Image provided by: SEIU Local 503; Salem, OR
About The Oregon state employee. (Salem, Oregon.) 1944-195? | View Entire Issue (Oct. 1, 1944)
5 T H E O R EG O N STATE EMPLOYEE Oregon State Employee is a new publication so ably edited and so filled with real merit that it may weld opin ion of state employees into such an effective pressure on the 1945 legisla ture that it will succumb to the de mand for a state civil service law de signed to protect present state em ployees in what they may deem to be a vested interest. Mistakenly, or per haps by design not recognized by mem bers having no direct interest in fav oring a state employee, League of W o men Voters has given its tremendous support to such a bill in past sessions. The League is too fine a body to permit itself to be used as a stooge for a pres sure group seeking an unfair advant age. There is so much genuine m erit in civil service reform, especially as against the spoils system, that it is easy to rally support for a special interest bill that is anything but a reform. We have been evolving a m erit system in prac tice in state employment in Oregon; the practice on the whole has been ex cellent and is improving and expand ing; its further development could be furthered by the right kind of statute and its administration, but to enact the kind of a bill which has been pro moted heretofore would be worse than a step backward; it would be freezing state employment into a pattern from which even a spoils system m ight be welcomed as relief. Aside from this one possible notivation, may we compli ment the editors of Oregon State Em ployee for issuing a first class, helpful, constructive magazine that is w orth reading from cover to cover. — Oregon Voter, Sept. 16, 1944 "The success or failure of democracy depends on its administration by hu man being.” Money in the Pot The state tax commission in its com putations of a tax discount for next year, which it fixed at 30 per cent on income and corporation excise taxes, had to do some unusual figuring or the discount would have been 40 per cent. This was because it found itself with too much money, a very rare condition in the history of Oregon’s treasury. N ot only would the commission have had to increase the discount by ten per cent, but the state would have lost the six per cent m arkup for the current fiscal year, in its tax base. The device by which the commission avoided making the extra ten per cent discount on income taxes and avoided a stationary tax base for the current year was by invoking the provision of the law (L. 1941, c. 440, sec. 19) which authorizes the commission in preparing its statement for the tax levy to include when such apportionment is made on the as sessment of an even year, such additional amount or amounts as the governor may deem necessary to meet the expenses of the state for the fiscal year. This is an old provision of the statute, though prior to 1941 the au thority was vested in the governor, sec retary of state and state treasurer. So far as is recalled the provision has never before been used, for the reason th at it always took the full six per cent increase to cover the legislative appro priations. The 1943 legislature appropriated more than enough money to absorb the six per cent increase allowed under the constitution, but two things occurred to throw the accounts off balance. First, the increase in miscellaneous re ceipts last year, over estimates, which amounted to $1,133,966.51, mostly in increased collections under the inherit ance tax; and second, reversions of un- (Continued on page 6)
