PAGE A4, KEIZERTIMES, JANUARY 1, 2016
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
Marketplace will decide wages
Increasing the mini-
mum wage and income
inequality will continue
to dominate the news in
2016. It is expected that
income inequality will
take center stage during
the presidential nominat-
ing and general election
campaigns.
Income inequality is not some-
thing that will be corrected by
protests in the street; it would take
systemic changes in tax laws, lobby-
ing rules and reforms of campaign
fi nance laws.
Increasing the minimum wage can
be accomplished at the ballot box.
Voters sympathetic to workers’ de-
mands for a higher wage are not nec-
essarily the people who would ben-
efi t. Oregon has one of the highest
minimum wages at $9.25 (the federal
minimum is $7.25); a measure in the
2016 general election would call for
an increase in our state’s minimum
to $15 by 2019 and annual increases
after that.
Businesses say that an increase
will force them to raise prices; some
businesses say a wage increase will
cause them to cut jobs. An increase
in payroll also increases a businesses’
tax bill as well as increased contribu-
tions to Medicare and Social Secu-
rity. Business has always passed on its
increased expenses to its customers, a
wage increase would be no different.
Reasonable people would not be-
grudge a fellow citizen from earning
a life-sustaining wage. The debate
will come down to what a living
wage is. A post-high school teenag-
er earning $9.25 an hour might be
quite satisifed with the wage, even
working part-time. A single mother
of two would probably not be satis-
fi ed with that wage especially if child
care is part of her weekly expenses.
A household earn-
ing less than $15,000 per
year is eligible for the
Supplemental
Nutri-
tion Assistance Program.
An eventual increase of
the minimum wage to
$15 would make many
workers ineligible for
SNAP. Unless the eligibility ceiling
is increased along with the minimum
wage, in which case nothing would
change. In that scenario the mini-
mum wage sought would continue
to climb.
The marketplace will have to de-
cide what the minimum should be.
But business should take a lesson
from Henry Ford. The car manufac-
turer understood that thousands of
his employees would be able to buy
one of the cars they built if they were
paid better.
Depressing wages while stock-
piling cash at the top is a recipe for
more than discontent; it’s a recipe
for a shattered society in which ev-
eryone fi ghts to grab their share of
the economic pie. Capitalism has its
winners and its losers. Once, hard
work and perservence were enough
to lift a person out of poverty, now
that path to success is much harder—
and some would say obstructed.
Financial success is available to
anyone who will work smarter, hard-
er and not feel entitled to success just
because they want it. Success is sel-
dom an overnight thing. In a world
where instant gratifi cation is the de-
sire, success will come to those who
know nothing comes easy or free.
Political and business leaders
should applaud those who strive
to reach the next rung. The public
should demand,though, that they not
put a foot on the fi ngers grasping for
the next level.
—LAZ
editorial
Paint part of the
mural
letters
To the Editor:
The Keizer Mural, lo-
cated on the long exterior
wall of Town and Country
Lanes, is developing with great com-
munity input and involvement. A
number of local people are designing
the individual images and will soon
create a collage with the numerous
elements of the Keizer Iris Parade.
Keizer Public
Arts
Com-
mission (KPAC) and Keizer Arts
Association(KAA) will soon be send-
ing out a ‘call to artists,’ asking for
submissions of portrait portfolio
work. This’ heads up’ is an oppor-
tunity to develop a few representa-
tive pieces of portrait work for the
paid commissioned faces that will be
a part of the mural. Details will be
explained in the actual call to artist
announcement. Final selections will
be done by the KAA board.
If anyone is interested in joining
the community mural effort, please
attend the next meeting, at 6 p.m.
on Wednesday, Jan. 6, at the Keizer
Civic Center. At this meeting Bar-
bara Hunter, a local artist, will offer
a short presentation on impressionis-
tic techniques that will be used in the
making of the mural. There will be
several mural-related presentations
over the next few months. Experi-
ence or none, professional or ama-
teur, young or old, all are welcome
and we will have jobs and tasks for
most everyone. Please, come join
the effort, contribute and be a part
of the growing expressions of Keiz-
er art. We have a number
of images just waiting
to be claimed and devel-
oped. Come to the meet-
ing and claim your image
of choice to develop. No
experience necessary. We
will help you if you ask.
Jill Hagen
Mural project manager
Gesture brings
smile to my face
To the Editor:
One afternoon in the the sum-
mer of 2013, I had a very brief ex-
change with someone whose name
I still don’t know, but I think about
him often and would love to thank
him for brightening my day with his
inspiring attitude.
