New Business Tax Referral

Why isn’t the new business sales tax being referred to a vote of the people? The 2019 Legislature passed a two billion-dollar Oregon business gross receipts tax. Businesses must pay the tax whether or not they actually make a profit. If you think about it, though, businesses don’t really pay taxes. People do. That means that billions more of my dollars and yours are headed to the black hole of PERS and Salem.

This same sort of tax was put on Oregon’s ballot just a couple of years ago. The people overwhelmingly defeated it. So, once the new tax passed, efforts began to refer it to a vote of the people.

But the anti-democratic Democrats sprang into action. Referrals are normally voted on at the next general election, which would have given opponents of the new tax well over a year to raise funds for the effort. But the Democrats passed a bill mandating that this particular referral would have to be voted on early in 2020. And they weren’t done. They then passed essentially the same bill again, with some very minor wording changes. This meant that the new tax could only be defeated If BOTH the new laws were referred. This doubled the number of signatures needed to refer them, increased the amount of money needed for the referral to be a success, and cut the time we had to raise funds by two thirds! Disgusting, right? That’s what we are up against.

The Democrats are taking our liberty by taking more and more of our money. And they are reducing our political liberty through shameful shenanigans. Get mad, but channel that anger into working to toss out anti-liberty Democrats in Oregon’s House and Senate. Sign up to be an Advance Liberty Advocate. Working with you, we’ll take back our State! Don’t move out, move forward!