An invitation resulted in my attending a short talk yesterday by Randall Edwards, our state treasurer. His basic thesis was that the voters of the state, by adopting Measures 5 and 50 (property tax limits and state school finance) and Measure 11 (mandatory minimum sentences) required the state to spend more money without providing the funds. He did not make the comparison, but the idea came to mind that the state is being squeezed by unfunded mandates both from the federal government and from the voters.
The inevitable question came up in his talk and in the discussion at dinner: should Oregon adopt a sales tax? Mr. Edwards did not express a strong opinion, but he called our current state funding system "a one-legged stool" that relies on the volatile income tax often enough to imply that he would not oppose a sales tax if the voters chose to adopt one. (The metaphor is taken from the public finance concept that a state's funding should be like a three-legged stool, supported by income, property, and sales taxes. The sales tax question has often been called the third rail of Oregon politics, the one that kills you if you touch it, and it's not likely to become the third leg of the funding stool anytime soon.)
Curiously, no one suggested imposing a statewide property tax to support public education, an idea which if dangerous to incumbent legislators is at least not instantly fatal to their chances of re-election. Every county already has a mechanism in place to collect property taxes, so unlike a sales tax a statewide property tax requires almost no new staffing to administer. And real property is easier to tax than are incomes (which move with their owners from state to state) or sales (which likewise can move between states, though not as readily as incomes). Let's look again to property to fund the schools, not to a sales tax.