Archive → December, 2011
Oregon reluctantly cuts top tax rates
On January 1, the top income earners in Oregon will be getting a tax cut… kinda. But that’s only if you don’t pay attention to what the tax rate was before the “temporary” hike. Even the best weight loss pill obtains better results than this.
But here’s the details.
Back in 2009, before Measure 66 took effect, the top individual income tax rate in Oregon was an already-hefty nine percent. Measure 66 allowed a “temporary” rate hike to 10.8 and eleven percent on individuals with incomes over $125,000, and married couples filing jointly with incomes over $250,000.
Occupy Portland would call those families “the top 1 percent.”
People who know better call them, “small business owners” and “employers.”
On January first, that “temporary” tax rate hike gets rolled back… to 9.9 percent. That’s still nearly a full percent higher than the original top marginal rate of nine percent. So, in essence, Oregon’s top income earners aren’t getting a tax cut, so much as a reduction in the amount of the tax hike enacted upon them under Measure 66.
Already, Salem politicians are scheming to invent ways to get those 10.8 and 11 percent rates back, failing to acknowledge that 9.9 is still more than the original rate.
Yet this punitive tax-rate attack on employers and job creators comes at a poor moment. The unemployment rate (as currently calculated) has dropped to 9.1 percent, the lowest rate since the Obama Administration came to power, but that rate fails to take into account those workers who have been out of work so long, they no longer qualify for unemployment benefits, or who have given up looking for jobs entirely because there are so few to be found.
According to some sources, the “actual” unemployment rate could be as high as 14 percent or more, and even higher among recent college graduates.
Kim Jong dead, long live Kim Jong?
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died this week, and his designated successor is his 27-year-old son, Kim Jong-eun. Well, that’s a minor difference and easy enough to learn.
The real question is, will his youth make him more sane, or less sane, than his father? It’s too early to tell. One could only hope for a greater degree of sanity with the new regime. Then again, there’s that saying about the apple not falling far from the crazy tree.
Or words to that effect. All I know is, from all the intrigue that seems to be surrounding this change of power in North Korea, I wouldn’t want to be the one charged with giving the man new life insurance rates. Yikes.
Pre-caucus poll: Gingrich by 4 points
He divorced a dying wife, has cheated on more than one spouse, has engaged in “strange bedfellows” relations with every prominent Democrat on Capitol Hill, and is a definitive flip-flopper on most issues. Yet Newt Gingrich is becoming the teflon candidate of the Iowa caucuses.
Following flirtations with Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain, the anti-Romney forces of the Iowa GOP have latched onto Newt Gingrich and refuse to be thrown off. The most recent Gallup Poll has him up by four percent over Romney, who can’t break past a 25-percent ceiling in his support.
Rick Santorum is looking better and better.
