Oregon ballot measures, November 2018

In my original conception - which seems silly now - I was going to go through the pros and cons of each ballot measure with great precision and clarity that was just going to be a delight to read.

Then I started looking at them, and it was like "Uh... really... no way... ARE YOU KIDDING ME? NO!"

So the short version is just that all of the statewide ballot measures are terrible; please reject them all. The end.

But I will add some detail beyond that.

I was most conflicted on Measure 102, largely due to some good organizations supporting it, and some potential for it to do good.

Measure 102 moves to amend the constitution to allow local bonds for financing housing with nongovernmental entities. Housing is an issue, and I can imagine there being enough desperation to grasp at straws, but I don't believe this is a good straw.

Part of that is Paul Allen's death. I do not doubt the sincerity of the grief and lionizing, but I keep remembering him insisting on an unsecured loan to get an arena built (because he wanted better terms) and him defaulting on that loan (and being pretty petty about it), thus losing the arena to the city, but somehow getting it back through undisclosed terms which probably sucked for Portland. The private sector is really good at crushing hopes of doing some good.

There may be potential for good things here, but I believe there is even more potential for non-governmental entities to soak the government. That will not help homeless people, or anyone else.

I did vote yes on Metro measure 26-199, which is also for affordable housing. I'm not always completely cynical.

The biggest lesson of this year's ballot measures is that the strongly conservative bent may indicate that some groups have been heartened by the 2016 election. That is most disturbing for measures 105 and 106, but I have more to say about 103 and 104.

The two measures are both tax-related. Based on their ads they didn't sound like something I would support anyway, but 103 seemed oddly unnecessary. It's not that sales taxes are never proposed, but Oregonians have been really good at turning them down. We even turned down a tax on business sales because it was phrased as a sales tax in the ads against it, though it was actually a way of trying to prevent large corporations from finding reasons why none of their income counts as profit.

Here's the thing: if we want to improve funding - and we should - there are two much better priorities.

One would be undoing the damage from Don McIntire's original ballot measure 5, from 1990. Yes, there were other measures that were a part of the problem, and enough time has passed that maybe it would take multiple well-crafted measures to get a good solution in place, but the man is dead; let's try and fix his damage.

And granted - regarding my previous mention of a tax on business sales - that campaign showed that businesses will fight really hard to avoid contributing to the state coffers. But their own actions (and Kansas) have shown that catering to business does not create an economic utopia of well-funded public services and living wage jobs. A sales tax on consumers would be progressive, but we had better funding once and we can do it again.

In addition, we need to ditch the kicker.

I understand the reluctance. Any time there is a chance for a little extra cash, it feels like a blessing. The state being required to have a balanced budget sounds like a good idea too. However, forcing the state to try and forecast how much it can bring in and underfunding necessities if it won't be enough is already pretty restrictive. Adding the provision that any time people in the state are doing well enough that there is extra, and then dictating that surplus can't roll over to next year, can't buy anything necessary, can't improve anything - that's begging the state to just lose at everything. (Which will then be blamed on the governor if she is a woman and a Democrat.)

We can do better than that. Instead we are tying the state's hands, and 103 and 104 attempt to add extra ropes.

Reject them. Reject them all.