Oregon’s tax structure has long relied heavily on personal income and property taxes to fund essential public services. While effective in earlier eras, this model places a disproportionate burden on working families, homeowners, retirees, and small businesses—particularly during periods of rising housing and living costs.

This policy framework explores an alternative approach: reducing or eventually eliminating personal income and property taxes by replacing them with large-scale, sovereign revenue streams designed to fund core public needs without over-reliance on household taxation.

The concept centers on a comprehensive revenue architecture projected at approximately $115 billion annually, built from sources such as publicly held energy infrastructure, technology licensing, innovation royalties, environmental markets, and enterprise-level fees tied to large-scale resource use. Rather than extracting revenue primarily from individuals, this approach emphasizes value creation at the systems level.

If viable, such a model could shift the funding of public priorities—including housing stability, addiction recovery, public safety, childcare, infrastructure modernization, and poverty reduction—away from personal taxation and toward self-sustaining economic engines. The intent is not austerity, but durability: public services funded through production, ownership, and long-term investment rather than perpetual tax increases.

Any transition of this scale would require extensive analysis, safeguards, and phased implementation. It would also demand transparency, public oversight, and rigorous evaluation to ensure stability for both residents and local governments.

At its core, this framework reflects a broader question worth preserving in Oregon’s civic dialogue: whether a modern economy can fund shared prosperity through ownership and innovation rather than continual dependence on taxing wages and homes.

Public discourse often frames compassion and fiscal responsibility as competing priorities, but that framing is increasingly inadequate for modern economic challenges. This framework explores whether a future-oriented economy—grounded in clean energy, artificial intelligence, innovation, and public-sector entrepreneurship—could sustainably fund public needs while reducing tax burdens and expanding opportunity without sacrificing accountability.

Estimated Annual Revenue: $42–46 Billion

This framework examines the potential of large-scale superhot geothermal development as a pathway toward long-term energy security and public revenue generation. By harnessing deep geothermal resources, a centralized power campus could theoretically deliver continuous, high-output electricity with a smaller surface footprint than many existing renewable systems, while supporting skilled employment in drilling, engineering, and advanced energy operations.

Beyond electricity generation, such infrastructure could enable secondary economic activity—including green hydrogen production, energy-intensive computing, and advanced manufacturing—creating the conditions for a broader industrial ecosystem anchored in reliable, low-carbon power. Considered this way, geothermal development functions not merely as an energy project, but as a foundational system with implications for economic resilience, climate adaptation, and public ownership of critical infrastructure.

Estimated Annual Revenue: $30–35 Billion

This framework examines the potential of a state-led innovation platform to license publicly developed AI technologies originating in sectors such as healthcare, transportation, agriculture, and logistics. In this model, tools would be developed in collaboration with Oregon research institutions and ethically aligned AI partners, with revenue generated through global licensing, software distribution, and intellectual property royalties. Framed this way, public-interest AI development becomes not only a service function, but a potential long-term revenue source aligned with socially responsible, problem-solving innovation.

Estimated Net Surplus: $3–5 Billion Annually

Hope Meadows is conceptualized as a network of self-sustaining residential recovery communities intended to address homelessness and substance use through integrated, long-term support rather than emergency sheltering. In this framework, each site combines stable housing with addiction treatment, mental health services, education pathways, vocational training, and small-scale commercial activity, with continued participation tied to engagement in recovery or skill-building.

From a systems perspective, such communities could be designed to support ongoing operations through a blend of tiered rents, healthcare partnerships, on-site enterprise revenue, and eligible public funding, allowing social recovery infrastructure to function as both a public good and a sustainable economic model.

Estimated Annual Revenue: $8–10 Billion

This framework explores the creation of a state-facilitated carbon credit trading platform as a tool for aligning emissions reduction with market-based incentives. In such a model, regulated entities that exceed emissions thresholds could purchase credits, while verified clean-energy, conservation, and restoration projects would generate credits eligible for trade.

If implemented with appropriate oversight, a system of this kind could support climate mitigation goals while producing public revenue through transaction fees, credit issuance, and compliance mechanisms, with proceeds potentially reinvested in forest restoration, wildfire resilience, and distributed renewable energy projects.

Estimated Annual Revenue: $6–8 Billion

Oregon hosts a growing concentration of hyperscale data centers that require significant energy and water resources to operate. This framework examines the use of resource- and emissions-based impact fees for large-scale facilities, calibrated to energy consumption, water use, and carbon intensity, as a way to better account for their environmental footprint.

Structured appropriately, such fees could generate public revenue dedicated to sustainability, resource mitigation, and infrastructure resilience, while limiting cost pass-through to households and small businesses that do not drive large-scale industrial demand.

Estimated Annual Revenue: $7–10 Billion

This framework explores the creation of a statewide patent and innovation registry designed to capture a modest public return on technologies developed with state-supported resources. Modeled conceptually on university technology transfer systems, such an approach would link public investment in research, infrastructure, land, or grants to limited royalty participation when resulting innovations reach commercial scale.

If structured carefully, a small percentage-based royalty on revenue derived from covered technologies could be reinvested into future research, workforce development, and public services, creating a continuing cycle of publicly supported innovation and shared benefit.

Estimated Annual Revenue: $3–6 Billion

This framework explores the development of a longevity and wellness hub combining regenerative medicine, advanced biotechnology, mental health care, and health-centered retreat infrastructure. Structured through partnerships with researchers, clinicians, and private-sector innovators, such a model could position health and wellness as both a public good and a source of non-tax revenue through medical tourism, research collaboration, and enterprise-scale wellness services.

If implemented responsibly, an initiative of this kind could contribute to economic diversification while supporting broader public health outcomes across the state.

$100–120 Billion Per Year

This framework draws on established economic models, adapted to explore alternatives to legacy tax structures through large-scale public revenue systems. Each component is designed to examine whether system-level investment can offset reliance on personal income and property taxes while supporting essential public services.

Taken together, these sectors are presented as a hypothetical revenue ecosystem intended to sustain infrastructure, public safety, education, healthcare, and environmental stewardship without placing the primary burden on households.