Posts published in September 2025

An Oregon Legislature hung up this season over state finances might in the next regular session, in theory, find some interest in a provocative idea from the Oregon Center for Public Policy:

Require reporting, in open public record, more information about finances among the larger corporations doing business in Oregon, mainly concerning the calculation of taxes paid and benefits received.

Such a concept is going nowhere any time soon on the national level.

In 2021, Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act, which was intended to pierce the sometimes mysterious forms of ownership — involving shell corporations, layers of ownership and foreign involvement — nationally.

It went into effect last year, but on March 2 the Trump administration announced “not only will it not enforce any penalties or fines associated with the beneficial ownership information reporting rule under the existing regulatory deadlines, but it will further not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies or their beneficial owners after the forthcoming rule changes take effect either.”

The OCPP proposal (proposed legislative text has been released) is set up differently than that law. It’s intended to work through tax reporting requirements imposed on publicly-traded corporations — which for the most part means the larger ones — and others which they substantially control. The aim is to elicit not so much forms of control but a sense of how the tax-related finance picture in Oregon actually works.

The group said its plan would require “corporations to make public certain tax and financial information by filing a disclosure with the Oregon Secretary of State. The Act would apply to C-corporations that are publicly traded, meaning they are listed on a stock exchange like the New York Stock Exchange or an over-the-counter market. These corporations are already required to provide significant tax disclosures to the Security and Exchange Commission, so any cost of compliance would be minimal.”

So far as I’ve been able to tell, nothing like it is underway in other states. Most states do impose a corporate income tax, but not all. Some, including Washington, along with Texas, Wyoming, Nevada, South Dakota and Ohio, have no corporate income tax as such, but generally they do apply other taxes and fees aimed at businesses.

But then, Oregon often has been willing to take a lead.

Here is how the OCPP summarizes its argument:

“Corporations have designed the tax system to their advantage. Shining a light on the corporate tax system would allow Oregonians to see which corporations pay the bare minimum in income taxes, while reporting big profits to shareholders. It will allow Oregonians to see which corporations exploit what tax loopholes and subsidies, and which might be shifting profits overseas to avoid taxes on profits earned in Oregon. In short, corporate tax transparency is essential to make the corporate income tax system work for the benefit of all Oregonians.”

This is not, or at least not necessarily, a call for changing or increasing corporation income tax rates. In comparing the basic rates, Oregon is more or less centrist. Its tax rate, averaging across brackets, is lower than in California but similar to Idaho. Rates, and more important the rules surrounding what is counted as net income and what can be deducted or otherwise vary the amounts to be paid, are widely different across the states.

So what is it we ought to know?

The OCPP makes three basic arguments. Each might lead to conclusions that corporations are underpaying their fair share or, if complaints by some corporate advocates are right, the system really doesn’t benefit them at all but hurts the business climate.

First, the OCPP has argued that a number of the larger corporations have been (legally) avoiding taxes through use of tax havens and other means. The specifics, if made available, could clarify what an appropriate response would look like.

Second, state corporate tax breaks have been blasted as giveaways and supported as investments in the economy. Right now, Oregonians have little way to assess this, but an open book on the breaks and how they’re used might offer insight.

Third, corporations have argued that tax proposals involving increases or more compliance issues could drive them out of state. It’s an argument often fraught with emotion but too little analysis; more information about how taxes actually impact large businesses would be useful for all legislators to have.

Whichever way the information runs, Oregonians would have a better basis for developing business tax policy. Only a sponsor is needed to launch the discussion.

This column first appeared on the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

The opening of candidate filing last week brought on a fresh season of hope, of minorities to become majorities, of majorities to expand their reach, of incumbents to hang on for another term.

Put in the context of other elections in recent times, you shouldn’t expect the 2026 election to fulfill extravagant hopes, from any point of view.

Generations ago, changes of a large number of legislative seats in a single election was common, but that has become a rarity.

What recent elections tell us is that the odds are strongly against Rs taking control of either chamber, especially in what’s likely to be a Democratic year. But Democrats could have a shot, albeit with less than even odds, of taking one or both chambers with a true supermajority — that is, with two-thirds.

Since 2004, Democrats have held 16, 17 or 18 seats in the state Senate; a ceiling and floor have been of long standing. In the House, since Democrats pushed through a tie in 2010, that party has held from 34 to 37 seats.

The last time either party had a true supermajority — a two-to-one margin — in either chamber of the Oregon Legislature was in 1996, when Republicans controlled the Senate with exactly 20 votes, two-thirds. That was enough, if the caucus held together, to override (in that chamber) a veto from Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber. Since then, neither party has cracked the ceiling of 18 members. Going back further, the 1980 and 1982 elections gave Democrats 22 members, and 24 in the 1976 election.

You have to go back exactly a half century to find the last time either party got to 40 in the House. In that 1974 election, when Democrats nationally had one of their best election years ever in the wake of Watergate, that party held 40 of the 60 House seats. That marked a significant fast shift: The 1972 election gave Dems a majority of just 33, so in 1974  they gained seven seats, an unusual level of gain for either party since.

The political map was a lot more fluid then. While (as now) most of the Republicans came from either east of the Cascades (or Washington County, which is now blue), with a few others scattered in other areas, Democrats won in places they’d be considered non-competitive today.

The map is more hardened now.

That’s why the Cyrus Javadi party switch, though on the surface it’s only about a single seat, has a lot of significance, since the real battlement is so sparse. But his district, on the northwest coast, in the Astoria and Tillamook area, happens to be one of the competitive areas.

Javadi recently left the Republican Party and is running for his third as a Democrat. Since his recent breaks with the rest of the Republican caucus would have made a primary election win difficult, he may have a better path to re-election now. Or not; party changes can be tricky, and he has a complex path ahead.

Not only his own seat may be at stake. The Republican holding the Senate district covering that area, Suzanne Weber, is barred from re-election because she joined a Republican walkout in 2023. A Republican replacement candidate with Weber’s support, has announced, as have other candidates. But the nature of the election year, the politics around the Javadi switch and the normal competition of candidates in a politically marginal district makes the seat hard to call this early on.

The exact margins, the precise number of Democratic seats in the legislature, likely will come down to only a few seats and districts.

As many as a half-dozen seats across both chambers — mainly in the Salem, Gorge, Clackamas and outlying Bend areas — could account for some uncertainty as well. It’s not hard to figure: Those were hotspots last year too.

Taken together, Republicans, though in the minority, seem to have as many seats at risk as the Democrats do. That would mean they have only a long-shot chance of capturing either chamber, and they’ll almost have to run the table to hold Democrats below their current 36-seat technical supermajority for finance and some other bills.

Democrats will have to push to gain true supermajority status — two thirds in each chamber — but their chance of pulling it off are realistic. They would have to fare just about as well in the election to reach 40 seats, as the Republicans would to keep them below 36.

The usual precautions apply here. Candidate filing has only just begun; we won’t know the whole field in many cases for months. There’s another regular session to go, not to mention final work (presumably) in the current special which features a contentious tax and budget bill, and those developments along with others could influence some races. And along the way, people may drop out of contention too.

But if you want a best guess as the 2026 cycle opens, you’d be wise not stray too far from the legislative roster of today.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.