PAGE A4, KEISERTIMES, MARCH 3, 2017
KeizerOpinion
KEIZERTIMES.COM
Urban play stations
The city is surveying utility pay-
ers about their level of interest in and
support of Keizer’s 19 parks. Respon-
dents are asked if they would support
an addition of up to $8 per month to
upgrade and maintain them.
Neighborhood and regional parks
are a key offering of a city’s quality of
life. People like parks and they help
maintain property values.
Parks, both big and small, are
the recreation hubs in our
neighborhoods.
The lack of entertain-
ment and recreation options
in Keizer have always ranked
high on the livability sur-
veys. Kids, especially teens,
are notoriously hard to keep busy and
engaged. Let’s face it, sometimes it is
hard to keep grown-ups busy and en-
gaged. Parks can go only so far. What
if you are a household without access
to a mountain or coastal cabin? What
if you not a school or club sportsman?
What can we do for those who live
in Keizer, want to stay in Keizer, but
need something fun to do? We should
get whimsical.
We envision play stations through-
out Keizer, along River Road, at the
Civic Center, at Keizer Station and
other public spaces.
What’s a play station?
It can be a huge checkers
board. It can be perma-
nent chess tables through-
out the city’s core (how
about three at the Mc-
Gee-Newton focal point
at the corner of River and
Chemawa Roads. It can
be an over-sized Tic Tac Toe game,. It
can be brain teaser puzzles that make
passers-by stop and try to solve it.
Establishing components of an ur-
ban play station can be part of any re-
newed River Road Renaissance—if a
our
opinion
No Uber, Lyft;
fi x transit fi rst
tion and I feel personally
that this hasn’t been done
within the fi rst few weeks
of Mayor Bennett’s ad-
ministration.
Mayor Bennett fought
hard and long to win elec-
tion to his current offi ce.
I would hope that he stands for all
of his constituents rather than those
that rely upon the Chamber of Com-
merce to promote themselves. I call on
Mayor Bennett to do the right thing
and actually do something to improve
the system—I call on my own elected
mayor, Cathy Clark, to try and help
improve the system. There has been
too much talk of “We will get to it
eventually” or “It is what it is.” The
people have had enough of the upper
one percent calling all the shots. If true
change is to happen it needs to start at
an already established point
Dakota Saunders
Keizer
letters
To the Editor:
I am writing to voice my
objections to Salem Mayor
Chuck Bennett’s proposal
to bring Uber and Lyft into
this city without fi rst trying to im-
prove upon the current public trans-
portation.
It is no actual secret that a good
chunk of people who live in this city,
rely on a currently inadequate trans-
portation system because the council
is unable or unwilling to take actual
steps to try and improve up on the sys-
tem as it stands.
Mayor Bennett has worked, it
would seem, extremely hard to bring
in ride share servers more than he has
tried to improve the current system.
True, the council is unable to make
actual decisions and changes in this
system but they are able to help move
the conversation in the right direc-
Everyone likes to win
By LYNDON ZAITZ
Everyone likes to win—an award,
a ribbon, a title, a contest. The recent
Academy Awards made me think
about the awards and honors I have
won. It was my fi rst
award that was like
winning an Oscar.
I had won a con-
test or two before
my big win on May
19, 1976. In second
grade at Keizer El-
ementary School I
won a coupon for a free 19¢ burg-
er at Bob’s Burgers for having my
poster design chosen as the winner.
I can’t even remember what the
topic was—don’t care; I won.
By 1976 I had traded in my aca-
demic pursuits for the glory of the
stage. By the middle of my junior
year I was a part of the drama de-
partment; I was no drama geek, per
se, I had other interests as well.
By the time my high school career
was ending I had trod the boards as
Man in Subway in Bells Are Ringing,
the lead in You’re a Good Man, Char-
lie Brown, and as Lt. Frank Burns
in our high school production of
M*A*S*H—it’s hard to picture a
school approving it these days. I was
the all-singing, all-dancing lifeguard
in No, No Nanette.
At the end of the school the dra-
ma class/department held an irrev-
erent awards program, set up in such
a way that every graduating senior
got some sort of an award. At the
awards dinner in my senior year, my
classmates won this award and that
award, even my younger brother
won a best actor award for a role
that mirrored Woody Allen.
All the awards had been present-
ed. Except one. Each year the teach-
er, Al Osburg, gave out The Ozzie,
an award he personally gave out. It is
still hard to discern what the criteria
on
my
mind
was for the award. Mr. Osburg gave
a few remarks and said the winner
of The Ozzie is...me.
I rose and walked to the dais to
thunderous applause from the 40 or
so people in attendance. The
award was basically a trophy
with a rendition of the sad/
happy masks on top where the
bowler or the batter would
normally be.
I was happy to win. I
was emotional; I cried and
I thanked the people in the
room for giving me a home in high
school.
Winning never gets old. I didn’t
win anything again until years later.
