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About Keizertimes. (Salem, Or.) 1979-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 20, 2017)
OCTOBER 20, 2017, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE A5 KeizerOpinion KEIZERTIMES.COM You, too? Social media has been fi lled with posts that say “Me, too,” over the past week or so. That two word message alludes to the fact that the poster had been a victim of sexual harassment. The ‘Me, too’ campaign started af- ter it was revealed that a Hollywood producer had paid out huge sums of money to a number of his accusers. That producer has since lost his company and has been kicked out of some organizations including the one that passes out the Academy Awards. It is good there is a ‘Me, too’ campaign; it brings the issue to the forefront of the news. It does not necessarily bring it to the forefront of the collective con- sciousness. There are people who will harass regardless of public norms. Ha- rassment is, and always has been, a mat- ter of power and control, not about sex. No one asks to be a victim of this behavior. No one invites inappropri- ate comments and physical touch. And certainly, no one is eager to have their career in the hands of a boss who uses their position to maintain control. Harassment has been part of the hu- man condition forever. If you don’t put out, you’re put out. How does society stem the tide of this type of harass- ment? As all things, it needs to start at the beginning. We teach our children the golden rule—do unto others as you wish them to do unto you. We don’t want our child to be a bully. There are so many positive messages that need to be instilled at an early age (one need look no further than Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, which is as relevant today as the day it was writ- ten in 1986. The messages in that books are a great place to start for teaching kids about how to behave and share. We all know that there are people who are not suscep- tible to positive messages— harassers come from some- where. Bad behavior is the refl ection of what a person has seen or endured. If a child sees an adult belittle and harass another person and there is no consequence, the mes- sage is received: I can control with this type of behavior. The antidote is in the telling. No one should let themselves be a victim of harassment. The notion that a victim doesn’t tell because they feel no one will believe them is wrong. Victims of harassment should tell everyone, all the time, about what has happened. Truth is the greatest disinfectant. A perpetrator will have few places to hide and lurk if it is publicly known who and what they are. No job and no ca- reer is worth putting up with belittling and soul-crushing harassment. Go on, tell the world “Me, too” and let’s start ending harassment now. —LAZ our opinion What if a band-aid cost $345? By DON VOWELL Donald Trump doesn’t even care that I can’t afford a massive dose of Viagra. I don’t really know that but it looks like the most reliable way to get his attention is to publicly insult him. He invari- ably takes the bait and nothing is more public than this newspaper. One symptom of pulmonary fi brosis is pulmonary hyperten- sion. Fibrosis constricts your arteries and makes your heart work harder to pump blood through your lungs. You don’t want that for your lungs or your heart. The currently favored drug to open the arteries in your lungs, or any body part that might work better with in- creased blood fl ow, is Viagra. My pul- monologist actually said a “massive dose of Viagra,” and then prescribed it. We live in a world today where no one has the sense to be embar- rassed about anything so I fi gured it was alright if I showed up at the local pharmacy to pick up a massive dose of Viagra, despite some anxiety about advertised possible side effects. I wore my portable oxygen generator so they could easily understand my legitimate G-rated need for this drug. At a dosage of three a day, my month’s supply was priced at $1,639. I was just as unwilling as my insurance company to pay for the Viagra benefi ts as touted in television ads. I tearfully explained that I was only hoping to reduce my level of pulmonary hyper- tension. The pharmacist said that in- surance companies would sometimes make an exception if the attending physician verifi ed that the drug was treating pulmonary hypertension as a primary symptom. If, however, pulmo- nary hypertension is instead just a sec- ondary symptom of fi brosis, then they may not pay. If they decide they needn’t pay be- cause no fi eld testing has shown that Viagra will be effective in this precise set of circumstances then I’ll need to pay. You are right to won- der why on earth I would discuss all this here. I just thought you’d judge me more kindly when you see me at a busy corner hold- ing up the “Will work for Viagra” cardboard. Passers- by might be more giving if they knew I needed it for breath support rather than recreation. The same is probably true of a Kickstarter or GoFundMe campaign for fi nancing Viagra. I thank you in advance. You are al- ready buying for me a newish drug called Esbriet. It is in the $90,000-a- year range and my co-pay so far has been zero. Insurance is hard to un- derstand. Esbriet is only marginally helpful. If