OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 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
REMEMBRANCE
One of our largest
talents leaves us
Patterson helped our company
and its owners reckon with future
A
publishing company is many things. It
is paper and ink, printing presses and a
bevy of computers. But most of all it is
an array of people with diverse talents. We just
lost one of our biggest talents of the past few
decades.
A man who loomed large in the develop-
ment of our company died last Sunday. Pat
Patterson was our corporate general manager
C.K.
during a period of acquisition, the company’s
“Pat” Patterson
irst moves into the digital world and its tran-
sition from one generation of owners to the next. He was our top
executive for 21 years.
When I came to The Daily Astorian in 1987, Pat was my men-
tor. While I had been managing editor of Willamette Week, I
came to Astoria from 10 years of self-employment, running my
own news agency in Washington, D.C. Pat helped me learn many
a management lesson.
Within months of my start, Pat joined me in Long Beach,
Washington, at the Bank of the Paciic where we signed loan
papers to purchase the Chinook Observer. Then we began the pro-
cess of bringing Craig Dennis’ paper into our corporate structure.
Next came acquisition of the Capital Press, a deal which lowed
from a relationship between my father and Dewey Rand Jr. On
two occasions, Pat expressed to me his surprise at how much
authority and conidence my father gave him.
From the 1970s on, business school academia’s discovered
family-owned business. Thanks to my cousin Jacqueline Brown,
the third generation of our family ownership paid attention to the
Austin Family Business program at Oregon State University. We
brought an outside, non-family director to our board. It was a dif-
icult transition for some in the second generation, and Pat helped
ease that.
Pat had no MBA. With a community college degree, he created
post-degree learning programs of his own. He was an exception-
ally resourceful and self-educated man. He talked about spend-
ing an hour each day reading trade and professional literature, to
stay current. That was how he reckoned with the early days of the
internet. Pat recognized that we needed to make a commitment
to the new digital world and in 2000 recommended that we make
Laura Sellers our irst corporate internet editor.
Except for our Astoria and Long Beach bankers, few in this part
of Oregon and Washington knew Pat. But he was a large inluence
in the formative years of coastal managers such as Patrick Webb,
Matt Winters and Sellers.
Pat was known for his annual visits to the newspaper ofices
where he would greet each employee by name and ask about their
family by name or inquire about their hobbies or recent travels.
During those visits, he had meetings with as many staffers as pos-
sible and ask, “If you were me for a day, what would you change.”
And then sometimes, he would make the change.
Pat spanned two eras of print journalism. Webb captured that
in his relection. “I appreciated his skill of working to adapt old-
school to cutting edge without losing core values of journalism.”
— S.A.F.
Steve Forrester is the retired editor and publisher of The Daily Astorian.
He is the president and CEO of the EO Media Group board of directors.
American companies
avoiding paying taxes
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times News Service
D
onald Trump has become the
country’s most notorious tax
shirker. And while his long
avoidance of federal income taxes
is extreme, it’s also part of a larger
problem.
The most aflu-
ent and powerful
parts of our society
have too easy a
time legally avoid-
ing taxes.
Consider corporate taxes, which
ultimately tend to be paid by the
well-off, because they own the most
stock. The oficial corporate rate is
35 percent, infamously higher than
in any other advanced economy. Yet
there are so many loopholes that
companies often pay relatively little
in tax.
Many companies work hard to
shroud how much they really pay,
sprinkling various igures throughout
their complex inancial statements.
But companies must report one num-
ber that provides a good glimpse.
It’s called cash taxes paid — the
combined amount that a company
pays in federal, state, local and even
foreign taxes.
I asked the analysts at S&P
Global Market Intelligence to
calculate this number since 2007
for this country’s 500 largest public
companies, and the results reveal a
broken tax system. Fixing it should
be an early priority for the next
president. If Hillary Clinton wins, it
may well be.
Amazon and others
A good case study is Amazon,
which pays a rate much lower than
its more traditional retail competi-
tors. Between 2007 and last year, the
company paid only 13 percent of its
proits in taxes.
Remember: That’s not just federal
taxes. It’s federal, state, local and
foreign taxes.
How does Amazon get away with
this? A tangle of tax breaks and loop-
holes, some enacted in the name of
creating jobs despite meager evidence
that they do. For many companies,
the key move is opening ofices in a
low-tax country like Ireland and then
claiming that much of their business
lows through those ofices.
Put all these tax breaks together,
and you end up with our system.
AT&T and General Electric each
paid a combined tax rate of only 18
percent since 2007, according to the
S&P data. Coca-Cola, Apple and
IBM paid 17 percent, and Alphabet
(Google’s parent) is at 16 percent.
Boeing is at 8 percent, Facebook at
4 percent.
And the following tax rate will
This system is
cumbersome
— causing
companies to
devote great
effort to tax
avoidance.
sound familiar to anyone who has
been watching the presidential
campaign: PG&E, the California-
based utility company, has paid
<em>zero</em> net taxes since
2007. In fact, it has paid negative
taxes, receiving tax breaks more
valuable than its tax payments.
“The tax code, on the business
side and the personal side, is a
rotting economic carcass,” Sen. Ron
Wyden, D-Ore., told me. “All these
games are signiicantly eroding the
American tax base.”
Back to stagnation
The inequities contribute to the
great American stagnation that I
described in last week’s column.
The billions of dollars in taxes being
avoided by GE, Coca-Cola and
others is money that can’t be used
to lift living standards for ordinary
families: It can’t be used to reduce
their taxes and can’t pay for schools,
medical research or clean energy.
