Dump Potiowsky

I've been watching the pattern of Oregon state tax revenue forecasts ever since the first time I ran for the Lane Community College Board. The person in charge for most of that time, except for an interim where he went back to academia, has been Tom Potiowsky. If nothing else, my observations have convinced me that Oregon should be cutting waste and inefficiency in order to balance the budget, starting by firing Mr. Potiowsky.

Yesterday, he announced that the revenue forecast for 2009-2010 was being reduced by a half billion bucks from what he had said three months earlier. He said this in an environment of no major surprises. No new flu epidemics. No wars or terrorist attacks. Nothing. But after three months, critically the three months during which the legislature went home thinking they'd done their job, the forecast plummets.

The problem is that the state's Democrats will spend almost every nickel that isn't nailed down, and the Republicans are so distrustful that rather than trying to nail much down, they prefer to ship it back to the taxpayers, especially since this earns them political points. A reasonable state operation would, after 150 years, have set aside enough reserves that it could proceed calmly through a biennium, spending what it estimated and handling noise in the revenue stream with reserves.

But this isn't going to happen. Nevertheless, if we're going to act stupidly we might as well save money. Let's get rid of the state economist and simply project Oregon's revenues to vary from the previous biennium by the average amount that CA and WA are estimating their own changes. I don't think we can do any worse, and it irritates me to think that our taxes in future years will be spent covering the amount of Potiowsky's PERS pension that we're not currently funding.