PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

No doubt critics of this post would say that I have been spending too much in the sun in Southern California.

But, in the sun and high temperatures here, I have been wondering why elected officials are so eager to propose new taxes. It seems to me they should spend time, first and foremost, to exact a “return on investment” principle from current government programs.

If those government programs fail to perform, they should be gone, thus making room within current spending for programs that produce results.

We had several more indications this week that many elected officials turn first to new taxes:

• U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon, has announced that he wants to tax capital gains as regular income, meaning rates up to 37 per cent and he also wants to tax unrealized gains, perhaps decades before the investor sells.
• Governor Kate Brown testified in favor of a new set of tobacco taxes, including a first-in-the-nation tax on vaping and e-cigarettes, all to fund her budget proposal for Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income Oregonians.
• Several state senators emerged in Salem with a long-awaited proposal to tax businesses just under one-half of 1 per cent of their gross receipts over $1 million to help fund the costs of K-12 education.

Whatever you think about these proposals – and, for what it’s worth, from my position in the cheap seats, I could support some of them — what troubles me is that the first instinct on the part of many political leaders is to tell taxpayers they need new money.

My view is that such proposals would have more standing if they were preceded by efforts to get the best from current spending.

Let me provide just one example from my past as lobbyist in Oregon. It is a small one, but yet an important one, helping to illustrate my point.

In the 2011 legislative session, my firm’s client, ChristieCare (now called Youth Villages and still a client of the firm I co-founded), proposed legislation – Senate Bill 964 – that rested on a simple premise: The rate of foster care was too high in Oregon and, if we – the state and its contracted entities — provided intensive services to children and their families, there was a way to reduce foster care and keep children in their own homes.

SB 964 contained two very important principles identified by phrases that, at the time, I said should become regular requirements in all state human services contracts – DEFINABLE CLIENT OUTCOMES through PERFORMANCE-BASED CONTRACTING.

In other words, under Senate Bill 964, contractors would be expected to produce specific client outcomes, thus earning retention of their contracts by their performance, or, on the other hand, losing their contracts if they failed to perform up to expectations.

It was incredible to me when I learned that this was the first performance-based social services contract language in Oregon law.

Through diligent effort – and over the objections of the agency involved, the Department of Human Services – we passed SB 964 and the governor signed it into law.

And, what happened?

Nothing.

Legislators soon lost track of the requirement and contracts with private sector entities continued without regard to whether they performed or not.

This still stands as a major loss for the State of Oregon, not to mention an example of a law that remains on the books, but is not enforced.

This may be a relatively small issue, though foster care in Oregon remains today a system in search of a solution. But, beyond the subject area, what this indicates to me is that there is more interest in new tades than there is in imposing a “return on investment” standard for existing state government programs.

Too bad, I say.