A uniform rate of taxation from year to year indicates of course the expenditures are just keeping abreast of the state's development; a small levy means that the state's wealth is gaining" on the cost of government, and a high rate the converse.
This table of the state levies has damaging limitations as an index of the relation between the growth of public expenditures and of wealth in Oregon,—and I shall proceed immediately to point out these limitations,—still it should suffice to give something of a line on this relation in a state making little use of public credit and confining itself, too, almost to the present time, to a general property tax for state revenues. The conditions preventing its being a true index are the following:
- The levies did not yield revenues regularly covering the expenditures from year to year. During the first half of the seventies, for instance, a comparatively large volume of floating indebtedness was accumulated.
- Under-assessment, though continuous, was yet varied as to the degrees to which it was carried at different times; thus the total valuation of the state in 1893 was about $168,000,000; in 1900 it was only $118,000,000; the material progress of the state in the interim had been slow yet substantial.
- Sources of revenue supplementing the general property tax have been brought into requisition, especially in recent years. The light that this table of state levies is fitted to give on the course commonwealth life in Oregon will be best available after we have before us some idea of the extension of the state's public activities and the use it has made of its credit.
Expansion of State Activities in Oregon.—The statistics given relating to the average per capita expenditures of the state government in Oregon, and those of the number of mills on a dollar levied from year to year for state purposes on a valuation not amounting to more than from one-third to one-half of actual values,—with exemptions for indebtedness allowed most of the time,—these give striking proof that the
