If facts matter at all to Lars Larson and Oregon's other right-wing talk show hosts, hopefully they'll stop with the Oregon has a horrible business climate B.S. now that a corporate lobbying group has come to an opposite conclusion.
Actually, Oregon has the lowest state and local business taxes in the country.
A newly released study by a corporate lobby group found that Oregon tied for the lowest state and local business taxes in the country in fiscal year 2009. It also said that Oregon tied for first place in terms of providing “value” to businesses from the taxes they pay.
The study (PDF) said that in 2009 Oregon, along with Delaware and North Carolina, had the lowest combined state and local business taxes as a share of the economy among all the states.
The Council On State Taxation (COST), an association of multistate and multinational corporations that lobbies on state tax policy, bankrolled the study conducted by the accounting firm Ernst & Young. COST represents about 600 corporations, including major Oregon employers (PDF) such as Nike, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, US Bank and Xerox.
Ah, it feels good to have my previous blog posts validated. Like I said, Oregon is not a high tax state, and raising Oregon taxes will be good for our state.
Along the same line, yesterday FiveThirtyEight showed that the United States isn't a high tax country. Americans have one of the lowest tax burdens (federal, state, local) as a share of GDP among industrialized nations.
And income taxes have held steady as a percentage of GDP for the past sixty-five years. So Oregon has the lowest business taxes in a nation that has one of the lowest overall levels of taxation.
No wonder that Genentech has decided to substantially expand its Oregon operations.
"We were very attracted by the business environment, the technical support we felt we could get in the area, and the encouragement we got from the local community and local and state government," said CEO Ian Clark at a ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday in Hillsboro attended by top executives, elected officials and hundreds of Oregon-based Genentech employees.
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