the price of a band-aid was sud- denly raised to $345 the American dis- cussion would be about how we can afford the subsequent rise in insurance premiums rather than challenging the cost of a band-aid. Dr. Kitzhaber has been trying to explain that for years. Sometimes obscure diseases are brought to light when a very famous actor or sports hero steps up to ad- vocate for research and funding. Not so with Viagra. Who’s going to buy a team jersey or spend money watching a fi rst run movie featuring some poor schlub who needs Viagra? Thus I need to provoke the presi- dent so he’ll pressure Big Pharma into reducing the cost of this drug. So, tweet this Mr. President. Real men need Viagra and can’t afford it. Clear- ly the problem is infl ation. a box of soap (Don Vowell gets on his soapbox regularly in the Keizertimes.) Tax cuts bound to increase debt By DEBRA SAUNDERS Speaking to a group of workers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania recently, President Donald Trump said that his proposed tax-cut package “will be rocket fuel” for the U.S. economy. It was Trump’s sly way of reinforc- ing a message that the White House has sent since it fi rst rolled out a framework for the tax cut in April. The message: Instead of adding to the $20 trillion national debt, the GOP tax cut will pay for itself; there’s no need to produce some $5 trillion in savings over the next decade to pay for the cuts. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin uttered that mantra after the rollout when he told the Institute of Interna- tional Finance, “The plan will pay for itself with growth.” The current package would lower the corporate tax rate from 38.9 per- cent to 20 percent and lower personal income taxes; the top rate would fall from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. That should mean a bigger defi cit, right? No, supporters maintain, because the package would eliminate a number of deductions, and that would broaden the tax base and generate some new revenue. The rest would come from growth as corporations, spurred by tax cuts, buy more equipment and hire more workers. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget supports tax reform but has observed that tax cuts in 1981 and the early 2000s widened defi cits and fi gured that for every dollar in cuts, economy activity would have to produce $5 to pay for itself. Don’t hold your breath on that score. other views “I think that very few economists would agree that the revenue loss would be fully offset with revenue growth,” budget expert Alan Viard of the American Enterprise Institute told The Hill. The Tax Policy Center estimated that the framework would increase the federal defi cit by $2.4 trillion in its fi rst 10 years. There are two caveats that go with any estimate. The fi rst is that the plan drafted by GOP leaders offers few details. While the nine-page frame- work boasts three new tax rates—12 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent—it does not delineate what the tax brackets would be. The second caveat is that it is not clear or even likely that Congress will stick with provisions that would remove tax deductions, such as the deduction for state and local taxes, in order to fi nance lower tax rates. The state and local deductions add up to $1.3 trillion over a decade, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Already the pressure is on lawmakers from high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and Maryland to refuse to support the package unless the GOP leadership restores the status quo. With Trump in the Oval Offi ce, all of a sudden GOP senators and repre- sentatives don’t see defi cit spending as being wasteful as they framed it under President Barack Obama. Also, GOP lawmakers have little incentive to try to cut spending, given that Trump never has been a fi scal conservative and likely would oppose cuts. No budget hawk, Trump cam- paigned on not messing with Social Security. “We’re not going to raise the age and we’re not going to do all the things that everybody else is talking Wheatland Publishing Corp. • 142 Chemawa Road N. • Keizer, Oregon 97303 phone: 503.390.1051 • web: www.keizertimes.com • email: kt@keizertimes.com Lyndon A. Zaitz, Editor & Publisher POSTMASTER Send address changes to: SUBSCRIPTIONS One year: $25 in Marion County, $33 outside Marion County, $45 outside Oregon PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY Publication No: USPS 679-430 Keizertimes Circulation 142 Chemawa Road N. Keizer, OR 97303 Periodical postage paid at Salem, Oregon (Creators Syndicate) Is US condemned to repeat history? By GENE H. McINTYRE Americans not now interested in Russia may want to reconsider that indifference. After all, while Russia may no longer export internation- ally, it hasn’t stopped trying to involve itself in the internal affairs of other countries, namely, for one salient ex- ample, the U.S.A. An essay, titled What Ever Happened to the Russian Revolution, by American writer Ian Frazier, that appeared in the October issue of Smithsonian, brings much light to those in search of understanding Russia, a nation most often nowadays depicted here as an arch enemy. One notice that heralds our attention is that the Russian Revolution marks its centen- nial this year. Before