By: News Register Editorial Board
Measure 118: This is a gross receipts sales tax designed to shift wealth from the corporate elite to the common man. The idea is assessing a 3% tax on the gross receipts of corporations taking in more than $25 million a year to use the projected $6.8 billion to cut rebate checks to every Oregonian, regardless of need.
You don’t actually have to be a very big operation to get to $25 million in pass-through money, but little if any may end up sticking as income. You’d have to pay even if you were losing money, so high-volume, low-margin operators like grocery stores would suffer disproportionately.
No operator could avoid passing along the new tax burden to customers. This tax bite could recur at point after point along the supply chain, leading to an eventual retail sale, with no exemption for necessities like groceries and prescriptions.
The annual rebate, initially projected at $1,000 to $1,300, is much too small to serve as a minimum guaranteed income safety net. The vast majority of the money would be showered on middle- and upper-income residents with no such need in the first place.
It could make Oregon companies less competitive. And through workings much too complicated to explain here, it figures to cut millions from the corporate income tax flow to the state general fund. It’s a half-baked idea that could prove incredibly damaging.
Link to full editorial: https://newsregister.com/article?articleId=50068