Extending a personal invitation to any Oregonian business that wants to come to Texas

And why would they want to come? It’s simple. As the Wall Street Journal reports this morning,

        Oregon voters approved two special tax measures Tuesday designed to close a $733 million state budget gap. With 91% of the vote counted, Measure 66 garnered 54% of ballots and Measure 67 received 53%, the Associated Press reported...

        Measure 66 increases Oregon's personal-income-tax rate by two percentage points for households earning over $250,000 a year. Measure 67 calls for an increase in the state's minimum corporate income tax, currently $10 a year, and imposes a tax on gross revenues for corporations that don't report a profit.

As one of the folks offering comments below the article put it, “Oregon has chosen to follow the California model,” and in a few years, the economy there “will be bleaker than the weather. Consider this the institutional state version of aggressive panhandling.” Over the next few years, the net effect will be further emigration out of Oregon, and to next-door Washington State in particular, which has neither a personal nor a corporate income tax.

So, as the leader of all GOP activities in the my roughly square mile area, I’m extending a personal invitation to any Oregonian business to consider coming to Texas. Our weather and our economic outlook are a heck of a lot better, and it’s just a much more affordable place to live. For excepting that awkward business margins tax, we don’t tax by capitation either.

How do we manage that? Well, contrary to what Barton Smith of the University of Houston’s Institute for Regional Forecasting told USA Today last month, Texans really are smarter than people elsewhere—or at least than Oregonians who vote for higher marginal taxes. Similarly, we’re not so brainless as to think that anyone can spend his way out of a recession. I’ve repeated this elsewhere, and I’ll say it again. Anyone cranky enough to still believe in unreconstructed Keynesianism is liable, as Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago put it last year, to tell a recovering alcoholic to drink a few glasses of red wine per day, because it’s said to be good for long-term health.

Barry Obama, of course, follows that advice. Of course, after his loopy comments the other day about how Scott Brown got himself elected to Ted Kennedy’s old senate seat because people in Massachusetts were angry at George W. Bush, we have reason to question whether he’s all there. If the US had a westminster system of government, ambitious Democrats in the federal congress would have good reason to think about a no-confidence motion. Moving now might just save them a few seats. In Oregon, they may have a ways to go before they turn their heads around. As we just saw in Massachusetts, though, we in the GOP can now get solid candidates elected almost anywhere.