OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Distracted driving
a serious crime
A
law that goes into effect on Sunday will increase the
penalty for distracted driving in Oregon and broaden the
definition of what “distracted” means.
The upgraded punishments reflect the ever-increasing danger
of controlling a speeding vehicle while also operating an array of
digital devices, which is making our roads as dangerous as they
have been in decades.
Using a hand-held device while behind the wheel will soon
cost you $260 to $1,000 for your first offense, $435 to $2,000
for your second and up to six months in jail for your third. And
that’s not just talking or texting. Any momentary glance, while
in motion or at rest in the roadway, is eligible.
And it could cost you even more than that — a serious injury,
an expensive fix, a fatal accident. More than 3,100 people die
every year in cellphone-related crashes, according to the federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It’s a serious public health threat, though not significantly dif-
ferent from ones we have faced before.
Drinking and driving, in the days before the dangers of such
action were known, was laughed about or even admired as a
rite of passage. But as fatalities mounted and innocent victims
demanded to be heard, a nationwide public outcry called out for
action. Advertising campaigns broadcast the danger of drinking
and driving, law enforcement agencies committed resources to
catching lawbreakers, and the justice system upped the penalties
for those convicted of engaging in illegal conduct.
And although drinking and driving remains an issue, you
would be hard-pressed to find any American who doesn’t know
that it is a dangerous, illegal act that carries with it serious
consequences.
That must now be the case with distracted driving as well.
Until the not-too-far future when our cars are driving them-
selves, people are going to be bombarded with more gadgets
and gizmos that do not play nice with operating a large piece of
machinery traveling fast and carrying our loved ones. Not taking
that responsibility seriously must be a serious crime.
State must clarify tax
rules on recreational pot
O
regon’s rules on disclosure of tax collections on recre-
ational marijuana sales are blurry and need refining.
As they are now, the disclosure rules put cities,
including those on the North Coast and others in rural areas, in
an awkward position because the state’s rules on what can and
can’t be disclosed create a conflict with local budget require-
ments to publicly account for all incoming money.
Most cities that passed marijuana taxes signed agreements
with the state Department of Revenue for collection. Usually
when the state reports on tax collections and other economic
data there are regional and city-by-city breakdowns. As a result,
the state required confidentiality agreements with the cities to
ensure information about tax returns from individual businesses
is protected so the data couldn’t be used by anyone to gain a
competitive edge.
In regions where there are only
a few pot shops, individual busi-
Taxpayers
ness information could be dis-
should know
cerned from public documents if
that when
a city accurately accounts for that
money in its financial statements
viewing
or annual budget. To stay within
a city’s
the rules, cities have taken dif-
ferent approaches. In Astoria, for
financial
instance, the city didn’t include
revenue projections for pot dollars statement
in its budget for the fiscal year.
or budget
As we reported Friday, only City
that all the
Finance Director Susan Brooks
money is
knows how much has come in
and resides in the city’s accounts.
accounted
Developing clear rules for the
for, and
budding growth of marijuana
sales has been a work in progress
right now
since voters approved recreational
the rules
sales. The state Department of
Justice is expected to issue a legal
prevent
opinion on the tax collections and
that.
disclosure rules, and it must to
clear up the conflicts.
The type of secrecy and nondisclosure caused by the confi-
dentiality agreements and their interpretation isn’t in the pub-
lic interest. Taxpayers should know that when viewing a city’s
financial statement or budget that all the money is accounted for,
and right now the rules prevent that.
It must change.
Trapped by their own lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times News Service
O
n Saturday pretty much the
entire medical sector —
groups representing doctors,
hospitals and insur-
ers — released an
extraordinary open
letter condemning
the Graham-
Cassidy health bill.
The letter was writ-
ten in the style of
Emile Zola’s “J’accuse”: a series of
paragraphs, each beginning with the
bolded words “We agree,” pointing
out the bill’s many awful features,
from the harm it would do to people
with pre-existing conditions to the
chaos it would cause in insurance
markets.
It takes a truly terrible proposal
to elicit such eloquent unanimity
from organizations that are usually
cautious to the point of stodginess.
