This April, Multnomah County economist Jeff Renfro was invited by City Club Of Portland to give an address about the state of the economy alongside Oregon Chief Economist Carl Riccadonna. The full presentation is available on YouTube, but we found this answer to an audience question particularly interesting.
The audience member asks about a recent report that Multnomah County has been losing more people than its neighboring counties, and asks “what makes Multnomah County so strange?” Jeff Renfro begins by breaking down the demographics of those who move (younger people who are looking to set down roots but can’t afford to do so here) before segueing into directly confronting a talking point often leveraged when outbound migration is the topic — taxation. Here’s Jeff’s full answer, lightly edited for clarity.
“Just because I know there’s like an implication of tax policy in there, I’ll just say, I have access to all of the Preschool for All tax returns. I’m updating our board every year. We just did a briefing for our board back in March where we presented the latest data on who’s paying us and what it looks like by income level.
I don’t see a ton of evidence that there is an exodus of high income people in our Preschool for All tax returns. And we’ve seen pretty consistent growth following the first year of the tax and the number of payers. Even when you pull out the impact of inflation, the number of payers is still growing. Also, given the importance of like very, very high-income-payers to the overall collections, we pay special attention to our very high income people. And what it looks like to me after four complete years of tax return data, is that there was maybe a response between the first and the second year where we did lose some people, especially on the higher end. But since then it’s really stabilized and kind of gone back to normal.
So, what I’ve told our board even before we collected the first dollar of Preschool for All tax is, there’s a lot of economic research that goes back a long ways that says, it’s not very common for people to say, “I hate this tax. I’m leaving.” Right? People are sensitive to tax policy when they’re at a point in their life, like retirement or starting to think about having a family or buying a house, where tax policy is one of the things that they definitely consider.
What I remain more concerned about over the longer term is the people who don’t move here, basically. And that’s a harder thing to capture. But I would still argue that housing affordability and just affordability of living in Central Portland continues to be our most significant problem.”
Jeff Renfro’s concerns are well-founded. As sociologist Cristobal Young explained to the Multnomah County Board last year: “In policy terms, rich people are the wrong focus, Young said, because they aren’t highly mobile. Young people on track to become rich are mobile, he said, and cities should seek to attract them before they put down roots.
“There should be a focus on attracting and retaining people at the beginning of their careers,” Young said. “I think you do that by investing in quality of life, urban amenities, child care, good schools, supports for young families.”
We agree, and if you do too, please sign our petition to keep Preschool for All fully funded as it grows into full universality.