I had just entered the Keizer Civic
Center and was headed toward City
Hall when I heard steps behind me.
I looked and noticed that an older
man was hurrying to get ahead of
me. He opened the door and stood
there holding it for me as I passed
through. I thought “Wow, that’s chiv-
alry!” and I thanked him for the ges-
ture. He smiled and shrugged a little
and said “My wife is watching me
from above.” As soon as he was gone,
I turned into a mess of tears, admir-
ing this man for honoring his wife
in such a lovely way. Wherever he is
today, I hope he is still smiling at her
memory and doing little things to
make her proud.
Dorothy Diehl
Aumsville
Keizertimes
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Bernie Sander’s lessons for capitalists
By E.J. DIONNE JR.
There is an irony to the presiden-
tial candidacy of Bernie Sanders: The
senator from Vermont is often cast
as exotic because he calls himself a
“democratic socialist.” Yet the most
important issue in politics throughout
the Western democracies is whether
the economic and social world that
social democrats built can survive the
coming decades.
Let’s deal fi rst with the tyranny of
labels. “Socialist” has long been an un-
acceptable word in the United States,
yet our country once had a vibrant
socialist movement, whose history has
been well recounted by John Nichols
and James Weinstein. Socialists had a
major impact on the mainstream con-
versation. Reforming liberals, includ-
ing Franklin D. Roosevelt, co-opted
many of their best ideas, and it’s one
reason they were marginalized.
Moreover, the vast majority of
“democratic socialists” are now prop-
erly described more modestly as “so-
cial democrats” because most on the
left believe in a successful private sec-
tor. But they also favor a government
that achieves broad public objectives,
from a clean environment to wide ac-
cess to education, and regulates and
redistributes in ways that strengthen
the bargaining power of those who
don’t own much capital.
When Sanders defi ned his own
brand of socialism earlier this year
in a speech at Georgetown, he made
clear he’s in this camp. “The next time
you hear me attacked as a socialist, re-
member this,” he said, “I don’t believe
government should own the means of
production, but I do believe that the
middle class and the working families
who produce the wealth of America
deserve a fair deal.”
Honestly, Bernie, you’re really a so-
cial democrat.
But there is
great honor in
this. The bar-
gain between
g ove r n m e n t
and the market
that allowed
the
United
States and the
other Western democracies to share
growing prosperity from the end of
World War II until recent years was es-
sentially a social democratic achieve-
ment.
As the economist J. Bradford De-
Long argued in a recent essay on
Talking Points Memo, these economies
were “relatively egalitarian places
when viewed in historical perspec-
tive (for native-born white guys, at
least).” The chance to infl uence poli-
tics was “widely distributed through-
out the population” while “the claims
of wealth to drive political directions”
were “kept within bounds.”
Yet the headline on DeLong’s
piece, The Melting Away of North Atlan-
tic Social Democracy, raises the question
we need to debate far more explicitly
in the presidential campaign: Was the
great social democratic experiment
an aberration in history? Are all the
wealthy societies destined to become
far more unequal, as they were in the
late 19th century, because of global-
ization and technological change? Or
can governments fi nd new ways of
ensuring a degree of justice and fair-
ness?
These questions have absorbed my
former colleague Steven Weisman of
the Peterson Institute for Internation-
al Economics for some years now. His
new book, The Great Tradeoff: Control-
ling Moral Confl icts in the Era of Glo-
balization, provides an excellent text
for the discussion we need. Weisman
painstakingly avoids dogmatism and is
other
views
careful in laying out the often agoniz-
ing choices we face.
For example: Globalization has “el-
evated the living standards of hundreds
of millions, if not billions, of people
worldwide” but also “has helped sup-
press the incomes of low-skilled mid-
dle-class workers in rich countries.”
Where do our loyalties lie? How do
we balance obligations to our fel-
low citizens in the communities and
countries in which we live against the
interests of those far away? And how
do the vast disparities of wealth the
system creates constrain the very pro-
cess of democratic deliberation over
what to do about it?
Weisman is more sympathetic to
globalization than are many on the
left, and I’m more drawn to its critics
than he is. Still, Weisman does not let
advocates of the market off the hook.
Defending the achievements of glo-
balization, he argues, requires facing
up to its costs.
“The global economic system,” he
writes, “should be one in which op-
portunities are more equal, the dis-
tribution of rewards is fairer, and the
preservation of communities is more
respected.”
