oregon

It’s a tough time to talk about taxes in Massachusetts.  The House Speaker has asserted his opposition to any tax increases to deal with the state budget shortfall and echoes of the anti-tax rhetoric of the recent Senate campaign still ring in the public mind.

And tax conversations are never easy.  As Charles Pierce lays out in his excellent piece in the Globe Magazine this weekend, Americans have a love-hate relationship with taxes:

“Quite simply, if you love a particular government service -- that your bridges are repaired, for example, or your emergency calls answered -- you ought to love the taxes that pay for it. That, however, is rarely the case.”

And our conflicted relationship with taxes is about more than money:

“Taxes have become the way we define ourselves as a political commonwealth, or a way of determining whether we still see ourselves as such at all.”

But a recent vote in Oregon shows that talking about taxes in a productive way is still possible.  On January 26th Oregon voters approved two tax increases that had been passed by the legislature and were being challenged at the ballot.  Along with painful budget cuts these two tax measures helped to address a severe state budget shortfall.