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Note: Guest Opinions are added to this page on an intermittent basis. Fiscal foolishness 'Kicker' refunds are folly in the midst of a recession, but lawmakers are gutless The Daily Astorian What's wrong with this picture? Oregon taxpayers will receive $254 million in "kicker" refund checks at the very moment when the governor and state legislators are planning for a special session to cut some $212 million from budgets they enacted four months ago. And what's wrong with this picture? Republican congressmen push an economic stimulus bill that would remove billions from the federal Treasury for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations just as we are going to war and the nation is lurching into recession. The link between these two events is the politics of greed. Both are hangovers from the we-can-have-something-for-nothing era of fiscal policy which brought us an immense deficit. Writing Oct. 26 in The Oregonian, Charles Sheketoff of the Oregon Center for Public Policy argued, "A fiscally prudent Legislature and governor would have delayed sending out the checks." And therein lies the truth. These men and women, who style themselves as fiscal conservatives, are not prudent. They are slaves to the kicker law, because none of them has the guts to stand up and say this law makes no sense in the wake of Measures 5 and 47/50. Or in the midst of a recession. It is foolishness to send money out of the Treasury during a recession. The state will need all of its resources to maintain a safety net for unemployed Oregonians. Crumbling bridges The (Pendleton) East Oregonian It was a combination of poor planning and inadequate funding that led to Oregon's sorry state of bridge repair. Across the state, bridges are falling apart, leaving us in a troubling situation. Oregon Department of Transportation officials are asking for more money to fix these bridges. The $90 million the Legislature gave ODOT during the last session to repair and replace bridges won't come close to fixing the problem. Emergency repairs have been made on 10 bridges since September. Fourteen bridges have been declared "load limited" so far this year. Cracks have been found in at least 36. However the issue of aging bridges is defined, we have a bad situation with no funding to fix it. Let's hope that as we work our way out of this, we also implement a comprehensive plan to replace bridges in the future so we don't find ourselves in the same situation. |
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