How to achieve these goals is
what politics needs to be about. The
presidential campaign would be more
edifying (and more relevant to the
problems so many American face) if
it focused directly on the need to re-
negotiate a social contract that once
provided broadly inclusive prosperity
but is now in grave jeopardy.
You don’t need to be a demo-
cratic socialist to believe this. On the
contrary, the survival of democratic
capitalism depends upon facing the
diffi culties the system is having in de-
livering on the promises it was once
able to keep.
(Washington Post Writers Group)
Want an outsider for president? Consider Musk
It is reported and polls show many
Americans want a person elected
president who’s not a politician. Not
someone who’s a member of the so-
called “establishment” or those folks
who year-after-year make certain one
of their favorite cronies is elected to
the highest political offi ce in the land.
I join those who want an outsider
elected to lead my nation and will, as
I’ve hoped for all the years I have been
an adult and paid taxes, work for all
Americans not just a chosen few as I
feel the case is now, not only in D.C.
but in Salem, too, clamoring, often
successfully, according to media sto-
ries, for favors with every new gov-
ernor. At the national level, I want a
person not now running, Elon Musk,
while at the state level, a person who
gets things done and create enthusi-
asm for all things Oregon, such as Os-
wald West and Tom McCall did.
Musk, born in 1971, is a guy who
proved himself early in his life and has
continued to prove himself more than
many who want to hold the reins of
government but offer nothing im-
pressive beyond a glib tongue. Un-
fortunate to my dream is that Musk
was born in South Africa and the U.S.
Constitution demands that the occu-
pant of the White House must be born
in the U.S. In Musk’s case, an excep-
tion to the U.S. Constitution, Article
2, Clause (5) would have to be made.
Musk’s story reveals that he was
a mover and shaker from his earliest
years, having made his fi rst software
sale in a game titled Blaster when he
was 12. He moved around a lot in
acquiring his formal education, in-
cluding stops in
Canada and the
U.S. His last
higher educa-
tion stop was
Stanford where
he sought a
Ph.D. in energy
physics but dropped out to found
his fi rst company, Zip2 Corporation.
Zip2 was successful enough to be
bought by Compaq Computer Cor-
poration in 1999 for $307 million and
$34 million in stock options. Further,
he built a company that later became
PayPal which was later sold to eBay
for $1.5 billion in stock of which
Musk owned 11 percent.
Moving quickly in the world
of business building and high fi nance,
he founded Space Technologies Cor-
poration or SpaceX intending to build
spacecraft for commercial space travel.
SpaceX got into a NASA contract
in 2002 to handle cargo for the In-
ternational Space Station. Last week,
SpaceX received more fame for build-
ing a reusable rocket 229.6 feet tall (an
American standard football playing
fi eld is 300 feet long) that delivered a
payload into orbit and then landed by
remote control back on earth and can
be used again.
Another Musk venture is Tesla Mo-
tors that’s dedicated to manufactur-
ing electric cars. Five years after the
company got underway it produced a
sports car. Since its fi rst auto in 2008,
there have followed a sedan and, more
recently, in 2015, an SUV. Musk’s Tesla
has also been helped by its relationship
with Daimler and Toyota. This new
gene h.
mcintyre
auto maker launched its initial public
offering in 2010, raising $226 million.
The Hyperloop by Musk is his
concept for a new form of transpor-
tation. When made real it will dra-
matically shorten commuting time
between cities. Resistant to weather
and powered by renewable energy,
the Hyperloop will propel riders in
pods through a network of low-pres-
sure tubes at speeds of more than 700
miles per hour. It’s guesstimated at
seven to 10 years to build. With all
that he proposed or built, he seeks
through competitions for help from
individuals, teams of persons and other
corporations.
Speculation here believes there’s
much more that Musk has in his head
to create in addition to the other
projects he’s already brought to frui-
tion. He’s said he loves the U.S. and
believes this nation to be the best any-
where, at any time. He’s been mar-
ried twice, with a fi rst wife who’s re-
ported to have said nothing negative
about him; he is currently married
to his second wife. He offers, as an
American citizen, a near perfect per-
sonal record, solid as granite and is a
renowned problem-solver who moves
like a clipper ship in his business en-
deavors. He’s also a person who can
unite people in common causes that
serve all humankind and can ultimate-
ly improve life throughout the world.
He would make, in the estimation
of this fellow citizen, an outstanding
president if only he could run for the
offi ce.
(Gene H. McIntyre’s column ap-
pears weekly in the Keizertimes.)