Rodent Regatta

There’s an article on the opinion page of today’s Wall Street Journal. You may have to have a subscription to see it – I don’t know for sure. There’s a real temptation to quote the whole thing, but I won’t.

The upshot is that on Tuesday voters in Oregon decided they didn’t want an income tax increase of some $310 million just to prevent $310 million of budget cuts in the state. The irony of the whole story is two-fold. How it was quieted by the national media after the unexpected defeat is one huge story. The other story is about media, poll and pundit statements in advance of the election that assured it was going to pass. Voters turned out in droves and beat the thing 54% to 46%.

There was a real drive by pro-tax people to get this thing passed. The state’s employees and their unions were obviously all for it. Here are some excerpts:

Don’t take our word for it. In an election-day interview with National Public Radio’s ”Talk of the Nation,” Colin Fogerty of Oregon Public Broadcasting described the pro-tax effort as follows:

”This was a fairly sophisticated grassroots campaign by social service agencies and schools and supporters of state services that really sent the word out that these cuts will be fairly drastic, and there were a series of news stories on our station and television stations and the newspapers about just how dramatic these cuts are going to be. And literally there will be frail seniors turned out of nursing homes, and literally there will be a quarter fewer state troopers on the road, and universities will be cut.”

Translation: Frighten the bejeebers out of folks by telling them that unless they agree to higher taxes, government is going to shut down the prisons and throw grandma out in the snow. As Tom Cox of the Oregon Libertarian Party put it in an op-ed last week for the Statesman Journal: ”The state of Oregon has 47,000 employees. . . . But the 200 employees we find to lay off are state police officers?”

”I’m a normal person and when I don’t have enough money I have to change my habits,” 26-year-old Heather Bryan told the AP, explaining her vote against the measure. ”Government should be the same way.” How’s that for a bellwether?