STOP PARROTING TAX COMPLAINTS
Saying things like, “Whether they realize it or not, this is the future many Portlanders voted for last fall’ is patronizing and deeply unserious [“Better Off Red?” WW, July 16]. Portland voters were not tricked by socialists into some power grab, they freely voted for councilors who reflected their values. And can you please stop blithely writing about “second-highest marginal tax rate in the country”? Portland has low to medium property taxes relative to property values in the national context (thanks to Measures 5 and 50 in the 1990s) and no broad-based sales tax. A full picture of tax burden, rather than insisting that “the conventional wisdom in Portland…is that taxes are too high,” Willamette Week could take a broader look at the interaction of different facets of tax policy and how that affects local governments. Choosing to endlessly parrot a generally incomplete and patently false picture of our local taxation picture with no reference to the actual context of any other place in the country serves only to embolden the reactionary stool pigeons making up the ranks of the commenters on your website, and does a deep disservice to the news-reading public.
Andrew Lindstrom…