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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 9, 2016)
OPINION 6A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 2016 Founded in 1873 DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager OUR VIEW Measure 97 bails out PERS he bill to provide outsized pensions to government workers in Oregon is coming due. A new report on the Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) says that contributions to the fund will need to increase $885 million in the 2017-19 biennium. Such massive increases are projected for subsequent years as well. The increases are the result of providing public employees with pension beneits far beyond Oregon’s ability to pay. The campaign to raise taxes to continue this largess has begun. Gov. Kate Brown last week endorsed Measure 97, a $3 bil- lion-a-year general sales tax increase disguised as a toll on large corporations. The governor said the tax is necessary to provide stable support for schools and other government services. If our governor were as transparent as she claims to be, she would admit the obvious: Measure 97 AT A GLANCE raises taxes to underwrite PERS. The average PERS ben- Gov. Brown’s smokescreen became eficiary receives $27,881 each year. Social Security apparent in April. She avoided men- benefits add more. (Source: tion of the PERS crisis in her State Oregon Public Employees Retirement System.) of the State address then later told a Public employees in Ore- reporter: “There isn’t a path forward” gon earn richer retirement to reform the retirement system. benefits and contribute far The reality is quite different. less than those in Wash- ington and Idaho. (Source: Oregon’s Supreme Court predictably Center for Public Service at struck down in 2015 bipartisan leg- Portland State University.) islation that reduced beneits already The average full-career state government em- earned by state employees. However, ployee in Oregon has a re- the justices made clear that future tirement benefit exceeding the earnings of 90 percent beneits could be changed. of full-time employees in Among the available options: the state. (Source: Ameri- • Reduce the assumed rate of can Enterprise Institute.) return on PERS investments. Currently, participants are guaranteed a 7.5 percent return. Returns should match market rates. • Require participants to contribute to PERS. That’s the case in most private-sector retirement plans. While public employees are required to contribute to a second beneits plan, that beneit is often paid by taxpayers via the employer. • Change the retirement age. The federal government adjusted the retirement age to protect Social Security. Oregon should do the same. The average state worker retires after 22 years of service and earns a PERS beneit equivalent to 56 percent of their inal average salary. Those who retire after 30 years received 81% of their inal average salary. Astonishingly, 7 percent of PERS retires earn more in retirement beneits than they did while working. • Cap earning levels. Mike Bellotti receives $513,612 annually in retirement beneits as the former athletic director and football coach of the University of Oregon. There’s no logical reason state taxpayers should foot the bill for such gold-plated state workers in the future. These reforms would reduce the cost of PERS and ensure its long-term sustainability. They would also allow our schools and local governments to spend more to address real needs without raising taxes. Instead, Gov. Brown is doing the bidding of Oregon’s public employee unions, who are heavily inancing Measure 97. These same unions are pouring money into Brown’s election campaign and to those of legislative leaders. They, not school children, are the true beneiciaries of Measure 97. T Alert: The sore loser uprising By TIMOTHY EGAN New York Times News Service A fter a week in which Don- ald Trump insulted babies and their mothers and war heroes and their families, and threw in ire marshals for good measure, the scariest thing to come out of his team of thugs and political merce- naries is this: the suggestion that civil unrest could follow if he’s denied the presidency. When the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the White House in 2000 even though he lost the popular vote, Al Gore gra- ciously conceded and faded away. When Mitt Rom- ney lost to Barack Obama four years ago although his internal polls showed a Repub- lican triumph, he congratulated the winner and went off to rediscover his many grandchildren. Despite party-machine manip- ulation and considerable voting of the dead, the U.S. institution that