Jason Williams - Should Portland voters trust a councilor who skipped his own taxes?

A Portland city councilor seeking reelection failed to pay thousands of dollars in property taxes for months before settling the bill. Should voters overlook the mistake, or see it as a question of accountability?

Jason Williams is Founder of the Taxpayer Association of Oregon. He joins the show to discuss the unpaid tax controversy, public trust, and why accountability matters for elected officials.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Hey, welcome back to the Lars Larson show. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails in a moment. At 866-Hey Lars. And if you're a nay's hair, you go right to the head of the line at 866-439-5277. Send your emails to talk at LarsLarson.com. You can vote in our poll on X. We post a brand new poll question every day. This one, should Portland ban right turns at red lights for pedestrian safety? I would answer that one, no. I think there's a reason that we have an extraordinary number of accidents involving pedestrians in cars, and it's not because of right turn on red. But uh, I do want to bring up a separate subject. A Portland City Council member who's now seeking re-election, and there are a dozen of these jokers, just got caught ducking almost 8,000 bucks in past due property taxes after three separate notices. Can you trust a guy like that with an eight and a half billion dollar city budget when he can't pay his own bills? I thought we'd put that to Jason Williams, who's highlighted this story, and I think he's right to do that, founder of the Taxpayer Association of Oregon. You also find what he writes at Oregon Catalyst. Jason, welcome back.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

That's good to be here. Yes. It just happened to be that one of the socialist candidates in the city of Portland was the one who didn't pay his property tax.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

And that's Mitch Green, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Yes, yes. So he's one of the four socialists on the on the council. And he's also the guy who stood in front of a socialist rally with the banner above him that said tax the rich. Uh, but apparently, I guess taxing the rich doesn't uh you know doesn't apply to himself. And he's also the guy that uh voted for the street fee, where that's the uh the street fee that just put on your water bill there in Portland. Yep. And he's the guy also part of the few counselors that went to Europe. They spent $47,000 of taxpayer dollars going to Europe as a city councilor and going to car-free cities to learn how to have a car-free city. So this guy has spent a lot of money on the public dime. He has to tax the rich, but he's not paying his own property taxes.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

And by the way, uh Portland City Commissioners or council members, they make pretty good money, don't they? Aren't they making around 10 grand a month, maybe more?

SPEAKER_00 2:32

I think so. I think so. And um uh, you know, he says he just didn't get the notice, but there were three notices that were sent to him. Uh, and he's not the only person. There was another um a another mayor mayorial candidate, Sarah Inarone, who was a socialist who tried to run against Ted Wheeler, and she too got caught not paying her taxes. So there's something. I mean, I the only people I could find of people not paying their taxes that are either candidates or in office are socialists. I I don't know what that means, Large. It just seems like they uh uh they would be in their heart. They want to pay as many taxes as possible, and yet for some reason they're not.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

Well, and in fact, his explanation saying he bought his house in 2023, three years ago, and then last summer, just two years later, he refinanced his property for some reason. And by the way, if you bought it in 23 and then you refinanced it last year, it wasn't because the mortgage interest rates are lower. They they they aren't any lower at all. So I don't know why he'd be refinancing unless he was in money trouble and he said he was under the impression that the property tax balance would be settled as part of closing. Well, ordinarily, if you buy a house and you have a mortgage on it, you pay your property taxes every month with your you know, with your mortgage payment, unless you choose not to do it that way. And the fact that he owed almost 8,000 bucks, this guy doesn't sound like he does his own bills very well. And that means I don't I don't very much trust him with eight and a half billion dollars in a city budget.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Yes, you're exactly right. And as I said, he got three notices sent to his home saying, you know, you had not paid. So this is a big deal. You know, socialists should be wanting to pay their pro their property taxes and income taxes, and if they can't pay it, why should we be paying even more? Uh we could we could use uh not an increase in taxes if just uh the people that are avoiding it are paying theirs. And and one quick word about the turning the the on the red light. In my family, there's been a lot of friends that I've had that in Portland. Their accidents have been because there are so many people walking the streets of Port Portland intoxicated on drugs, homeless just wandering around. Uh sometimes they're on a bike. And when you're high on drugs and on a bike, there have been so many run-ins, and as they talk, Portland says, Well, we gotta stop these accidents. Well, I'll tell you what, if you not flood our streets with tweakers and meth heads and like zombie people walking around everywhere, you will reduce the uh the pedestrian uh accident deaths. But these pedestrians are are high in Portland, and that's causing a lot of problems.

SPEAKER_02 5:20

So I just tell you, when I've talked to the cops about uh pedestrian accidents to begin with, they said routinely at least 50 percent of them are the fault of the pedestrian. I mean, as much as you have to decide who was at fault here, was it the person who was high uh walking across the street? So I think your explanation makes sense, and simply telling car drivers you can't turn right on red because the city has decided to allow the population of the drug addicted and uh the alcohol addicted to be wandering around in the street makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. That is Jason Williams, the founder of the Taxpayer Association of Oregon. Would you trust an elected official who doesn't pay his own property taxes to manage taxpayer money? Let's go to Tom. Hey, Tom, welcome to the program. What's on your mind today?

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Well, I was under the impression, oh, thanks for taking my call. I was under the impression that uh uh that Trump couldn't do the executive action, but the Constitution says uh immigration shall be dis uh determined by Congress. So uh uh am I wrong in my assumption that that uh really nothing has changed except that it's executive action is all.

SPEAKER_02 6:31

Something did change, and here's why. Because up till now, Tom, what they've done with the Fourteenth Amendment has been sort of a working definition. What does the Fourteenth Amendment mean? And they have decided to grant citizenship on that basis. Now the Supreme Court has said you are not allowed to interrupt that, and that and that now that the court has found that when a baby is born in America, whether the parents were here legally or not, that baby is automatically an American citizen. How that changes things is it means the Congress can't fix it by just changing a law. Let me give you an example. Decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the states that were using the death penalty were doing it illegally. And so the states had to go back and rewrite the law so that they did it legally. In this case, the court has said that baby born to an illegal alien is automatically a citizen. The only way to change that would be to have an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And it's probably at least a decade to be able to change the Constitution. It takes two-thirds vote in the House, two-thirds in the Senate, three-quarters of all the states ratifying it, and usually the process takes at least years. So if you can't fix it by changing the law, in the case of the death penalty, all they had to do is rewrite the law and say this is the process by which we will achieve the death penalty. If you do it i i in the case in this case, now that the Supreme Court has said the 14th Amendment automatically confers citizenship even on the children of illegal aliens, you can't fix that with a law. It can only be fixed by amending the Constitution, and that is a tall order. Back in a moment, you're listening to the Laris Larson Show and the Radio Northwest Network.