Oregon’s DEI mission once again trumps homelessness crisis
Briana Oser
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Instead of focusing budgeting on the thousands of suffering homeless in Oregon, state officials have made another unwise decision to direct finances toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Senate Bill 1, if passed by the governor, would make Oregon the first state to require the Department of Revenue to include a voluntary questionnaire about taxpayers’ races, ethnicities, and disabilities. The act would also allocate $470,724 to the Department of Revenue to collect data and provide the legislature with a better understanding of “how Oregon’s tax policies affect different races and ethnicities statewide.”
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The director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy said, “We have spent decades and many billions of dollars in Oregon on hundreds of tax expenditures, tax credits, and deductions that have helped a lot of people and have subsidized a lot of people that maybe didn’t need the help. We have known that around income and wealth disparities for years, what we haven’t known is how does it also harm and how does it also undermine our goals of improving racial equity here in Oregon.”
Oregon officials have decided to spend two years gathering data to discover whether minorities are being marginalized and unfairly taxed. If Oregon really wanted to help the marginalized, it would focus its efforts on the thousands of drug addicts and homeless people sleeping on the streets, especially in Portland.
Liberal leaders in Oregon have a habit of ignoring statistics and offering ineffective solutions. When an Oregon county commissioner suggested cutting funds on a million-dollar DEI office to direct money toward homelessness, a homelessness nonprofit group defended it. According to the organization, “The crisis on our streets is exacerbated by racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, classism, and xenophobia.”
A group whose mission is ending homelessness should be better informed about its causes. The housing crisis is getting worse in Oregon primarily because of poverty and drug addiction. The more the state obsesses over DEI, the less it can help addicts and provide financial support.
Around the same time Oregon put up its expensive DEI office, Portland decriminalized “small possessions of drugs.” Since then, fentanyl deaths have shot up. Oregon is now No. 1 in the nation for substance abuse problems. In the hope of reversing these effects, Portland’s mayor recently banned fentanyl.
Since Oregon installed the DEI office and Portland legalized drugs, homelessness increased by 23%. True, this does not necessarily imply causation. But when a state directs massive funds toward one cause, those funds cannot be directed somewhere else. The homeless are multiplying in Oregon at a drastic rate, and it is not because more people are moving to Oregon — the population is declining.
Oregon is hurting. Its homeless population is rapidly growing. State leaders do not need to spend two years gathering data to find an oppressed group. If they are searching for the marginalized, they should just step outside.
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Briana Oser is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.