OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, JULY 10, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Joshua Bessex/The Daily Astorian
Neighbors have fought new housing development at the former
Central School site in Astoria.
We need more The GOP’s dishonest
claims
about
health
care
paths to ‘yes’
on housing
O
ur housing dilemmas may be kid-stuff compared to those
of the Bay Area or Seattle, but they are very real enough
for us. A new social movement on both coasts and in the
Denver area called “Yes in My Back Yard” offers some potentially
useful new directions to explore.
Civic leaders may most often focus on impacts to our economy
due to the lack of affordable workforce housing — a factor that
makes it difficult to hire and retain employees. But everyone with
a stake in our communities cares, or should care, about whether
young family members and others who comprise the next genera-
tion of proud coastal residents are able to find decent places to live
in their towns at affordable prices.
On a human scale, lack of affordable housing translates into
decisions to move out of the area, or never come here in the first
place. For those who stay, it may mean longer commutes between
home and work, subtracting time from family life. It may mean
needing to work two or more jobs. It can result in too many people
in too small a space.
All too often, these sympathetic feelings wither away in the
face of inertia, regulatory red tape, financing constraints and the
classic attitude of “Not in My Back Yard,” abbreviated as NIMBY.
We all are NIMBYs at one time or another, and about one sub-
ject or another. We might be OK with a new single-family house
down the block, but not OK with a new apartment complex. Or
OK with a new manufactured home park in east county, but not
OK with one six blocks away. Understandable as these attitudes
are, they too often combine to stymie much chance for timely res-
olution of housing troubles.
An intriguing article in The Atlantic magazine, tinyurl.com/
yd3xxthy, outlines the beginnings of a new way of thinking about
housing development, one which could prove useful even in our
relatively rural setting.
It’s important to note that a re-examination of our approaches
to development should not be taken as a repudiation of broader
growth management goals that have attempted to stem the tide of
urban sprawl in the Pacific Northwest for the past two decades.
There still are ample good reasons to preserve farmland, forests,
conservation areas and other green space. However, growth man-
agement has always been premised on concentrating development
within or closely adjacent to areas already being provided with
municipal-type services like water, sewer and other civic infra-
structure. YIMBY is, in effect, a next step in growth management
— finding mutually acceptable ways for growth to happen, with-
out degrading the settings we all treasure.
“There’s this great sense that housing is a problem, not just for
employers, but for the fabric of our community,” a councilman in
Google’s headquarters city told The Atlantic. “If we want housing,
we have to work with developers. I don’t like their business model
at all, but in some ways I’m their best ally because I want to build
housing.” For such YIMBY advocates, the issue is at least osten-
sibly less about economics than it is about social justice — ensur-
ing that communities maintain a healthy mix of different kinds of
residents.
The article observes that “convincing people to support housing
and equality in general is easier than getting them to back a proj-
ect that’s going up across the street from them.” In Google’s com-
munity, this translated into support for a new 10,000-unit neigh-
borhood on a somewhat distinct area previously used as an office
park.
In our area, it’s possible to imagine broad support for additional
planned developments like the ones now in process in Warrenton,
in which there are relatively few existing nearby neighbors who
will be inconvenienced by new houses in the hills and ridges
around town. With up to 500 owner-occupied and rental units,
these YIMBY developments will certainly take a bite out of the
housing crunch.
Other communities should consider following Warrenton’s
lead. It shouldn’t be — and realistically can’t be — up to one town
to address the housing needs of all. We need to find more paths to
“yes” in all our communities, each of which needs ways to accom-
modate different income groups and housing needs.
Austin Anthony/Daily News
U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., speaks to members of the media after a ribbon-cutting ceremony for
exit 30 on Interstate 65 in Bowling Green, Ky., on Thursday.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times News Service
D
oes anyone remember the
“reformicons”? A couple
of years back there was
much talk about
a new generation
of Republicans
who would, it was
claimed, move
their party off its
cruel and mindless
agenda of tax
cuts for the rich and pain for the
poor, bringing back the intellectual
seriousness that supposedly used
to characterize the conservative
movement.
