Thing grew heated in the halls of Oregon's legislature as SEIU pushed for a corporate gross income tax (again), vowing to oppose any transportation plans unless they get one. Response:
Sen. Brian Boquist, R-Dallas, told Demarest his union trying to engage in "political blackmail." Boquist is a key architect of the transportation plan and also sits on the committee deliberating a corporate tax increase.
"If you want to generate 'no' votes across the board you can continue this crap, do you understand me?" Boquist said. He told Demarest to inform union leaders that they can negotiate on both bills "or they can get out."
Dem-arrest is a lobbyist for SEIU.
Leaders of SEIU 503, a powerful labor union representing most state employees, have pushed lawmakers to raise corporate taxes and insist that must be done in concert with other taxes and fees increases to fix roads, Melissa Unger, the union's political director, told The Oregonian/OregonLive earlier this week.
Unger said SEIU would consider launching or supporting a ballot measure campaign to overturn the multibillion-dollar transportation plan, should it become law without an accompanying corporate tax increase by the end of the annual legislative session, in July.
Melissa's the sister of Ben Unger, who spearheaded last year's Measure 97, which was written by SEIU and other public employee unions and touted as a way to force corporations to "pay their fair share". Sane people recognized that not only was it a stealth sales tax, it was a sales tax on steroids; not only would the tax be passed through to consumers, there were no exemptions - most states with sales taxes exempt groceries and medications, but not that one.
Understandably, it was nearly as successful as the Hindenburg.
M97 went down in flames. So now the unions are pushing state legislators to pass the "son of M97" - or else. Public employee union leaders know that passage would have no impact on their members, as the unions would simply "negotiate" compensation hikes to cover the costs of higher prices. I believe that their official motto is: "From your wallet, to ours".
Unlike his wholly union-owned Democrat counterparts, Senator Boquist owes the unions no allegiance, and he made that clear to them. It's pretty rare for a state legislator to tell union representatives to cut the crap, but that's exactly what he did.
The tactics of the union thugs kind of backfired.
Even our governor from Minnesota criticized the unions on this one; it seems that nobody likes their "do this or else" approach.
A well understood problem is a problem easily solved, Connecticut needs to understand that they have a spending problem, not a revenue problem, and the same applies here in Oregon, where despite record revenue (50% higher than last biennium) they still claim to have a $1.6 billion "shortfall", and so they need more revenue. No, they need to stop spending on non-core government idiocies like "fighting climate change" and spending millions on "the homeless" - most of whom, it should be noted, aren't from around here in the first place. Like Tina, our diminutive governor from Minnesota, and most of the other Democratics that have taken over Oregon for the past four decades, they've come here because they can get "free stuff".
As millions of American families understand but the government does not, when the paycheck runs out, it's time to stop spending. It's better to learn to maximize what one's paycheck is spent on with enough left over for emergencies, because it rarely works to go to one's boss and ask for a raise because one has spent too much.
In fact, the only time that seems to work is in the public sector.