I was honored with awards from
some entries into a state-wide
contest by the Oregon Newspaper
Publishers Association.
I, like everyone else, likes to win
things. When I was a Toastmaster
with a Salem club, 10 of my required
speeches won nine blue ribbons.
Just as the theatre department was a
welcome fi t in my fi nal high school
days, Toastmasters fi lled a need
and did help with public speaking.
Though I haven’t been a member of
Toastmasters for a number of years,
I do use what I acquired in that or-
ganization every day—that was my
lasting award.
I don’t win every time. There are
honors or awards over many years
I wish I had received. But like they
say at the Oscars and other awards:
it nice just to be considered. A seg-
ment of the public decries the
awarding of green ribbons so every-
one feels like a winner and no one
is loser.
Well, there are losers. Losing
doesn’t create losers, it makes one
try harder, it keeps one humble. In-
stead of moping, just think, “I didn’t
win. This time.”
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business wants to get a city loan to up-
grade their commercial property they
must add a play station.
How would a series of urban play
stations throughout the city be paid
for? For starters, each station would
have a fi tness, educational, historical or
art facet. Those are four areas is which
grant money is available from a myr-
iad of public and private sources. For
stations situated in our parks, it can be
funded with money added to the city’s
utility bills (if that comes to pass).
A renewed River Road Renais-
sance would have money available for
stations along Keizer’s main thorough-
fare.
The addition of urban play stations
would be a project that maintains
Keizer’s urban livability while helping
to solve the issue of few entertainment
and recreation choices for our kids
and grown-ups alike.
—LAZ
As Trump unmuzzles the economy,
a rosy scenario will become reality
By LAWRENCE KUDLOW
Virtually the whole world is beat-
ing up on the Trump administration
for daring to predict that low marginal
tax rates, regulatory rollbacks and the
repeal of Obamacare will generate 3
to 3.5 percent economic growth in
the years ahead.
In a CNBC interview last week,
Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin held the line on
this forecast. He also argued
the need for dynamic budget
scoring to capture the effects
of faster growth. Good for
him.
But what’s so interest-
ing about all the economic
growth naysaying today
is that former President
Obama’s fi rst budget forecast roughly
eight years ago was much rosier than
President Trump’s. And there was nary
a peep of criticism from the main-
stream media outlets and the consen-
sus of economists.
Strategas Research Partners policy
analyst Dan Clifton printed up a chart
of the Obama plan that predicted real
economic growth of roughly 3 per-
cent in 2010, nearly 4 percent in 2011,
over 4 percent in 2012 and nearly 4
percent in 2013.
But it turned out that actual
growth ran below 2 percent during
this period. Was there any howling
about this result among the economic
consensus? Of course not. It seems
it has saved all its grumbling for the
Trump forecast.
And what’s really interesting is that
the Obama policy didn’t include a
single economic growth incentive.
Not one. Instead, there was a massive
$850 billion so-called spending stimu-
lus (Whatever became of those spend-
ing multipliers?), a bunch of public
works programs that never got off the
ground and, fi nally, Obamacare, which
really was one giant tax increase.
Remember when Supreme Court
Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that
the health-care mandate was in fact
a tax? But it wasn’t just
a tax. It was a tax hike.
And added to that were
a 3.8 percent investment
tax hike, a proposed tax
hike on so-called Cadillac
insurance plans and yet
another tax increase on
medical equipment.
So eight years ago, tax-
and-spend was perfectly
OK. And the projection that it would
produce a 4 percent growth rate per-
fectly satisfi ed the economic consen-
sus.
Make sense? No, it does not.
So here’s President Trump reaching
back through history for a common-
sense growth policy that worked in
the 1960s, when President John F.
Kennedy slashed marginal tax rates
on individuals and corporations, and
again in the 1980s, when President
Ronald Reagan slashed tax rates
across the board and sparked a two-
decade boom of roughly 4 percent
real annual growth.
But the economic consensus won’t
buy Trump’s plan.
One after another, Trump critics
argue that because we’ve had 2 per-
cent growth over the past 10 years or
so, we are doomed to continue that
forever. This is nonsense.
Most of them point to the decline
other
views
in productivity over the past 15 years.
They say that unless productivity
jumps to 2.5 percent or so, and un-
less labor-force participation rises,
we can’t possibly have 3 to 4 percent
growth.
Stanford University econom-
ics professor John Taylor, who’s also
a research fellow at the Hoover In-
stitution, is one of the nation’s top
academic economists. He released
a chart on productivity growth that
shows that productivity declines can
be followed by productivity increases,
which unfortunately can be followed
again by productivity declines.
In his widely read blog, Econom-
ics One, Taylor wrote one post titled
“Take Off the Muzzle and the Econo-
my Will Roar.” He notes that bad eco-
nomic policy leads to slumping pro-
ductivity, living standards, real wages
and growth.
