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About Keizertimes. (Salem, Or.) 1979-current | View Entire Issue (March 25, 2016)
PAGE A4, KEIZERTIMES, MARCH 25, 2016 KeizerOpinion KEIZERTIMES.COM It’ll be a lemony day Imagine a Sunday in the very near future. Now imagine being able to sample lemonade at stands throughout Keizer and Salem on that day. Lemonade that is the product of the creative imagination of kids throughout the region. That Sunday, May 1, is Lemonade Day, a national project that teaches kids how to be little businesspeople. The fi rst Lemonade Day in our area was in 2014. Now under the guidance of the Salem-Keizer Education Foundation and the support of dozens of sponsors, kids of elementary- and middle-school age will be able to make some money for themselves. Orignated in Texas, Lemonade Day was devised to give kids an idea of how a business is created including planning, following through and enjoying the profi ts. Lemonade Day in Keizer and Salem will be as creative and diverse as the kids who register a stand. In recent years some Lemonaders have joined with siblings or friends to create a lemonade recipe (often with the help of parents), building a stand and most importantly, deciding where to locate their stand. Some have erected their stands in front of their houses; others have received permission to put their stands at busy retail locations. Lemonade Day is a fun activity including parents. Either individually or with a team, each little company gets to devise a name for their stand, test different recipes to come up with the ulitmate lemonade. By asking for donations from grandparents, parents or neighbors, each team is able to purchase the ingredients for the lemonade and the stand. Besides learning how to build their own business from the ground up, Lemonaders learn how to manage money. Each registered stand agrees to split their money in three piles: one third for their education, one third to donate to a charity of their choice and, best of all, one third to use as mad money. Getting involved with Lemonade Day should be seen by parents and kids as a worthwhile and fun project. Parents can be the ultimate mentors to their budding businesspeople, steering them in the different aspects from seeking money needed to create the best lemonade stand and the most delicious lemonade available. On May 1 there will be stands throughout the entire region. Some stands will serve lemonade with fruit additions and baked goods as an upsale, some stands will be gathered with other stands in a pod-formation to attract the greatest number of customers. Lemonade Day is a fun project in which the kids learn something: teamwork, salesmanship, design and more. With the helping hand of a parent, guardian or family member, our kids will be out in force that day, proudly serving their hearts out. It won’t matter if their stand is in The Meadows or Gubser neighborhoods or in front of a busy storefront. With guidance they’ll have fun, help others and add to their education fund. Registration is open now at salemkeizer.lemonadeday.org. —LAZ Can voters really trust Donald Trump? might be more foolish than they would have us believe. Trump says “our leaders are stupid,” but his own record as a businessman—his main selling point—should raise a few questions about whether he wouldn’t be yet another political buffoon whose rhetoric proves to be, in the end, nothing more than clever campaign Kool-Aid. A fi nal note on his fi nances: Self- funding seems great, but to suggest it’s indicative of his sincerity is to ignore the common theme of his life and career—his base instinct is self-protection and interest. Some- times those are good things, yet, as fi ckle in his character and beliefs as Trump has been, they make it diffi - cult to truly discern between sensi- bility and expediency. For my fellow Republicans, it’s entirely possible his conversion is true and full; I’m only saying that those who support him shouldn’t be surprised if “The Art of the Deal” came back to bite America in the end. David Cheney Keizer editorial letters To the Editor: Let’s admit it: Donald Trump has an uncanny skill for branding and marketing. How else do you explain the personality cult that has grown signifi cantly around his campaign, except by looking at his expertise as the CEO of a notable company? He is, as are his support- ers, under the impression that his success in various business ventures is proof of how he’s a winner who makes great decisions with minimal downside, yet anyone with an ob- jective eye can see that he’s just as capable of mistakes as the rest of the imperfect human race. Granting that not all bankruptcies are the same, it is diffi cult to ignore the fact that Mr. Trump has, as a business executive, declared bank- ruptcy multiple times over the years. One on its own is easy enough to explain away, but after two a per- son has to wonder if perhaps the executive(s) running the company Empty promises of Trump and Sanders By MICHAEL GERSON In a time of brushfi re populism, the problem is not the populace, it is the