income people than for upper-income people.

To his credit, Westlund appears to have used the proposal as a starting point for further conversations, and has demonstrated an uncanny ability to build positive relationships with people in both political parties, and has surrounded himself with some very talented people.

I see him as a poster child for building bi-partisan support on issues.
Oregon will be well-served with him as treasurer, I believe.

On a related note: westlund was a champion for domestic partnerships. I am deeply disappointed that Frank Girod, who is looking to replace him in the Oregon Senate, has chosen to take the low road and demagogue against domestic partnerships.

A sales tax would have been one of many components, and its regressive aspects would have been mitigated by the others, resulting in tax relief for all tax brackets, especially the poor.

Actually, the numbers that came with the plan specifically showed that the lowest income brackets would pay more taxes. The further up the income scale you went, the greater the break in taxes you saw. I did a fairly in-depth posting on this some time ago.

This plan is something I disagree heavily with Westlund on. And it's something I would campaign heavily against were it to come up for a vote in the legislature.

However, there are hundreds of other points where I agree with Westlund. He really impressed me when I had the chance to have lunch with him at Rebooting Democracy in '06. We may disagree on this one issue, but that's true with just about anyone.

Your characterization of it as a "regressive sales tax" is a major oversimplification. As I understood it, the most significant aspect of it would have been to reverse a good bit of the damage done by Measure 5, ... Your allegation that it relied on false claims is interesting; more detail or citations would be welcome.

This was discussed rather thoroughly here just before and after the New Year, in threads that ran to scores of comments, after Rep. Scott Bruun's (R-McMinnville) op-ed in the Oregonian was published. Bruun was a co-sponsor of one of the most recent sales tax proposals Westlund was involved with. I also covered it on my own blog:

http://www.darrelplant.com/blog_item.php?ItemRef=860 http://www.darrelplant.com/blog_item.php?ItemRef=861 http://www.darrelplant.com/blog_item.php?ItemRef=864 http://www.darrelplant.com/blog_item.php?ItemRef=866

As for the "false claims," as I pointed out in my posts and comments here, there's ample evidence from studies in California and Washington that assertions that a sales tax is a stable source of revenue are simply untrue. Tables may be more stable with three legs, but that much-loved analogy of sales tax proponents is problematic when the length of the legs keeps shifting.

I took a look at the Oregon Tax Incidence Model figures that were cited in the package sent out by the Westlund for Governor campaign. The figures it used to calculate costs for families were ludicrously off the mark. For instance, a family making the Oregon mean income of about $45K was expected to have housing costs of $600 per month. When garbage goes into an economic model, garbage comes out.

The list goes on and on. Now, those false claims aren't directly attributable to Westlund, the OTIM was developed by the state Legislative Revenue Office, and the supposed benefits of the sales tax are broadcast from the roof of every entity that wants to replace income taxes with a sales tax, but personally, I expect someone who's almost certainly going to be in charge of the state's money for the next few years to actually crunch some numbers, not just believe the happy spin of the conventional wisdom.

And if the intention was the mitigate the damage done by Measure 5, why not address what Measure 5 actually did instead of proposing even more cuts in property taxes (the most stable source of state revenue) and replacing them with something as volatile as sales taxes?

Has anyone ever asked Westlund what he thought of Measure 5 back in the day?

Thanks all for the feedback and links, looks like I've got some reading to do. Lots of dissonance with my memory of the proposal, but it's entirely possible it's my memory at fault.

Re: Measure 5, I definitely didn't say it was Westlund's or any of the other Senators' intent to do anything about Measure 5. I have no idea what their views on M5 are. That was my own impression about what its effects would be, nothing more.

One point before I get to my reading: regardless whether the specifics of the proposal were right or wrong, I admire Senators Westlund, Deckert, Morse, and Schrader for having the political courage to begin this difficult conversation, and attempt to focus the state's attention on its awful revenue model. Floating an idea, even a "bad" one, is generally a good thing if it gets the conversation going.

Floating an idea, even a "bad" one, is generally a good thing if it gets the conversation going.

I don't think it's a good thing if you -- knowingly or unknowingly -- use bad data and false assertions to buttress your proposal. That's how we ended up with Measure 5 and any number of other pieces of bad legislation in the first place. Not to mention the Iraq war.

There's nothing inherently awful about the state's revenue model. The problem is that it's uneven. But as the studies I point to in my posts indicate, so are the revenue streams of states with property and sales tax and no income tax (like Washington) and states with property, sales, and income tax (like California). What's made those revenue streams less stable over the past decades has been a move away from steady streams of revenue like property taxes to less stable streams like sales taxes.

Oregon tends to suffer more than its coastal neighbors because its economy is less diversified. But that's not an problem that's going to be rectified by a sales tax.

Oh, one other thing I loved about the SB382 proposal Westlund sponsored. It paid retailers 1.5% of the gross just for collecting the tax. Since the annual revenue of the proposal was $3 billion, that would have meant $45 million in retailer payments each year, an amount equal to half the annual budget of the Oregon Department of Revenue. Changes could be made to the existing tax system to capture $3 billion without expending another $45 million.