produces a peaceful transfer of power has survived. But this year, facing a likely trouncing in November, Trump has signaled that he will try to bring down our democracy with him. His overlooked comment — “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged” — is the opening move in a scheme to delegitimize the outcome. Because Trump is consistently barbaric and such a proliic liar, it’s hard to sustain outrage over any one of his serial scandals. But his pre-emptive attack on the electoral process is very troubling. To understand what Trump is up to, listen to his doppelganger, veteran political operative Roger Stone. He will say things that even Trump will not say, usually as a Clinton’s ibs vs. Trump’s huge lies By NICHOLAS KRISTOF New York Times News Service One persistent narrative in U.S. pol- itics is that Hillary Clinton is a slippery, compulsive liar while Donald Trump is a gutsy truth-teller. Overall, the latest CBS News poll inds the public sim- ilarly repulsed by each candidate: 34 percent of registered voters say Clinton is honest and trust- worthy compared with 36 percent for Trump. Yet the idea that they are even in the same league is preposterous. If deception were a sport, Trump would be the Olympic gold medalist; Clin- ton would be an honorable mention at her local Y. Let’s investigate. One metric comes from indepen- dent fact-checking websites. As of Friday, PolitiFact had found 27 per- cent of Clinton’s statements that it had looked into were mostly false or worse, compared with 70 percent of Trump’s. It said 2 percent of Clinton’s statements it had reviewed were egre- gious “pants on ire” lies, compared with 19 percent of Trump’s. So Trump has nine times the share of lat-out lies as Clinton. Likewise, The Washington Post Fact-Checker has awarded its worst ranking, Four Pinocchios, to 16 percent of Clinton’s statements that it checked and to 64 percent of Trump’s. “Essentially, Clinton is in the norm for a typical politician,” says Glenn Kessler, who runs Fact-Checker, while Trump “is just off the charts. There’s never been anyone like him, at least in the six years I have been doing this.” When I speak with Trump vot- ers, they often argue that Clinton is an inveterate liar and crook, yet when pressed they draw from the same hand- ful of examples. One is Clinton’s 2008 claim that she landed in Bosnia in 1996 “under sniper ire” and “ran with our heads down” from the plane. The Washing- ton Post dismantled that claim; video shows that Clinton was greeted not by gunshots but by a crowd of dignitar- ies that included an 8-year-old Bos- nian girl. But it’s also true that as the plane prepared to descend, security oficials gave a spine-chilling brieing of the risks of sniper ire, and Clinton wore body armor in case of shooting. Critics also claim that Clinton lied to the families of the four Americans killed in Benghazi, but fact-check- ers have said the evidence is unclear. Harder to defend is her disingenu- ous explanation of lip-lopping on the Asian trade agreement. And her accounts of her use of private email servers have been consistently false or misleading; astonishingly, she con- tinues to mislead by claiming that the FBI director, James Comey, judged her answers truthful (he didn’t). All this is junior varsity mendac- ity. In contrast, Trump is the champ of prevarication. You don’t need to go back eight years to ind a Trump embellishment; eight minutes is more than suficient. In March, Politico chronicled a week of Trump remarks and found on average one misstatement every ive minutes. way to allow Trump to later repeat some variant of them. It was Stone who called a CNN commentator a “stupid Negro” and accused the Gold Star par- ents of Capt. Humayun Khan of being Muslim Brotherhood agents. And it was Stone who threatened to give out the hotel room numbers of unsupportive Republicans at the party convention, the better for the Trumpian mob to ind them. He tastes the food for the king to make sure it’s not poison. If it doesn’t kill Roger Stone, it will not kill Donald Trump. Picking up on Trump’s rigged-election meme, Stone told a right-wing news outlet that the elec- toral ix was already in: “The gov- ernment will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hil- lary in.” The outcome is fair only if Trump wins. “If there’s voter fraud, this elec- tion will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience,” he said. It would be laughable if the cam- paign were simply laying down the grand excuse for the label that will follow the tyrant from Trump Tower after Nov. 8 — loser. But Trump has crossed all barriers of precedent and civility, from