Here’s another bit of evidence that Oregon’s tax climate isn’t as toxic to business as conservatives make it out to be: Bend’s G5 Search Marketing announced this week that it’s getting a $15 million infusion of venture capital and plans to more than double its workforce.
The five-year-old company, which designs software to help businesses make their websites more effective in snagging visitors and customers, plans to add 20 employees by the end of the year and as many as 100 more within two years, according to co-founder and CEO Dan Hobin. It currently has a payroll of 75, plus five independent contractors.
“This has been an unusually strong year for venture capital in Oregon, which had its best first-half in four years,” The Oregonian reported in its story about G5’s success. “The state has benefited from looser capital markets and because Oregon entrepreneurs have diversified into hot sectors including clean tech, medical technology and social media.”
“This news comes as no surprise to me and many of those who supported [Measures 66 and 67] last January,” Chuck Sheketoff of the Oregon Center for Public Policy comments on Blue Oregon. “We continually pointed out that taxes play a very minor role in business location decisions. Much more important are factors such proximity to customers, the quality of the workforce, the quality of public structures and the quality of life in Oregon.”
I’m not sure I agree that taxes play only a “very minor role” in business location decisions, but they clearly aren’t the only factor – and probably aren’t even the biggest.
Hobin, a Silicon Valley refugee, told The Oregonian that Central Oregon’s low cost of living compared to the Bay Area enables G5 to attract high-quality employees without paying California wages. Hobin called it “geographic arbitrage.”
Sheketoff couldn’t resist pointing out that the 100 or so jobs G5 plans to add are substantially more – make that five times more – than the 20 lost by the sale of Tara O’Keeffe’s small hand and foot cream manufacturing company to Ohio-based Gorilla Glue this spring.
In a column by Business Editor John Stearns and in an editorial, The Bulletin has cited that sale as an example of the horrible consequences of M66 and 67, but so far it has refrained from commenting on G5’s coup. I guess it just doesn’t fit the narrative the paper is trying to peddle.
This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2010.
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So amazing how liberals love to tax and spend and then deceptively argue they are not hurting the economy. Hiring 75 employees with a pot of 15 million dollars at least is better than the job killing stimulus debt costing $145,000 or more for each created job that in many cases lasted only weeks.
Slightly off-topic, but I was wondering if, when the Tea Partiers rant and rave against taxes, and then they simultaneously shriek to ‘Drill Baby Drill!’, they understand that they could be paying as much as $15 a gallon at the pump via taxpayer subsidies. Just was having a read of this fascinating article, y’see…
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175284/tomgram:_mark_engler,_paying_oil's_true_cost/
HBM, Your hatred for the Bulletin would’nt have anything to do with your stance….would it?
Chuck Sheketoff of the Oregon Center for Public Policy comments on Blue Oregon. “We continually pointed out that taxes play a very minor role in business location decisions.
– spoken like someone who has never had to make a profit in thier lives!
spare me the rhetoric!
Tax is a form of slavery.Why are you always trying to make it sound like a good thing? Are you in to bondage? I wish you would keep your perversions to your self.
you have it wrong hbm. before you peddle the narrative you have to create the narrative.
just like malcolm mcLaren said in The great rock and roll swindle.
“first you create the swindle, then you sell the swindle”
Why do you think the cost of living is so much higher in the bay area and most other parts of California? Think about it!
Nice try but guess what repeated narrative is. At least the Bulletin says they support business and most of your tripe is anti establishment, anti business rhetoric. 117 tax, fee, anti business bills were in front of our legislature last year and they cant pass enough of them in this super majority, union driven democratic governing party. Bend faces loss of doctors, lawyers, businesses, etc due to this states unwillingness to cut spending. We are close to be the second California but keep telling us that if we just spent more, taxed more, we would be fine.
“Tax is a form of slavery.”
Ah, somebody’s been reading the crackpot Ayn Rand.
Taxation is how governments raise money to pay for the functions we expect them to perform. If you want to live in a place without taxation you’ll need to move to a place without government. Does Somalia appeal to you?
“Why do you think the cost of living is so much higher in the bay area and most other parts of California?”
High cost of housing, mostly.
I agree with you Bruce, it is funny how people complain about taxes being to high and measure 66 and 67 driving bussinesses away. these are the same people that complain that state and local goverments are not supporting the people. I think they forget that taxes are one of the only revinues the state has. I also think businesses come and go not just by taxes but by the work force, location, and product that they sell. it is not taxes that drives them out!!
I don’t know, I kinda dig living in a country where taxes are paid into the common good. I like going to the post office to send a letter to my sister in New Hampshire, I like driving on roads, I like having a sewer system and a power grid (though I wish they were powered by green, renewable energy), I like having restaurant inspectors that tell me if there are rats in a restaurant’s kitchen, I like building inspectors that tell me if my landlord hasn’t wired my electricity correctly, I like having the policemen, firemen, and a teacher for my kids. I would really like if this country could use it’s sense of invention and create a top-flight, universal health care system that was equal, accessible, and affordable to all. I don’t so much like that the Pentagon uses close to 25% of the annual budget to fund what is basically a military welfare system with military bases in 20 non-threatening countries and a lifetime of health and welfare compensation for every soldier and I’m unsure why conservatives don’t ever bother to conserve in that sadomasochistic area. But I reckon we’ll get to world peace, now that there’s Facebook, and we won’t need to spend so much money on bombers. And so all in all, I like paying my taxes, because we’re working toward the day when all of our taxes go for the common good. And corporations should have to pay taxes in proportion to the rest of us, certainly. Especially if they’ve attained ‘personhood’ from the Supreme Court. Corporations and citizens in this country alike are LUCKY LUCKY LUCKY to have been born here. God didn’t handpick souls specifically for America, and we know this because it turns out there are good, God-fearin’ souls in other countries too, so it’s LUCK LUCK LUCK that folks are born here, and they needs pay their fair share in taxes to pay for that luck, to pay into the common good. No one was raised by wolves. We’ve all been helped along by the blessed government of our blessed nation in uncountable ways.
