On Failure
In case you’re interested, Ben Cannon (D-Portland), the guy who wanted to raise Oregon’s beer tax by ~1600%, has a piece over at Blue Oregon in which he tries to “aw, shucks!” his way out of legislative embarrassment:
There is no training manual for being a legislator. You don’t have a boss, you have 60,000 voters. Heck, you don’t even have an official job description to fall back on.
Like many jobs, this is one you learn by doing.
As my second legislative session draws to a close, I can assure you that I am still learning.
Well, golly. It’s nice to know Ben’s learned something from this massive waste of taxpayer dollars. I guess now that he’s got a little experience under his belt, he realizes what a terrible idea his proposal was, and has abandoned any illusions of trying to resurrect it, right?
Absolutely not… I have tried to apply the above lessons to a new version of the tax.
The first thing on his list of reasons why we need to increase the tax?
Oregon hasn’t raised its beer tax in more than 30 years.
One of the posts in the comments section put it nicely:
I love the rationalization the just because a tax hasn’t been raised in awhile it is your profound duty to see that it be raised.
Indeed.
