The State of Oregon’s Office of Economic Analysis recently announced a $563 million dollar additional shortfall for the current two-year budget cycle. The newest budget gap came about as a result of lower-than-expected tax revenue due to the continued high unemployment rate in Oregon.
In Oregon, Measures 66 and 67–successful ballot referendums that raised taxes slightly on corporations and the richest residents of the state–helped stave off the most draconian cuts in the previous fiscal year. But the newest numbers illustrate that the measures didn’t go nearly far enough.
Oregon lawmakers are maneuvering with an eye to the upcoming midterm elections. Oregon Republicans have called for an emergency session of the legislature in order to make the cuts targeted rather than across the board(which the legislature can do legally, unlike the governor). The Democrats, who have a majority in the statehouse, blocked the special session in a bid to buy time, hoping that there will be more aid from Washington.
The cuts will have a terrible and immediate impact on thousands of the most vulnerable Oregonians. The Department of Human Services has started notifying seniors and people with disabilities that the state can no longer afford the services they receive. The cuts will also hit hard at public schools, which are already on a shoestring budget. Without federal assistance, K-12 schools will face a $237 million cut.
How different school boards will deal with the cuts is uncertain, but ideas already floated include teacher and classified staff layoffs, forced furlough days, pay cuts and elimination of sections of the curriculum. The Portland school board has proposed eliminating physical education for Kindergarten through middle school.
The reductions will filter through a long list of state-provided services–from acute care assistance to adults with severe mental illness and programs which help low-income workers provide child care while they’re at work. Losing benefits from a program like these will force some to leave a job in order to stay at home to care for children, putting an even greater strain on working families.
For Oregonians, these cuts represent the first cold splash of an austerity tidal wave that’s certain to strike unless we can build a movement to defend our schools, our basic services and our jobs.
The answer to this new wave of attacks is solidarity. Oregon Action will begin by linking up the fights against K-12 cuts, and against tuition hikes and privatization schemes at the colleges, with the fight to save benefits for the disabled and the elderly.
The fight for Measures 66 and 67 showed us that it’s possible to untangle the twisted top-down logic of tax breaks for the rich, and service cuts and layoffs for everyone else. We need a renewed grassroots tax-the-rich movement in Oregon–one that can defend our interests as workers and show the people at the top that we won’t pay for the crisis they unleashed on us.