Seems kind of inefficient to me.

Not only is Frank Girod in the Senate already, but he's in Marion County. A long, long way from Bend.

Sal, maybe you mean Chuck Burley?

Darrel, I can tell you've never tried to pass legislation.

I'm really not sure what that has to do with trying to pass legislation based on specious data. Or backing a revamping of the tax system that would make a volatile tax system even more volatile and claiming that it would do the opposite.

By passing legislation, do you mean lying about what a bill does to sell it to the public? Or do you mean being ignorant of the facts about what the legislation does? Because those are the only two options I'm aware of regarding the various sales tax proposals.

The financial assertions behind the last sales tax proposal doesn't stand up to cross-checks against real-world numbers, and assertions of the sales tax as a stabilizing influence on revenue are demonstrably false.

When people can't refute factual arguments they always revert to the "ranting" claim. But Westlund's "reasonable" sales tax plan was blown out of the water months ago by facts. And when he brings it up after he's elected Treasurer, the same facts are going to hit it again.

Personal insults are the response of someone with no ability to close an argument on a factual basis. I've heard a lot of them in forty-odd years of life, because I've run up against a lot of people who have no other recourse when they realize that they've lost the debate and they just can't admit it.

"California's sales tax is ultimate roller coaster" http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20030717/ai_n14555332

Washington: "Sales and use tax is the most volatile revenue source." http://dor.wa.gov/Content/AboutUs/StatisticsAndReports/WAtaxstudy/Chapter_9.pdf

I removed my comments from the Oregon Economics blog because the author there descended into the same kind of name-calling you did.

As a point of interest, when he began talking about the sales tax there last year -- even though he teaches economics at a state university -- he was unaware of the studies on income tax volatility until I pointed them out to him. His argument for a sales tax was based almost entirely on economic theory, not on statistical evidence. He wasn't even aware that Washington had as much of a reliance on sales tax as it does (one of his posts mentions that).

Both of our neighboring coastal states have problems with the volatility of their sales tax systems. Not the system as a whole, but very specifically the sales tax revenue. One of the reports making that claim is from the revenue department of the state itself. But proponents of a sales tax consistently say that the sales tax is more stable than income taxes. If the evidence from existing sales tax systems says otherwise, that invalidates a lot of their argument in favor.

As for hijacking this thread, I made a brief comment in response to the questions posed in the original post and was asked by Pete Forsyth for "more detail or citations", which I gave. It would have ended there.

I don't think that Westlund's willingness to talk tax reform makes him any less of a progressive Democrat.

I never said it did. My objection was to "a regressive sales tax as a part of an overhaul of the state tax system". And no, a shift in the revenue stream from a volatile tax system to a more volatile tax system is not desirable when the goal is stability. The instability issue is not my opinion. It's the conclusion of the Washington State Department of Revenue.

I didn't deny that I distrusted Westlund as a progressive. I said I didn't do because of his "willingness to talk tax reform".

My quote was:

I have a hard time trusting someone as a progressive Democrat when they've so recently supported (and as far as I know still support) a regressive sales tax as a part of an overhaul of the state tax system...

Most people who are literate in English would read that and know that the reference to "regressive sales tax" was the trigger point for my distrust. But feel free to continue on this track, pretending to be uncomprehending of the language and making stuff up. It doesn't help your argument any.

The problem with you stamping your little foot and wanting a report on Oregon is that until you have years of data from an existing system, there won't be a report. So all you can do is look at existing systems and see how they perform.

California's sales tax is more volatile than its income tax is. That's based on empirical data over more than 20 years. Both reports directly contradict theoretical assumptions used by sales tax proponents that sales taxes are stable. I believe in reality-based economics, not faith-based economics.

So, in summary when employment in one state is more volatile that in another, the income tax is going to be more volatile in that state than in the other.

This cracks me up. You think sales taxes aren't affected by unemployment rates and the general economy?

One final question. How does a state agency evaluating a potential sales tax go about determining the proper figure for volatility to plug into their economic model? Throw dice?

And some think it is HOW the sales tax is constructed (exemptions, etc.) that makes such a tax regressive.

That's what some may think, but there are no existing examples of a non-regressive sales tax. So far as I know, there's not even an existing example of a tax system including a sales tax that is not regressive.

But forget for a second about theoretical constructs. The SB382 plan supported by Ben Westlund (and others) in 2006, while it claimed to do a number of things that would aid Oregon's tax system, was based on bad data. It made assumptions about the volatility of sales taxes that aren't borne out by real-world data (hence my "dice" comment that seems to have driven JTT around the bend). It used incredibly low (or long out-of-date) figures for household expenses. But nobody pushing the proposal seems to have noticed that. It's in the data Westlund's staff was sending out in support of the bill two years ago.

Of course there have been debates among many people about the efficacy of the sales tax. But the arguments for it have always been based on its stability -- which is a myth.

I don't have any problem voicing doubts about someone being a progressive -- interested in social improvement by governmental action -- when they propose legislation that shifts the burden of taxes further onto the people who can least afford it, even if the reason is that they haven't studied their own proposal well enough to know that it's based on false assumptions.