The New York Times has lied again. So does most of the corporate news media about certain issues.
The Times has long been a bastion of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which, since the late 1970s, has been completely dominated by billionaires of Wall Street and big corporations, as well as another group of billionaires, such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros and others. The chief aim of all of these folks and organizations is to keep Wall Street happy, stock prices soaring, and the liberal Democratic grassroots uninformed and keeping their eyes off the real issues.
The Times now officially has endorsed the lie that public employee pensions are the cause of local and state government budget shortfalls. In a story published on April 14 2018, they specifically used the case of Oregon. The Times claimed that funding for public employee pensions is crowding out other government services.
However, there are other things that are causing budget shortfalls in Oregon, and nationally, and the Times editors dare not mention them because it will offend corporate advertisers, the Democratic National Committee, and other billionaires whose plight the Times editors are sympathetic to.
Budget shortfalls in Oregon coincide with declining state corporate tax liabilities. A report by the Oregon Center for Public Policy shows that corporations now pay only 6.7 percent of all of Oregon’s income taxes today compared to 18.5 percent in 1970. No budget shortfalls would exist if corporations paid the same percentage of state income taxes as they did in 1970. Corporations have used their financial muscles to force legislators to reduce their state tax liabilities, and this has caused the shortage. (As an aside, some people call the links between cash and legislation corruption.)
In addition, hundreds of thousands of Oregon jobs have been exported since 1994 to third world nations, reducing the state’s tax base, and this has also helped to increase the budget shortfalls. Wall Street politicians, such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, have led the drive to export tens of millions of US jobs since 1994 (Wyden is supposed to be a US senator from Oregon but his voting record indicates he is in Wall Street’s back pockets as much as the Clintons).
What this really means is that income and wealth inequality have created the shortfalls since corporations are simply tools of the rich which are used to redistribute income and wealth from working Americans to rich investors. Reducing the tax liabilities of corporations has redistributed $2.36 billion dollars from taxpayers to the rich shareholders of corporations during the 2017-19 Oregon state budget. Notice the Times doesn’t mention this.
The same holds true with international income redistribution treaties. The difference between the old higher US wages and benefits of those tens of millions of exported US jobs and the new dirt low third world wages have gone straight into the bank accounts of the billionaires who control both major political parties, and the New York Times.
So redistributing income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent has created local and state budget shortfalls nationwide, as well as in Oregon.
What’s even worse, the Times story only uses examples of overly generous state pensions given to just a few, such as former Oregon Ducks football coach Mike Belotti. Belotti receives $559,000 a year from the public employee’s retirement system (PERS). There is no mention in the Times story that Belotti and these few others are exceptions. There is no mention of the elderly couples who worked thirty-four years each to get a combined $2000 a month in their deferred compensation called a pension, or the many who only receive a few hundred dollars a month, or the vast majority who receive between $400 and $2000 a month. There is no mention that pensions are deferred compensation.
In effect, the Times story was intended to generate public outrage at local and state pensions, and it was also specifically intended to turn our eyes away from the real reasons why there might be local and state budget shortfalls in Oregon and throughout the nation. The Times story was class warfare at its most insidious. No doubt the billionaires loved the story, even if it was a complete lie.
See 8 Key Things About Oregon Corporate Taxes–Oregon Center for Public Policy