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.