But the rise of the reformicons
never happened. What we got
instead was the (further) rise of the
decepticons — not the evil robots
from the movies, but conservatives
who keep scaling new heights of
dishonesty in their attempt to sell
their reverse-Robin Hood agenda.
Consider, in particular,
Republican leaders’ strategy on
health care. At this point, every-
thing they say involves either
demonstrably dishonest claims
about Obamacare or wild mis-
representations of their proposed
replacement, which would — sur-
prise — cut taxes for the rich while
inflicting harsh punishment on the
poor and working class, including
millions of Trump supporters. In
fact, there’s so much deception that
I can’t cover it all. But here are a
few low points.
Despite encountering some sig-
nificant problems, the Affordable
Care Act has, as promised,
extended health insurance to mil-
lions of Americans who wouldn’t
have had it otherwise, at a fairly
modest cost. In states that have
implemented the act as it was
intended, expanding Medicaid, the
percentage of nonelderly residents
without insurance has fallen by
more than half since 2010.
And these numbers translate
into dramatic positive impacts
on real lives. A few days ago the
Indiana GOP asked residents to
share their “Obamacare horror
stories”; what it got instead were
thousands of testimonials from
people whom the ACA has saved
from financial ruin or even death.
How do Republicans argue
against this success? You can get
a good overview by looking at
the Twitter feed of Tom Price,
President Donald Trump’s secretary
of health and human services — a
feed that is, in its own way, almost
as horrifying as that of the tweeter
in chief. Price points repeatedly to
two misleading numbers.
It’s not just
Donald Trump:
The whole GOP
has become
a post-truth
party. And I
see no sign
that it will ever
improve.
First, he points to the fact
that fewer people than expected
have signed up on the exchanges
— Obamacare’s insurance mar-
ketplaces — and portrays this as a
sign of dire failure. But a lot of this
shortfall is the result of good news:
Fewer employers than predicted
chose to drop coverage and shift
their workers onto exchange plans.
So exchange enrollment has come
in below forecast, but it mostly
consists of people who wouldn’t
otherwise have been insured — and
as I said, there have been large
gains in overall coverage.
Second, he points to the 28
million U.S. residents who remain
uninsured as if this were some
huge, unanticipated failure. But
nobody expected Obamacare
to cover everyone; indeed, the
Congressional Budget Office
always projected that more than 20
million people would, for various
reasons, be left out. And you have
to wonder how Price can look him-
self in the mirror after condemning
the ACA for missing some people
when his own party’s plans would
vastly increase the number of
uninsured.
Which brings us to Republicans’
efforts to obscure the nature of
their own plans.
The main story here is very
simple: In order to free up money
for tax cuts, GOP plans would
drastically cut Medicaid spending
relative to current law, and they
would also cut insurance subsidies,
making private insurance unafford-
able for many people not eligible
for Medicaid.
Republicans could try to make
a case for this policy shift; they
could try to explain why tax cuts
for a wealthy few are more import-
ant than health care for tens of
millions. Instead, however, they’re
engaging in shameless denial.
On one side, they claim that
a cut is not a cut, because dollar
spending on Medicaid would still
rise over time. What about the need
to spend more to keep up with
the needs of an aging population?
(Most Medicaid spending goes to
the elderly or disabled.) La, la, la,
we can’t hear you.
On the other side — even I
was shocked by this one — senior
Republicans like Paul Ryan dismiss
declines in the number of people
with coverage as no big deal,
because they would represent
voluntary choices not to buy
insurance.
How is this supposed to apply
to the 15 million people the CBO
predicts would lose Medicaid?
Wouldn’t many people drop cover-
age, not as an exercise in personal
freedom but in response to what
the Kaiser Family Foundation
estimates would be an average 74
percent increase in after-tax premi-
ums? Never mind.
OK, so the selling of Trumpcare
is deeply dishonest. But isn’t that
what politics is always like? No.
Political spin used to have its lim-
its: Politicians who wanted to be
taken seriously wouldn’t go around
claiming that up is down and black
is white.
Yet today’s Republicans hardly
ever do anything else. It’s not just
Donald Trump: The whole GOP
has become a post-truth party.
And I see no sign that it will ever
improve.