populists who seek to lead it. The two candidates who call themselves revolutionaries—Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—are, in fact, backward looking, intellectually timid and unresponsive to the real needs of the working and middle classes. This judgment emerges from some basic economics (bear with me). The last several decades have seen both dramatic increases in productivity and the fading of the traditional, American, middle-class dream. The globalization of labor markets (creating competition with skilled workers abroad) and new technology and automation (hol- lowing out whole categories of la- bor at home) have placed downward pressure on wages and put a relent- less emphasis on acquiring new skills. If the global economy were your boss, he or she would be demanding harder work for less money while making you go to school at night. Unfortunately, this creep is actually most people’s boss, ultimately. The populists are right that im- portant institutions have been woe- fully unresponsive to these changes. A recent Casey Foundation report found that 82 percent of African- American and 79 percent of Latino fourth-graders are reading below profi cient levels. How are they be- ing prepared for the new economy? Nearly 10.2 million young people in America are not in school or in the workplace. How did they fall between the sidewalk cracks of American life? Colleges and uni- versities in America graduate only about half the students who enter, leaving many in debt and without a diploma to show for it. What is Sanders’ liberal populist an- swer to these challenges? He wants to in- crease Social Security ben- efi ts for everyone, including the wealthy; he wants free college edu- cation for everyone, without a seri- ous emphasis on quality; he wants to break up the big banks; and he wants a single-payer health care system. “What kind of guts does it show to promise people free things?” asks Jonathan Cowan, President of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank. The centerpiece ideas of the Sanders campaign could have been proposed by Hubert Humphrey in the 1960s. Sanders would massively expand the commitments of 20th- century liberalism, defi antly un- updated for 21st-century challenges. His campaign is progressive nostal- gia in concentrated form. Trump, the other self-described revolutionary in the race, is running a campaign entirely based on nostal- gia. He proposes to return America to greatness by personally reversing globalization. “I’ll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places,” he says. But how? There is no real poli- cy beneath the pledge. It is entire- ly magical thinking. The parts of Trump’s economic plan that can be weighed and measured—the pro- ductivity loss from expelling millions of workers and the global recession that might result from blowing up the global trading order with tar- iffs—are frightening. Where Trump is not vacuous, he is dangerous. Working-class people and their challenges should transform the Republican Party. But Trump’s wel- come to these voters includes de- other views ception, exploitation and crackpot policies that make their eventual dis- appointment and alienation assured. “The populists,” says Cowan, “are not the revolutionaries”—assum- ing (for the sake of this argument) that revolution involves an ambi- tious, modern vision of economic adaptation. And who might the real revolutionaries be? Proposals by Third Way to improve the quality of higher education and encourage savings and capital accumulation for lower income people are practical and promising. Reform conserva- tive plans to increase the rewards for work and encourage social mobility fall into this same category. Centrist Democrats and reform conservatives disagree on many things. But their arguments draw the outlines of an actual 21st-century politics, which puts the best instincts of the left and right to work on real contemporary problems, rather than promising empty revolutions that look mainly to the past. And what politicians in our sys- tem might carry on an adult con- versation about the goal of ensur- ing that all Americans are prepared for the new economy? The answer, surprising myself even as I write it, would probably be President Hill- ary Clinton working with House Speaker Paul Ryan and an emerg- ing Republican anti-poverty cau- cus (think Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah) in the Senate. There are many other reasons to oppose Clinton for president (or, if you are a Democrat, to want Ryan deposed and the Senate retaken). But if the goal is addressing work- ing-class struggles, the real revolu- tion might come from a divided government. (Washington Group) Post Writers Time to stop clock-changing madness Keizertimes Wheatland Publishing Corp. • 142 Chemawa Road N. • Keizer, Oregon 97303 phone: 503.390.1051 • web: www.keizertimes.com • email: kt@keizertimes.com SUBSCRIPTIONS NEWS EDITOR Craig Murphy editor@keizertimes.