We can see “huge swings in pro-
ductivity growth in recent years,” he
says. “These movements ... are closely
related to shifts in economic policy,
and economic theory indicates that
the relationship is causal.”
He concludes, “To turn the econo-
my around we need to take the muzzle
off, and that means regulatory reform,
tax reform, budget reform, and mone-
tary reform.” Well, aren’t those exactly
the reforms that President Trump is
promoting?
Get rid of the state-sponsored
barriers to growth. Then watch how
these common-sense incentive-mind-
ed policies turn a rosy scenario into
economic reality.
(Creators Syndicate)
The American ideal will not be disrupted
By MICHAEL GERSON
Two sets of remarks, a day apart, by
two men more accustomed
to being behind the scenes.
Stephen Bannon, ap-
pearing at the Conservative
Political Action Conference
(CPAC), made the case for
“economic
nationalism”
and called President Trump’s
withdrawal from the Trans-
Pacifi c Partnership “one of
the most pivotal moments in modern
American history.” The passage of the
Civil Rights Act and the defeat of the
Soviet Union fi nally have some com-
pany.
As the ideologist in Trump’s in-
ner circle, Bannon is a practitioner
of Newt Gingrich’s mystic arts. Take
some partially valid insight at the
crossroads of pop economics, pop
history and pop psychology; declare
it an inexorable world-historic force;
and, by implication, take credit for be-
ing the only one who sees the inner
workings of reality.
For Bannon, it has something to do
with “the fourth turning,” or maybe
it is the fi fth progression, or the third
cataclysm. At any rate, it apparently
involves cycles of discontent and dis-
ruption. Lots of disruption. Across the
West, as Bannon sees it, the victims of
globalization—the victims of immi-
gration, free trade and international-
ism in general—are rising against their
cosmopolitan oppressors. Institutions
will crash and rise in new forms. And
this restless world spirit takes human
form in... Nigel Farage and Donald
Trump.
Like many philosophies that can be
derived entirely from an airport book-
store, this one has an element of truth.
The benefi ciaries of the liberal inter-
national order have not paid suffi cient
attention to the human costs of rapid
economic change. (Just as the critics
of internationalism have not paid suf-
fi cient attention to the nearly 1 billion
people who have left extreme poverty
during the last two decades.)
But there is a prob-
lem with the response of
economic
nationalism
and ethno-nationalism. It
is morally degraded and
dangerous to the country.
Which brings us to the
second set of remarks, at
a State Department re-
tirement party, complete
with cake. This speech was from one
of the most distinguished diplomats
our nation has recently produced,
Ambassador Dan Fried. Fried was on
diplomatic duty for 40 years, focusing
mainly on Europe. He was ambassador
to Poland and pulled into the White
House as a special adviser on Central
and Eastern Europe to both Bill Clin-
ton and George W. Bush.
Most populists would probably
view Fried as the pin-striped enemy.
I came to know him in the Bush
administration as a freedom fi ghter,
deeply and personally offended by
oppression. He had been an enemy —
not an opponent, but an enemy—of
the Soviet Union, and remains a com-
mitted friend to 100 million liberated
Europeans.
Fried used his retirement remarks
to describe “America’s Grand Strat-
egy.” For decades, the U.S. has stood
for “an open, rules-based world, with
a united West at its core.” Despite oc-
casional failures and blunders, “the
world America made after 1945 and
1989 has enjoyed the longest period
of general peace in the West since Ro-
man times.”
What would happen if America
were to leave the global order and
pursue its own ethno-national great-
ness? This is the proposal that the
populists have placed on the table, in
which blowing up the TPP is a sign
of things to come. “By abandoning
our American Grand Strategy,” argued
Fried, “we would diminish to being
michael
gerson
just another zero-sum great power.”
This would result in a system entirely
based on “spheres of infl uence,” which
are “admired by those who don’t have
to suffer the consequences.” And ac-
cepting spheres of infl uence would
“mean our acquiescence when great
powers, starting with China and
Russia, dominated their neighbors
through force and fear.”
“Some so-called realists,” said Fried,
“might accept such a world as mak-
ing the best of a harsh world, but it is
not realistic to expect that it would be
peaceful or stable. Rather the reverse:
A sphere of infl uence system would
lead to cycles of rebellion and repres-
sion, and, if the past 1,000 years is any
guide, lead to war between the great
powers, because no power would be
satisfi ed with its sphere. They never
are.”
This is a foreign policy cycle more
substantial than the “fourth turning.”
The disrupters of international order
—the liberal democratic order built
and defended by FDR, Truman, Ken-
nedy and Reagan—are thoughtless,
careless and reckless. And they must
be resisted.
The founding fathers of the ethno-
state are also in violation of the coun-
try’s defi ning values. The United States
was summoned into existence by the
clear bell of unifying aspirations, not
by the primal scream of blood and
soil. And this great ideal of universal
freedom and dignity is not disrupted;
it disrupts.
(Washington Post Writers Group)
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