An Empty Offer

I read Dennis Richardson’s August 26 newsletter.  He is a legislator from the 4^th District of the Oregon House of Representatives.   I didn’t know much about him.  Now I know he is a Republican and a declared candidate to run for Governor.  I also read about Richardson in an August 19  post on a conservative blog, The Governed | NW Politics.  The Governed reveals that Richardson hasn’t a chance because he has betrayed his conservative roots.  With that confident assertion in mind, I’d guess that The Governed is probably correct.  Richardson also isn’t making good friends with another group that is usually considered to be outside that first group.  That leaves a rapidly shrinking middle.

Richardson manages to demonize, in double-digit percentages, big slices of a big group, Oregon workers.  He’s railed against PERS (Public Employee Retirement System) and presumably the beneficiaries who do, or hope to, participate in promised PERS benefits.  And he names three big public sector unions in Oregon – OEA, AFSCME, and SEIU.  All of them, according to Richardson, are responsible for various evils that have befallen Oregon.

You can follow along with the back-of-the-envelope calculations in the spreadsheet provided (for illustration only, dates from different samples may not match by a couple of years).  In a nutshell, there are about 1,670,000 workers in Oregon – 100% of the workforce.  Non-retired PERS workers are about 13% of the workforce.  Retired PERS workers – 118000 of them – are not part of the work force but they are probably sensitive to schemes to tamper with their fixed income.  The three big unions make up 7% of Oregon workers.

The question remains, whom exactly does Richardson represent?  Like Richardson, I can name names (I already have).  A number of them don’t even live in Oregon but their money and their influence do.  They share an activist agenda with a few very wealthy Oregonians. That agenda includes “right to work” (suppressing collective bargaining and collective union action), tax cuts for business and the wealthy, and cutting support for expensive services like schools, public safety, and human services.

More important than Richardson or his candidacy is how emblematic his position is: ideological and simplistic (the cure for unemployment is more jobs).  He offers less than nothing because his “solutions” come at the expense of social services, schools, workers, retirees and poor people.