There is another victim, too —
one easily forgotten in this populist
time. Many large companies do
indeed pay a lot of taxes. For one
reason or another, these companies
can’t take advantage of loopholes
and must pay a rate much closer to
the oficial one.
Brick-and-mortar retailers, for
example, aren’t as politically popular
as manufacturers or technology
companies and haven’t persuaded
Congress to create a lot of special
tax breaks. Retailers also can’t easily
pretend their business is based over-
seas. As a result, CVS, Home Depot,
Wal-Mart and Target have all been
paying a combined tax rate of more
than 30 percent, more than twice as
high as Amazon’s rate.
This system is cumbersome —
causing companies to devote great
effort to tax avoidance — and unfair.
A better system could lift economic
growth, by directing more of
investors’ money to truly promising
companies, rather than tax-advan-
taged ones.
Fortunately, there are signs of
hope. Overhauling the corporate tax
code is a rare issue on which the two
parties have some common ground.
If the Democrats take the Senate,
Wyden is in line to lead the Finance
Committee and says its irst priority
will be a big bill to improve roads,
bridges and public transit systems
(and create jobs). The second will
be a corporate-tax bill to pay for the
infrastructure. Both are good ideas.
As strong as the case for change
is, corporate-tax reform will
still cause a nasty political ight.
Companies make millions of dollars
from tax avoidance. To defend the
status quo, some will devise clever
arguments to suggest that a new
system would somehow destroy jobs
or otherwise wreak havoc. They will
pretend they’re just looking out for
the rest of us.
Don’t be fooled.
What we need next is family table for all our kids
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
K
athy Fletcher and David
Simpson have a son
named Santi, who went to
Washington, D.C., public schools.
Santi had a friend who sometimes
went to school hungry. So Santi
invited him to occa-
sionally eat and
sleep at his house.
That friend
had a friend and
that friend had a
friend, and now
when you go to dinner at Kathy and
David’s house on Thursday night
there might be 15 to 20 teenagers
crammed around the table, and later
there will be groups of them crash-
ing in the basement or in the few
small bedrooms upstairs.
The kids who show up at
Kathy and David’s have endured
the ordeals of modern poverty:
homelessness, hunger, abuse, sexual
assault. Almost all have seen death
irsthand — to a sibling, friend or
parent.
It’s anomalous for them to have
a bed at home. One 21-year-old
woman came to dinner last week
and said this was the irst time she’d
been around a family table since she
was 11.
And yet by some miracle, hostile
soil has produced charismatic
lowers. Thursday dinner is the big
social occasion of the week. Kids
come from around the city. Spicy
chicken and black rice are served.
Cellphones are banned (“Be in the
now,” Kathy says).
The kids call Kathy and David
“Momma” and “Dad,” are unfail-
ingly polite, clear the dishes, turn
toward one another’s love like
plants toward the sun and burst with
big glowing personalities. Birthdays
and graduations are celebrated.
Songs are performed.
Hungry for heart
I started going to dinner there
about two years ago, hungry for
something beyond food. Each meal
we go around the table, and every-
body has to say something nobody
else knows about them.
Each meal we demonstrate our
commitment to care for one another.
I took my daughter once and on the
way out she said, “That’s the warm-
est place I can ever imagine.”
During this election season
of viciousness, vulgarity and
depravity, Thursdays at Kathy
and David’s has been a weekly
uplift, and their home a place to be
reminded of what is beautiful about
our country and what we can do to
bring out its loveliness.
The kids need what all ado-
lescents need: bikes, laptops and
a listening heart. “Thank you for
seeing the light in me,” one young
woman told Kathy after a cry on the
couch. David and Kathy have set
up a charitable organization called
AOK, for All Our Kids, to help each
of the kids come into his or her own
fullness. Four started college this
year, and one joined City Year, the
national service organization.
Poverty up close is so much
more intricate and unpredictable
than the picture of poverty you get
from the grand national debates.
The kids can project total self-coni-
dence one minute and then slide into
utter lostness the next.
The college application process
often seems like a shapeless fog
to them; nobody’s taught them the
concrete steps to move along the
way. One young woman lied on
her inancial aid forms because she
didn’t want to admit that her father
was dead, her mother was on drugs
— how messed up her home life
actually was.
There’s no margin for error for
these kids, and she would have lost
her college dreams if not for a squad
of adults ready to mobilize around
her.
Present their gifts
The adults in this community
give the kids the chance to present
their gifts. At my irst dinner, Edd
read a poem from his cracked lip
phone that I irst thought was from
Langston Hughes, but it turned
out to be his own. Kesari has a
voice that somehow emerged from
New Orleans jazz from the 1920s.
Madeline and Thalya practice
friendship as if it were the highest
art form. Jamel loses self-conscious-
ness when he talks of engine repair.
They give us a gift — complete
intolerance of social distance. When
I irst met Edd, I held out my hand
to shake his. He looked at it and
said, “We hug here,” and we’ve
been hugging and hanging off each
other since.
Bill Milliken, a veteran youth
activist, is often asked which pro-
grams turn around kids’ lives. “I still
haven’t seen one program change
one kid’s life,” he says. “What
changes people is relationships.
Somebody willing to walk through
the shadow of the valley of adoles-
cence with them.”
Souls are not saved in bundles.
Love is the necessary force.
The problems facing this country
are deeper than the labor partici-
pation rate and ISIS. It’s a crisis of
solidarity, a crisis of segmentation,
spiritual degradation and intimacy.
Throughout this ugly year, AOK
has been my visit to a better future,
more powerful than any political
tract about what we need next.
Sometimes Kathy and David
are asked how they ended up with
so many kids lowing through their
house. They look at how many kids
are out there, and respond, “How is
it possible you don’t?”