waging an openly racist campaign to loose talk about nuclear weapons. He has challenged the independence of the judiciary sys- tem and called for a religious test for entry into this nation. With this latest tactic, he’s trying to destabilize the country itself after he’s crushed. Let’s talk about the basis for his sore loser uprising — the gaming of the system. Trump’s casinos were rigged, as are all gambling parlors, in favor of the house. Italian soccer is rigged. But there is virtually no evi- dence of modern U.S. elections being ixed. Studying national elections from The Hufington Post once chronicled 71 inaccuracies in an hourlong town hall session — more than one a minute. If Clinton declares that she didn’t chop down a cherry tree, that might mean that she actually used a chain saw to cut it down. Or that she ordered an aide to chop it down. As for Trump, he will insist, “I absolutely did not chop down that cherry tree,” even as he clutches the ax with which he chopped it down moments earlier on Facebook Live. Trump used to boast that he and Vladimir Putin were buddies — “I spoke directly and indirectly with Pres- ident Putin” — only to acknowledge later that they had never met or spoken. He retweeted an incendiary graphic indicating that 81 percent of murdered whites are killed by blacks (the actual igure is 15 percent). He denied telling The New York Times’ editorial board that he would impose a 45 percent tar- iff on China; The Times then released the audio of him saying just that. Then there was Trump’s claim that he had seen thousands of Muslims cel- ebrating in New Jersey after 9/11. That was preposterous, but he then claimed that an article from the time backed him up (it didn’t), mocked the dis- 2000 to 2014, and looking at 834 million ballots cast, Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School found a total of 31 instances of credible voter fraud. Yes, 31. The Bush administration, after a ive-year investigation con- cluding in 2007, found no evidence of any organized effort to skew fed- eral elections. A federal judge in Wis- consin found that “virtually no voter impersonation occurs.” Trump’s evidence? “I just hear things and I just feel it.” Yeah, he hears things. Like Russia not actu- ally taking over Crimea. Like Presi- dent Barack Obama not being a U.S. citizen. Like the NFL writing him an imaginary letter. “The voter ID sit- uation has turned out to be a very unfair development,” he said this week. “We may have people vote 10 times.” He’s right about the unfairness of voter identiication, but not in the way he means it. As recent court rul- ings have shown, Republican-led efforts to deny the vote to millions of citizens has rigged the system against the poor, the disabled, eth- nic minorities. A voter-suppression law in North Carolina targeted blacks “with almost surgical precision,” an appeals court ruled. Nationwide rigging, although dif- icult to do in a system with more than 9,000 voting jurisdictions, is more likely to come from Russian efforts at hacking voting machines, given Vladimir Putin’s apparent attempt to tip things in favor of his fellow authoritarian, the unstable Donald Trump. With his inability to process basic information, Trump has gone down this road before. After the 2012 con- test, which Romney lost by nearly 5 million votes, Trump said: “This election is a total sham and travesty. We are not a democracy.” The last statement, judging by the ground- work he’s doing for this Novem- ber, looks more like a self-fulilling prophecy. abled reporter who wrote it, and denied he had done so. Lately he stitched yet another quilt of lies about all this. Equally brazen were Trump’s claims about his fundraiser for veterans in Iowa: He said on video that he had raised $6 million for them, then when the money didn’t show up he denied ever saying that. He claims to have been “among the earliest” to oppose the Iraq War, even though interviews from 2002 and 2003 show he then sup- ported the war. “The man lies all the time,” says Thomas M. Wells, his former lawyer. Wells recalls being curious that news- paper accounts varied as to the num- ber of rooms in Trump’s apartment in Trump Tower — eight, 16, 20 or 30. So Wells asked him how many rooms were actually in the apartment. “How- ever many they will print,” Trump responded. Tony Schwartz, the co-writer of his book “The Art of the Deal,” told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, “Lying is second nature to him.” In short, Clinton is about average for a politician in dissembling, while Trump is a world champion who is pathological in his dishonesty. Hon- estly, there is no comparison.