The Oregon Business Association (OBA) Embraces Father of Dangerous Budget Agenda

Chuck Sheketoff

The Oregon Business Association’s (OBA) Tenth Annual Statesman Dinner will honor Columbia Sportswear's Gert Boyle as OBA's "Statesman of the Year." The "special guest and keynote speaker" at the event will be U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI).

OBA calls Ryan a "rising star of the GOP" and "a leading voice for fiscal discipline and accountability in the federal government." In particular, OBA lauds Ryan's A Roadmap for America’s Future (PDF), describing it as “a comprehensive proposal that tackles health care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, an outdated tax code and America’s debt."

OBA’s enthusiastic description of Ryan is disturbing. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the Ryan plan “Provides Largest Tax Cuts in History for Wealthy, Raises Middle Class Taxes, Ends Guaranteed Medicare, Privatizes Social Security, Erodes Health Care.”

CBPP cites (in a PDF 17-page report and a PDF of 4-page executive summary) an analysis by the Tax Policy Center and explains that "the tax cuts for those at the very top would be of historic proportions" and

to offset some of the cost of these massive tax cuts, the Ryan plan would place a new consumption tax on most goods and services, a measure that would increase taxes on most low- and middle-income families. . . About three-quarters of Americans — those with incomes between $20,000 and $200,000 — would face tax increases.

The CBPP goes on to note

Because of the Ryan plan’s enormous tax cuts for the affluent, even the very large benefit cuts that the plan would make in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — and the plan’s middle-class tax increases — would not put the federal budget on a sustainable course for decades. The federal debt would soar to about 175 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. In contrast, most fiscal policy analysts recommend that the debt-to-GDP ratio be stabilized within the next ten years, and at a far lower level.

The OBA's Statesman of the Year dinner will undoubtedly remove any doubt about whether Gert Boyle is "one tough mother." But it’s hard to understand the OBA’s simultaneous embrace of the father of such a devastating fiscal plan for the nation. Has OBA abandoned any pretense of concern for small businesses, the middle class and our nation’s fiscal health?

Chuck Sheketoff is the executive director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy. You can sign up to receive email notification of OCPP materials at www.ocpp.org.

By Chuck Sheketoff Aug. 23, 2010