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
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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.)