© 2024 Blaze Media LLC. All rights reserved.
Portland city council passes law to raise taxes on CEOs to address 'income inequality
Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick on Fox News. (Image source: Fox News)

Portland city council passes law to raise taxes on CEOs to address 'income inequality

The city of Portland, Oregon, recently passed a new law that will raise the tax on businesses whose CEO makes substantially more than their workers.

According to the New York Times, companies located in the city will see a 10 percent tax increase if their CEO makes more than 100 times the average pay of their workers and 25 percent tax increase if the CEO makes 250 times the average worker salary.

The new law is set to take effect next year and is expected to only raise an additional $2.5 million to $3.5 million in revenue per year. The additional income is expected to be used to help address "income inequality" on the local level, while beefing up the funds for public workers like police officers and firefighters.

More from the Times:

The tax will take effect next year, after the Securities and Exchange Commission begins to require public companies to calculate and disclose how their chief executives’ compensation compares with their workers’ median pay. The S.E.C. rule was required under the Dodd-Frank legislation enacted in 2010.

Portland’s executive-pay surcharge will be levied as a percentage of what a company owes on the city’s so-called business license tax, which has been in place since the 1970s.

Many liberals across the country have praised the new law, but local business owners in Portland are not particularly thrilled about it.

The Portland Business Alliance, which is a group of 1,850 companies that do business in Portland, said the law will not have the desired effect of lowering "income inequality," but instead will have many undesirable consequences.

"We think they’d be far better off trying to work with business leaders to create more jobs that will lift people up and improve incomes," the group's president, Sandra McDonough, told the Times, adding that large, publicly traded companies are "an easy group to pick on."

Still, Portland city officials are hailing the law as one that will help address income inequality.

Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick said on Fox News Friday that the largest problem facing the U.S. today is the extreme wealth of top Americans — aside from climate change, of course.

"The richest one percent — and especially the richest one-tenth of one percent — have far more income and wealth and power than they did 40 years ago," Novick told Fox host Neil Cavuto. "And it's been economically destabilizing, socially destabilizing, politically destabilizing.

Cavuto, however, argued that the new tax would hurt Portland's economy by encouraging businesses to leave the city, while discouraging new businesses not to move to the city.

Watch Cavuto's exchange with Novick below:

Want to leave a tip?

We answer to you. Help keep our content free of advertisers and big tech censorship by leaving a tip today.
Want to join the conversation?
Already a subscriber?