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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (March 17, 2006)
Let me say this about that —By Gene Klare ...The great Tax Shift (From Page 1) Belanger joins Hall THE LABOR Hall of Fame’s newest honoree is Bill Belanger, 64, a re- tired apprenticeship coordinator for Portland-based Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 1, which represents skilled workers in the brick, tile, ter- razzo, marble and restoration industry in Oregon and Southwest Washington. He was selected for the honor by the Northwest Oregon Labor Retirees Council, the sponsor of the Hall of Fame. The NOLRC is affiliated with the Northwest Oregon Labor Council, AFL- CIO, which is headquartered in the Scandia Building at 1125 SE Madison St., Portland. Belanger retired in 2001 after a 35-year ca- reer in the bricklaying trade. WILLIAM PAUL BELANGER was born in Portland on March 3, 1942. He attended Lake Grove Grade School in suburban Clackamas County and graduated from Lake Oswego High School, where he was a cross country runner on the track team. He attended Portland State for a BILL BELANGER year. Later on, he spent six years in the Oregon Air National Guard as an electronics technician. His active duty was served at an Air Force base near San Antonio, Texas. Belanger said he worked at “a variety of jobs” until contractor Bob Schroeder hired him in 1966 to start as an apprentice bricklayer on a project in Seaside on the Oregon Coast. He earned journeyman status in three and a half years. Another journeyman, Jim McNannay, and Bill became friends; Jim encouraged Bill to attend union meetings and become an actively partic- ipating member. McNannay later was elected as the union’s business manager and after retiring in 1994 he was selected for the Labor Hall of Fame. BlLL’S FIRST elected office in Local 1 was sergeant-at-arms. Next came the office of president, presiding at union meetings. He later was elected as recording secretary and he also became a business agent. As recording secre- tary, he compiled the official minutes of the union’s meetings. Back then, Bricklayers Local 1 had its office in the Mason Trades Building at 2215 SE Division St. Other unions in the mason trades, also called the trowel trades be- cause they use that tool, included Cement Masons Local 555, Plasterers Lo- cal 82 and Lathers Local 54. The Lathers later merged into the United Broth- erhood of Carpenters. Other unions, not in the mason trades, also had offices in the building. Now, the Mason Trades Building, including a state-of-the-art apprenticeship center, is at 12812 NE Marx St.; the unions sold the building on SE Division. BELANGER SPENT a year, 1985-86, as the elected secretary-treasurer of the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council. He said be- cause the job did not pay a full-time salary he worked part-time as a bricklayer and after a year left the council to work full-time at his trade. He still held the recording secretary post in Local 1. When John Mohlis succeeded McNannay as Local 1’s business manager in 1994, he asked Belanger to become the union’s apprenticeship coordinator. LOCAL 1 MEMBERS perform civic volunteer work for organizations in the geographic areas of the union’s jurisdiction. Belanger helped build dugouts for high school baseball teams and he also helped build a brick retaining wall for a home for battered women and their children. Bill Belanger and his wife, Sharon Rixen, have lived on a houseboat for three decades. Their home is moored in North Portland in a harbor connect- ing to the Columbia River. They enjoy living on the water and own a 38-foot boat, a single-engine fiberglass trawler. Their boat, berthed at Astoria, is named “Break Time” as a reminder of an on-board accident when Sharon slipped on a throw rug and broke an ankle. In 1973, corporations paid 18.5 per- cent of the income taxes paid in Ore- gon. Today they pay less than 5 per- cent. The Oregon Center for Public Policy (OCPP), a labor-allied eco- nomic think tank, estimates that if cor- porate income taxpayers still paid the same share they paid in the 1970s, the state would have $900 million a year more to spend on schools, public safety and low-income senior citizens. Today, Oregon tax law contains 49 income tax breaks for corporations. More than half of those were added in the last decade. “No matter how you look at it, cor- porate taxes are way down,” says OCPP researcher Mike Leachman. In