TheLoop21.com

By: Alyssa Giachino (Add to your loop)
Thu, 01/28/2010 - 01:00

Vice President Biden and President Obama announced help for the middle class

Americans are not as allergic to tax increases during a recession as Washington believes, as Oregon’s approval of raising taxes on the state’s wealthy residents and corporations shows.

By a 54 percent margin, voters overcame the opposition’s campaign messages that tax hikes kill jobs to approve two measures that would bring more dollars into the state budget for education and safety net services. Considering the state’s 11 percent unemployment rate, that’s no small feat.

Obama is attempting to tap into a similar sentiment with his middle class-friendly proposals in last night’s State of the Union Address. He’s talking about bigger tax cuts for child care expenses, elder care and big breaks on paying back student loans. And he’s got tax cuts for businesses too, as the start of plans to jump start job growth -- a major priority for the middle class -- offering a tax break for hiring new employees and for new investments in small businesses.

At the same time, he’s straddling the middle again with his spending freeze proposal--which has earned ridicule from the very conservatives he’s trying to appease for being nothing more than window dressing. The idea didn’t win him much support from liberals either, since it could hurt government services while protecting defense spending to prop up the two unpopular wars.

Tuesday’s vote in the Beaver State is another way to take the pulse of voters, and it may bode well for the political feasibility of Obama’s proposals to help middle class Americans while maybe getting the wealthy to contribute more. Households earning more than $250,000 in Oregon will now have to pay 2 percent more in income taxes, which combined with the corporate tax will account for 5.5 percent of the state's general fund in the next two years.

That said, Oregon is generally a fairly blue state, though not nearly as much as Massachusetts where voters caught Democrats in the headlights with that painful Senate seat loss.

So although Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been gratingly consistent with his broken record message that Americans are angry because the government is spending more while they have to cut back, Oregon voters beg to differ.

In fact, their vote show that a good section of the American public still wants to secure priorities like education and safety net services— in other words, in tough times, there’s a need for government programs to have some stability that the private market isn't offering.

Alyssa Giachino is an economics writer for TheLoop21.com. She has worked as a reporter in New York, New Jersey, Mexico City and California covering stories on labor, the environment, immigration and politics.