Supporting analysis · Oregon
Compete, don't benchmark
Oregon's report says to align with its neighbors. But the neighbors are losing. The winning states recruit.
There is a quiet assumption buried in Oregon's tax recommendations: that the goal is to match our neighbors. Align the rates. Close the gap with California and Washington. Stay in the pack. It is the wrong target, because the pack is losing.
California shed a net 216,000 residents to other states in 2024–25, and more than 1.4 million since 2020. Seattle's tech employment fell about 6% from mid-2022 to early 2025, and both Washington and California sit in the bottom ten of the Tax Foundation's competitiveness index — Washington at 45th. Benchmarking to them is like training for a race by timing the runners falling behind.
The states that are winning don't wait to be chosen; they recruit. Texas reclaimed the top spot on U-Haul's growth index and added hundreds of thousands of residents in a year. Tennessee landed Ford's $5.6 billion BlueOval City by putting roughly $174 million into the site before Ford arrived — utilities, grading, shovel-ready land — then layering incentives on top. Utah has held the top economic-outlook ranking for eighteen straight years on a simple posture: align land, labor, logistics, and leadership behind a project and move fast. Idaho, next door, grew about 1.4% last year — second-fastest in the nation — on net migration that is overwhelmingly Americans choosing to come.
What these states share is not a magic incentive. It is agency. They treat employers and families as something to be earned, not endured. Lower costs, yes — but more than that, faster permitting, ready sites, and a clear answer to "how quickly can I build here?" The winning pitch in 2026 is not the lowest rate; it is the shortest distance between a decision and a groundbreaking.
Oregon should find this encouraging, because none of it requires becoming Texas. It has what capital and talent increasingly want — a place people genuinely want to live, real research universities, a culture of craft. What it has lacked is the build-friendly posture to match. Oregon slid from 7th to 35th on the tax-competitiveness index not because it got worse, but because it stood still while others reformed; its job growth since 2022 trailed Washington, Nevada, and Idaho — Idaho nearly tripled it.
That is the opportunity hiding in the data. The bar set by the neighbors is low and falling. Oregon does not have to clear it; it can step over it entirely — ready the sites before the employer calls, shorten the permit from quarters to weeks, and compete for the next plant the way Tennessee competed for Ford: actively, confidently, on offense. States that recruit, win. States that benchmark, drift.
Sources: Tax Foundation — 2026 Index · CBRE — HQ relocations (2026 update) · U-Haul 2025 Growth Index · Census 2025 population estimates · Tennessee ECD incentives · CNBC Top States 2025.