Celebrating and supporting our work for Tax Fairness in Oregon

After all the pleas you received on Giving Tuesday, TFO sends its own on “Giving Wednesday.” We are grateful for your support. Below we’re sharing with you readers the fundraising letter we mailed to donors of record.

In the 2023 legislative session, members of TFO testified more than 70 times and had hundreds of conversations with legislators. We led the legislature to pass one bill of our design, contributed to the modeling of another, limited the damage of a third, and provided the rationale for killing dozens of bad ideas (no doubt some will be revived). You can read our submitted testimony at TaxFairnessOregon.net/legislative-testimony.

Since the session ended, we’ve continued to meet with legislators and plan for 2024. Several of us traveled to the Eastern Oregon Economic Summit in La Grande. We attended the Democratic Party’s biennial conference in Sun River, where we talked with legislators in a casual setting. And we’ve had published the occasional op-ed. Somehow the same argument we make in a one-pager carries more weight with legislators when printed in a newspaper.

The 2024 short session is not expected to consider much in the way of substantive tax policy. To elevate legislators’ understanding of the tax bills they consider, we have begun an effort to require a distributional analysis (showing who receives the benefits by income class) of every tax bill that goes to the floor. We’re also fighting a proposal to give more than $20 million to the owners of minor league baseball teams to help finance new stadiums—an example of misplaced priorities if ever we saw one.

None of us gets paid—which is one reason legislators trust us. But we still have expenses: dues, travel, research tools, our website. Which is why we’re writing: to ask you for a modest investment in our work.

You can donate online at TaxFairnessOregon.net or mail a check in the envelope included with this letter.

Thank you for your continued support.

The address for an envelope: 5550 NW Roanoke Lane, Portland, Oregon 97229

Do check out our updated website.