Sad white people want you to vote for the oil industry

Portland is voting on a local gas tax. Ballots arrive tomorrow.

Measure 26–273 would raise $5.18 per Portland household per month for the next four years with a 10-cent-per gallon tax and divide the resulting $16 million between two things:

1. Repaving streets and fixing potholes before they turn into bigger potholes. This is a really good idea because bigger potholes are 10 times more expensive to fix. Every $5.18 we spend on this now means $51.80 in lower taxes 10 years from now.
2. Making streets safer and better for walking, biking and public transit. This will prevent collisions, which saves all of us even more money; and also more of us will walk, bike and ride public transit, which is good for literally everything.

I don’t vote in favor of every local tax. But taxes do not get much more sensible than this.

Virtually every institution in the city has endorsed this plan: the big evil chamber of commerce, the little indie chamber of commerce, the good-government club, every mayoral candidate, the firefighters’ union, the police union and every social justice nonprofit I’ve ever heard of.

On Wednesday we got this flyer in the mail. If you’ve voted in recent elections, you probably did too.

“That’s pretty ridiculous,” my wife said.

It is pretty ridiculous.

I looked up the state records of where the money for this flyer came from:

I will now summarize this donor list with a stock photo I found on the website of the industry association that on Monday dumped $50,000 into the “vote no” campaign, by far the largest single donation of this entire Portland election:

The oil industry is a lonely but well-funded voice opposing this gas tax. They don’t want a local gas tax because from their perspective it would be divided between two things:

1. Reducing the oil industry’s profit margins.
2. Rewarding people for finding alternatives to purchasing the oil industry’s product, which is oil.

So on Monday, the “no” campaign used that burst of oil money to spend $60,000 to print and mail these flyers warning us that sad white people can’t afford to spend $5.18 per month in order to avoid spending $51.80 per month ten years from now.

Okay, if you (a) can afford a car but (b) really, really do not want to spend another $5.18 a month on said car, then you will definitely be able to find some rationalization for voting “no” on this extremely sensible tax. The oil industry would love to help.

Or if you (b) truly cannot afford to spend $5.18 a month right now, then that totally sucks but in that case I guarantee you that (a) you do not own a car and therefore you are not going to have to worry about any of this.

This flyer is ridiculous. The oil industry is awful. This gas tax makes sense. Vote yes.