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR Eric A. Howald news@keizertimes.com One year: $25 in Marion County, $33 outside Marion County, $45 outside Oregon PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY ADVERTISING Publication No: USPS 679-430 Paula Moseley advertising@keizertimes.com POSTMASTER Send address changes to: PRODUCTION MANAGER Andrew Jackson Keizertimes Circulation graphics@keizertimes.com 142 Chemawa Road N. LEGAL NOTICES Keizer, OR 97303 legals@keizertimes.com EDITOR & PUBLISHER Lyndon Zaitz publisher@keizertimes.com BUSINESS MANAGER Laurie Painter billing@keizertimes.com Periodical postage paid at Salem, Oregon RECEPTION Lori Beyeler facebook.com/keizertimes twitter.com/keizertimes A couple of weeks have passed since we were put upon again by this mindless moving of our clocks ahead in spring and back in the fall. Everyone who survived can forget about it for awhile. Rather than resign to daylight saving time, I argue, the best response to this matter is to ask: Why do we continue this truly unnecessary interruption among so many other interruptions that we must put up with in modern times, when most of us would prefer our lives to be more simplifi ed? My effort? A request of Senator Kim Thatcher that she ask for a bill to end the abomination of daylight saving time in the legislature’s hopper two sessions past. It got a hearing, although, the only legislator who showed up for it was Thatcher, the room for it otherwise serving to represent zero interest in something that every Oregonian with whom I’ve discussed the subject has wished this imposition would be sent to the dustbin of history. Before the recent session, I asked the new guy, Representative Bill Post, if he’d help me during the short session. But this matter, he reported, was not among his priorities. Silly me, I thought representatives represent. Is this just another good news, bad news story? Daylight saving time adds an hour of light when the days get longer, as though people in huge numbers become agriculturalists in the mid-March downpours and, no matter the soggy soil and muddy climes, head outside with trowel in hand to make certain that an added hour of daylight is used to plant fl owers and, even possibly, put a crop in the ground. To others, who must put up with this silliness and lack of consideration, they lose an hour’s sleep that impacts their ability to function in wakefulness mode for about two weeks after the onset of new time. Actually, based on what medical science knows about the circadian rhythm, that set of internal body controls that can keep us healthy or not, this factor can cause sickness and even death when thrown out of whack. We are advised not to take the circadian rhythm consideration lightly while this threat-to-all could be lessened if we got rid of daylight saving time. If every Oregonian became knowledgeable about the importance of life balance as related to the workings of the circadian rhythm, it’s surmised that there would be a groundswell of support for keeping Pacifi c Standard Time year-round but too many ignore it to their demise. Other states have gotten in touch with enlightenment, those include Hawaii, most of Arizona, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Meanwhile, California has a bill (not unlike the one that I tried here with help from Thatcher in 2015) that would ask voters to abolish the practice of changing clocks twice a year. Legislators in Alaska and nearly a dozen other states are debating similar measures. Then, too, those patriots in New England want to secede from the Eastern time zone, adding themselves to Nova Scotia and Puerto Rico in the Atlantic time zone as New gene h. mcintyre England sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean farther east than anywhere else, forcing it to 3:45 p.m. sunsets in places in Maine’s December, causing them to experience a borderline to the Arctic Circle. There’s been report after report that, due to the time changes, traffi c accident increase as do heart attacks and strokes when we change time. Further, the argument that electricity is saved has not proven true under the scrutiny of study and analysis. Perhaps, as with other matters, the only way change can occur with something like this is if a legislator has a personal or family disaster over the time change and then becomes a zealot for no time adjustments. Otherwise, those folks like to argue with each other into infi nity most of which results in more impositions that severely test one’s soul and sanity while nothing to satisfy the average beleaguered person, much comes of this futility. In keeping up with the times and what Americans want, a Hello Inc. survey conducted on 1,018 citizens between Feb. 23 and 29, and reported on March 14, found that 59 percent of Americans consider daylight saving time a waste of time. Another third have decided that daylight saving time is “outdated.” “Hello!” Is anyone besides Thatcher awake and willing to be responsive in that wedding cake- shaped building in Salem? (Gene H. McIntyre’s column appears weekly in the Keizertimes.) Share your opinion Email letters to the editor (300 words) by noon Tuesday. Email to: publisher@keizertimes.com
