Raising tax rates of any kind risks impairing the private sector’s motivation to invest in activities that support job and income growth. However, the taxation of corporate income is particularly injurious to growth. . . . Read more!

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and
should not be attributed to any other individual or to any other organization
with which the author is affiliated.

Introduction
The State of Oregon faces State budget deficits due to the sharp decline in employment and economic activity in the state. In an attempt to fend off this fiscal problem, the Oregon House just passed, and the Oregon Senate will decide shortly, on two major tax measures:

• HB 3405 would increase tax rates on corporate profits, from 6.6 to 7.9 percent for two years, dropping to 7.6 percent thereafter.
• HB 2649 would increase, for three years, personal income and capital gains tax rates from the current 9 percent to 10.8 percent and 11 percent for those earning more than $125,000 and $250,000, respectively. A 9.9 percent rate would be imposed thereafter. . . . Read more!

At the cost of $819 billion, the current House version of the Obama Stimulus Plan is more than twice as costly as the much-reviled Iraq War to date. Passage of a stimulus plan, according to President Obama, is an urgently needed and critical step to a rapid recovery. In fact, as I argue here, the Plan is simply a standard-issue spending program masquerading as stabilization policy, and unlikely to provide useful stimulus. 

Why Fiscal Policy Doesn’t Work

If Nobel-laureate economist Milton Friedman were still alive today, he would be shaking his head in dismay at the current version of Stimulus Plan. Dr. Friedman, whom I had the pleasure of knowing, was a strong skeptic of the usefulness of fiscal policy as an economic stabilization tool. Fiscal policy (the use of changes in government spending or tax revenue collection to influence the economy) has both fatal theoretical flaws and weak empirical justification. . . . Read more!

Many policymakers in Oregon have concluded that global warming is a crisis, that human use of fossil fuels is the primary cause of climate change, and that state policies must be enacted to stabilize the global climate. Because of this, policy initiatives to regulate greenhouse gas emissions are fast becoming a dominant feature of statewide public policy. Oregon has adopted one of the most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction goals in the world. . . . Read more!

Summary

Absent serious structural reforms such as school-level competition, paying for performance in the classroom may be the best way to stimulate higher academic achievement among our K-12 public school students. . . . Read more!

Introduction and Executive Summary

This report examines the potential for using performance incentives to improve the K-12 classroom education experience. It uses principles derived from economic theory to identify what type of incentives might work and what form those incentives should take. The limited literature on performance incentive applications in K-12 education is then examined to see if the evidence is consistent with the economic prescriptions. . . . Read more!

Introduction

In the United States, most health insurance coverage is obtained either through employment or through a government program. Few of us buy insurance privately or pay for our health care out of pocket. This approach has distanced the consumer from health expenditure decisions. As I have argued elsewhere, comprehensive, low-deductible, low-co-payment health insurance leads to over-utilization and inflation of unit costs and total costs of health care. An argument easily can be made that the problem with health care is not too little insurance, but rather . . . Read more!

Summary

This report updates and expands on a previous Cascade Policy Institute report by Dr. Pozdena. The purpose of this report is to compare Oregon’s state and local spending level against that of other states through benchmarking.

Benchmarking helps Oregon citizens understand the extent to which their state’s spending choices differ from those of other states. Since individual states vary widely in both their ability to pay for public services and in population characteristics that determine the demand for spending, simple ratio comparisons are insufficient to fairly benchmark individual states. . . . Read more!