If you think you’re an island unto yourself and that paying your taxes is living in bondage and you don’t feel you should have to, then by all means disappear into the wilderness, go build your own cabin, make your own clothes, hunt your own food. But we’ll have to remove you from the Medicare roles and the Social Security roles, and you can’t use our roads anymore, you can’t send a letter to your sister from our post office anymore, your cabin won’t be checked for faulty building codes and there’s no guarantee you’ll own the land, and you’ll have to work out your own sewer system and power grid, and your food won’t be inspected, and your water won’t be protected from pollution and neither will your air, and your kids can’t use our schools, and we won’t license you to watch television, and you won’t be able to check out a library book, either. But by all means, it’ll be worth it! Imagine simply removing yourself from this country, this awful, hateful, horrific, oppressive, taxing yoke of demonically evil tax-loving tyranny that makes each and every disgusting taxed moment of each and every worthless taxed life into an exruciatingly miserable living taxing hell of unyielding, cancerous taxed suffering under the lacerating, taxing pitchfork and taxable whipping of The Tax Man. No, I mean really: if you find it all so hateful, then by all means go.
Oh honey, The Bulletin definitely has a narrative, and it’s only hair’s degree away from the narrative of Fox News. Always I see the letters complaining about The Source’s seeming liberalism! Except they are letters from a town where the dominant newspaper panders daily to the right wing. Ever seen the way the Bulletin words a headline to sound anti-Obama? Ever seen how the Bulletin publishes commentary by 90% right wing pundits? Ever seen how the Bulletin’s ‘articles’ are consistently geared to appeal to the right (for prime example the stone cold crazy article by Betsy Q. Cliff about how organic food wasn’t, after all, good for you they had a couple months back)? Ever seen the nutso letters page of The Bulletin? Catering to the far right forces The Bulletin to daily publish some letter-to-editor madness about how everyone must speak English or there’s homeless people living in the La Pine woods off the teat of the government or how no one but Glenn Beck deserves health care. The Bulletin is the sub-Fox News of local papers for sure.
The Economic Elite have seized our economy, tax system and government. These people are the most depraved terrorists on the planet and they have viciously attacked us and launched an all-out economic war on the American public. We have to get serious about defending ourselves and fighting back.
“This situation continues only because the mass of the people refuse to look facts in the face and prefer to feed on illusions produced and circulated by those in power with a profusion that contrasts with their withholding the necessities of life. The day that the mass of the American people awake to the realities of the situation, that day the restoration of democracy will commence, for power and rule will revert to the people.” – John Dewey
Which brings us back to my original question: Is It Time for Law Abiding American Citizens to Stop Paying Their Taxes and Start a New Government?
When it comes to the overwhelming evidence of unpunished theft, and the process of paying taxes into that organized system of theft, there comes a point when exploited people need to ask the question: Why should hardworking Americans continue to contribute to our own demise?
This is the same question that led to the first American Revolution when Thomas Jefferson wrote the following Declaration:
“Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. – Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”
In the late Sixties I was a member member of student groups that really never succeeded in achieving much of anything. When I read Bruno’s rant, all I have to do is change ‘Ecomomic Elite’ to ‘Power Elite’ and I swear I’m back in somebody’s run-down apartment doing bong hits and affirming each rant with ‘Right On!!’ and a clenched fist salute. I’ll repeat a challenge one of my Poli-Sci profs gave me–I could rant all I wanted but I had to be specific with examples to support my argument that withstood a rational challenge.
It was the beginning of the end of the ‘progressive, radical’ me. I could not be irational and as a result the ’cause’ fell by the wayside.
Bruno, we were able to quote Marx, Mau and Che with equal skill–even the founding fathers when convenient. I had enough support to feel like I really understood what the REAL picture was–a true believer. In the end, though, I had to admit that it was all just mental masturbation. It felt good but was totally self directed and really never affected anyone else. Oh, yeah, the revolution was right around the corner.
When I read your post, it’s nice to know that the revolution is still right around the corner.
Bruno,
Nice cutting and pasting. Why didn’t you just go ahead and paste up the entire declaration of independence? Or are you afraid that someone might read the rest of it wherein Jefferson enumerates the very real depredations being committed by the crown against the colonists.
“…For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing taxes on us without our consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:
For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:
For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:
For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”
that right there is a list of REAL problems.
here’s your list: “my taxes are too high.”
Did you happen to notice that Jefferson never even mentioned taxes? why do you suppose that is?
since you are able to ignore the main point of the article, I suppose it would be useless for me to point out to you that federal taxes are, right now, lower than during bush 1, reagan, carter, ford, nixon, and on back probably to the establishment of the 16th amendment by that flaming commie republican Taft. which was ratified first the socialist America haters from s.carolina, alabama texas,mississippi,oklahoma kentucy and georgia. And opposed and ratified last and after the fact, by all those liberal elites from places on the east coast like massachusetts, new hampshire and vermont. And outright rejected by more of those liberal elites in connecticut and rhode island.
Anyway, your entire point is moot. The main complaint of the colonists was that they had no representation in the british government. Therefore, no redress for the very real problems they were forced to deal with by the actions of the crown. You have representation in our government. you have a legal way to change laws you don’t like. all you have to do is muster up the ambition and testicular fortitude to do something beyond complaining into cyberspace from the comfort of your air conditioned house. of course should you choose to get involved, be forewarned, you may miss some of that hi def evening programming we have all come to love so much.
should have said jefferson did not mention being overtaxed