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.
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NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
MARCH 17, 2006