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As a tax teacher, I love the idea of making taxes sing!  I have a number of strategies for keeping students interested and making taxes relevant.  But I'm not sure that they would work for your purposes -- they include discussing celebrity tax issues (lots of those around now -- just look at almost any Cabinet appointee), playing tax jeopardy, making art projects around tax issues, using cartoon characters in examples, and the Daily Show. Oregon has a couple of terrific resource people:  Tim Nesbitt in the Governor's Office and Henry Breithaupt, the Oregon Tax Court Judge.  Henry can explain state tax issues, starting from the Magna Carta.  Tim can explain Bill Sizemore and why the Oregon corporate tax doesn't work as well as it could.  Another one of your particular problems is that many aspects of tax have a strong visual component.  Revenue projections make a lot more sense if you can see the chart of where we've been and where we're going.  Finally, for relevance purposes, it's important for taxpayers to know who is going to bear the burden of the tax.  Thus, if a proposal taxes a utility company, for example, that will mean higher rates for individual consumers.  Your listeners need to know "where the buck stops."  And finally again, your listeners need to know what the tax is going to pay for.  Will it build a stadium?  Will it fix those ever growing potholes?  Good luck!

posted 4 years, 2 months ago
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