fact, two-thirds of Oregon corpo- rations pay just $10 a year in income tax. That’s because Oregon’s corporate income tax applies only to profits, and if a company can show that its ex- penses exceeded revenues, it pays only a minimum tax of $10, even though it may have hundreds of millions of dol- lars in income. The State of Washing- ton, on the other hand, taxes corpora- tions based on gross receipts. If Oregon did that, there would be no shortage of funds to pay for the gov- ernment services the public wants. In Oregon, even when companies are profitable, they don’t necessarily pay taxes. One fifth of the corporations paying just $10 a year are profitable, but the tax law allows them to “carry forward” losses from previous years. And today, more companies are structured as “S corporations” or Lim- ited Liability Corporations, meaning that their profits are taxed as personal income. Even before getting to deductions and credits that reduce the corporate tax bill, the income tax rate itself is un- equal. Oregon taxes corporate income at 6.6 percent, while most personal in- come is taxed at 9 percent. That differ- ence prompted former Oregon AFL- CIO president Tim Nesbitt to call for corporations to pay the same rate as their employees — but the Legislature has so far been deaf to that proposal. On the contrary, every two years, the people’s representatives meet in Salem to discuss new ways to cut cor- porate taxes. For the benefit of compa- nies like Nike and Intel, recent legisla- tures moved to a different way to calculate corporate income, lowering the taxes on those that have sales pri- marily out of state, and increasing the taxes on those that sell in Oregon. Overall, the change is costing the state about $36 million a year. Another tax break to subsidize cor- porate research and development was expanded last year. That’s expected to cost $11 million a year, and most of the break will go to one company. If it wasn’t for efforts in the Senate, the 2005 Legislature might have dug an even bigger budget hole. The Sen- ate rejected nearly a dozen proposed tax breaks passed by the House that would have cost the state treasury nearly $290 million, according to an estimate by the union-supported tax fairness group Our Oregon. On its Web site — ouroregon.org — the group’s legislative report identifies each of those giveaways, and how law- makers voted. But tax breaks come in many forms. And besides the income tax, Oregon corporations also pay less in property taxes than they used to. Partly that’s because of property tax limita- tion measures that apply to residential property too. Assessments on com- mercial and industrial properties haven’t been going up as fast. It’s also the case that the shift to a service econ- omy has lowered the share of property taxes paid by business: Oregon used to have wood products companies, for example, that owned expensive equip- ment that they paid property tax on. Now Oregon has more service sector companies, which don’t pay much property taxes. Tax avoidance is also on the rise, OCPP’s Leachman says, with compa- nies sheltering money overseas, or shifting how they account revenue from one state to another to take ad- vantage of differences in tax treatment. All told, these changes amount to a shift of the tax burden onto house- holds. That shift, Nesbitt and others say, is partly responsible for voters’ re- luctance to support new taxes: They al- ready feel like they’re paying more for less. And they are — because corpora- tions are paying less for more. If Ore- gonians want good schools, safe streets, and help for the poor and eld- erly, voters may have to turn back the clock to a time when business paid a bigger share. Swanson,Thomas &Coon ATTORNEYS AT LAW Since 1981 James Coon Megan Glor Cynthia F. Newton Ray Thomas Margaret Weddell Sharon Maynard James Oliver Kimberly Tucker Tip of the week: In most cases, if you are found disabled by Social Security you can collect back benefits starting one year before the date of your application. We represent people on all types of injury and disease related claims. n Workers’ Compensation n Asbestos/Mesothelioma n Personal Injury/Product Liability n Social Security Disability n Death Claims n ERISA/Long-Term Disability We provide straight answers at no cost on any of the above areas of law. CALL US or VISIT OUR WEB SITE ( 503) 228-5222 http://www.stc-law.com (Turn to Page 11) PAGE 2 NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS MARCH 17, 2006
