'Tax Fairness Now!' confab draws 200; political action campaign in the works

By LARRY WILLIAMS
Special Correspondent

EUGENE, OR -- "Power and information are the keys to stopping the shift in the federal tax burden."

This was the message left by Ken Peres, research director of Communications Workers of America, District One, in New York, to an overflow audience at the "Tax Fairness Now!" conference presented by the Lane County Labor Council.

More than 200 labor and community activists from throughout Oregon attended the conference at Eugene's Hilton Hotel.

The tax shift has occurred, said Peres, because the wealthy few in the U.S. are "never satisfied, never satiated, never full, though they eat forever."

The conference was designed to build a coalition to "shift the shaft" in taxes from working people to wealthy individuals and corporations. Armed with colored dots, attendees ranked their three favorite tax reform options. The results were: 1) Increase the corporate income tax rate from 6.6 percent to 9 percent, netting $226 million over two years. 2) Create a new tax bracket for individual income taxes with the net revenue depending on the new rate. 3) Repeal some corporate tax breaks, netting $176 million.

The underlying dynamic in the shift that has occurred in the federal tax burden and cutbacks in public services is a redistribution of wealth from poor and middle-class working people to wealthy individuals.

Peres told the Northwest Labor Press at a meeting of union leaders and community activists in Portland the following day that the U.S. "is seeing a transfer of wealth from working people to the wealthy that's unprecedented since World War II."

He said that since 1980, workers at the minimum wage and the factory wage levels have not kept pace with inflation,while profits and chief executive officers' pay have far exceeded inflation. He said the richest 10 percent of the U.S. population owns 86.4 percent of the stocks and 91.3 percent of the bonds, and since 1991 the Standard and Poor�s composite index of 500 stocks has risen 143 percent.

Peres said the bottom 60 percent of families in the U.S. have seen their net worth decline; while the top 1 percent has seen an average increase of $1.75 million in net worth from 1983 to 1992.

Conference organizers presented a skit demonstrating the shift in wealth. Using 10 people each representing 10 percent of the U.S. population, and 10 chairs each representing 10 percent of the total wealth, the picture for 1995 was of eight people struggling to sit on two chairs.

"How does it feel," asked Kurt Willcox, associate professor at the Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) of the University of Oregon, "to be squeezed in the last two chairs?" He suggested that there was "great resentment toward the others trying to crowd onto those two chairs," while the one person who spread out over seven chairs avoided notice.

The shifting tax burden in Oregon has been no better. Margaret Hallock, director of LERC, said the state's tax system was less understandable, less balanced between households and business, more regressive, and less adequate than it had been only a decade ago. Like the trend at the national level, said Hallock, working people "truly are paying more and getting less." Peres favors a legislative and initiative petition agenda that focuses on an agenda rather than a political party.

Political action is the only way to address an issue that is basically about power. Policies of corporate deregulation, welfare cuts, privatization of public services and "cutting our services to pay for their tax breaks" go together in a package. "If you get one, you get them all. We need our package for working people," he said.

Peres' strategy would combine citizen lobbying with a campaign to promote a package in order to "changed the terms of the debate and changed the results."

Nancy Haque of the Oregon Tax Justice Coalition, said "We're going to build the movement from the ground up and that's how we're going to win." The coalition hopes to build on the momentum created by the successful initiative petition to raise the state's minimum wage. The Lane County Labor Council will produce a short videotape from the conference to use for educational purposes. Copies can be ordered for $13 each. Tax Fairness Now! T-shirts are also available for $13. Send orders to the labor council at 1174 Gateway Loop, Springfield, Ore. 97477.