that landmark year, 1917, Russia experienced for a hundred years, great disorder mixed with a whole lot of political violence. Its considerable contributions to litera- ture previously became a backdrop to revolution unlike the world had ever seen. Frazier commented in his ar- ticle that “today, a hundred years af- terward, we still don’t know what to make of that huge event” while the Russian people themselves, he says, “aren’t too sure about its signifi cance.” Of course, the Russian Revolu- tion took time to complete and, while underway in momentous happenings, for a long time prior to actualiza- tion, required most of a year to bring to the Bolshevik foundation of a new order. There had been drastic fail- ures in trying to deal with the people who worked the land, the shortcom- ings of an inept autocracy to address an exploding industrial society, the inadequacies of the Romanovs, and, among so many other matters not redressed, the deplorable conditions of land-born workers who were liv- ing in squalid conditions in Petrograd and other Russian industrial cities. The Russian people writ large reached a point of critical mass where they screamed something like ‘we’re mad as hell and will not take it any more.’ As you may remember there were many individuals and groups vying for top dog status while Lenin’s Bolsheviks ultimately succeeded at grabbing the baton of power. How- ever, a Socialist revolution encom- passing the entire world came up far short of the glorious expectations of the Bolsheviks. Fact of the matter is, there was not another country in the world at the time that followed Rus- sia’s attempt at world leadership. Eventually, there were others who followed. China’s revolution, by far, added the most people under Com- munist rule. It remains the most sig- nifi cant nation among any who had leaned toward or tried Communism to embrace Lenin’s dream of a world- wide proletarian uprising. Fifty years after the 1917 revolution, about one- third of the world’s population was under a version of Communism; however, even among them, now, they’ve swung toward a market-based economy. But the Bolsheviks in our time have not gone en mass to their graves. guest column Keizertimes about doing. They’re all talking about doing it, and you don’t have to,” he said on the campaign trail. “We’re go- ing to bring our jobs back.” In offi ce, Trump has become even more inclined to magical thinking when it comes to other people’s mon- ey. Trump told a gathering of truckers in Harrisburg that the stock market grew by $5.2 trillion since he won the election—“that’s a quarter of the $20 trillion that we owe.” Then Trump ap- parently multiplied the $5 trillion by the four years of his fi rst term and fi g- ured, “I’ve increased the value of your U.S. assets by more than the $20 tril- lion that we currently owe.” Wrong, responded Patrick Newton of the Committee for a Responsible Budget. “Stock market gains benefi t investors. They do not pay down the debt.” Republicans aren’t all wet when they talk up the dynamic powers that tax cuts can have. The GOP plan would allow corporations to write off equipment purchases in the year they are made—an incentive to buy equip- ment. A lower tax on corporate prof- its overseas could convince CEOs to return offshore dollars to the United States. But can it make a rabbit disappear? In a recent phone call for “Not One Penny”—a Democrat-leaning group that opposes the GOP plan—venture capitalist Nick Hanauer scoffed at the notion that tax cuts for wealthy indi- viduals will increase dynamism and growth. “It is extraordinary that they con- tinue to try to sell this nonsense to the American people,” he said. He likened the approach to “giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” Instead, they’ve found mischievous ways to intrude themselves into a presence throughout the world and, most poignantly, recently, U.S. elec- tions and those of several other West- ern democracies. Nevertheless, there would not have been a Soviet Union without Lenin. Today, Lenin would likely be disap- pointed that a Marxist utopia never materialized. Yet, the way he got things done may be what’s his greatest contribution to a Russia without the USSR. You see, it’s Lenin’s tactics that are alive and well in 2017. Russia is now more capitalistic than communistic but what you see in the workings of President Vladimir Pu- tin is that his takes care of his friends, holds power absolutely and will not compromise with anyone. But you see Lenin in America, too, where the strictest rules of partisanship prevail while President Trump’s pal, Breitbart News’ Steve Bannon, has said that he’s a Leninist who wants to bring everything crashing down and de- stroy America’s establishment. However imperfect and divided our nation, it just seems as though there are enough of us who view our way of life important enough to fi ght to preserve rather than surrender to Bolsheviks, Steve Bannon and their ilk. The alternative being a form of the Soviet Union that Russia’s evolved into where nothing works well and the only national objective is to try to take the freedoms and rule of law away from countries like ours with an 200-year effort underway for life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- ness. (Gene H. McIntyre lives in Keizer.)