So how did Republicans come up
with something that bad, and how
did that bad thing get so close to
becoming law? Indeed, it still has
a chance of being enacted despite
John McCain’s “no.”
The answer is that Republicans
have spent years routinely lying for
the sake of political advantage. And
now — not just on health care, but
across the board — they are trapped
by their own lies, forced into trying
to enact policies they know won’t
work.
Reporting on why the GOP
plowed ahead with Graham-
Cassidy makes it clear that many
Republicans supporting it are well
aware that it’s a bad bill, although
they may not appreciate just how
bad. “You know, I could maybe
give you 10 reasons why this bill
shouldn’t be considered,” said
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa.
“But,” he continued, “Republicans
have campaigned on this,” meaning
repeal-and-replace, and had to fulfill
their promise.
Carl Hulse of The New York
Times adds more detail: One big
factor behind the push for Graham-
Cassidy was anger among big
donors, who wanted to know why
Republicans had broken their vows
to kill Obamacare.
But repealing the Affordable
Care Act wasn’t the only thing
Republicans promised; they
also promised to replace it with
something better and cheaper,
doing away with all the things
people don’t like about Obamacare
without creating any new problems.
Remember, it was Bill Cassidy,
not Jimmy Kimmel, who came up
with the “Jimmy Kimmel test,” the
pledge that nobody would be denied
health care because of expense.
Yet Republicans never had any
idea how to fulfill that promise
and meet that test, or indeed how
to repeal the ACA without taking
insurance away from tens of mil-
lions. That is, they were lying about
health care all along.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
A protester opposed to the GOP’s Graham-Cassidy health care re-
peal bill is removed by U.S. Capitol Police Monday after disrupting
a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the last-ditch GOP push to
overhaul the nation’s health care system.
And the base, both the grass
roots and the big money, believed
the lies. Hence the trap in which
Republicans find themselves.
The thing is, health care isn’t the
only issue on which lies are coming
back to bite the liars. The same story
is playing out on other issues — in
fact, on almost every substantive
policy issue the U.S. faces.
The next big item on the GOP
agenda is taxes. Now, cutting taxes
on corporations and the wealthy
may be an easier political lift than
taking health insurance away
from 30 million Americans. But
Republicans still have a problem,
because they’ve spent years posing
as the party of fiscal responsibility,
and they have no idea how to cut
taxes without blowing up the deficit.
As with health care, the party
has masked its lack of good ideas
with lies, claiming that it would
offset lower tax rates and even
reduce the deficit by eliminating
unnamed loopholes and slashing
unnamed wasteful spending. But
as with health care, these lies will
be revealed once actual legisla-
tion is unveiled. It’s telling that
Republicans are already invoking
voodoo economics to justify
their as-yet-unspecified tax plans,
insisting that tax cuts will pay for
themselves by leading to higher
economic growth.
At this point, however, few peo-
ple believe them. The Bush tax cuts
didn’t create a boom; neither did
the Kansas tax-cut “experiment.”
Conversely, the U.S. economy did
fine after the 2013 Obama tax hike,
as has the California economy since
Jerry Brown raised state taxes. Party
apparatchiks will no doubt engage
in an orgy of Reaganolatry, but the
broader public probably won’t be
moved by (false) claims about the
wondrous results of tax cuts 36
years ago.
So tax policy, like health care,
will be hobbled by a legacy of lies.
Wait, there’s more.
Foreign policy isn’t usually a
central concern for voters. Still, past
lies have put the Trump adminis-
tration in a box over things like the
Iran nuclear deal: Canceling the deal
would create huge problems, yet
not canceling it would amount to an
admission that the criticisms were
dishonest.
And soon the GOP may even
start to pay a price for lying about
climate change. As hurricanes get
ever more severe — just as climate
scientists predicted — climate
denial is looking increasingly out
of touch. Yet donors and the base
would react with fury to any admis-
sion that the threat is real, after all.
The bottom line is that the bill
for cynicism seems to be coming
due. For years, flat-out lies about
policy served Republicans well,
helping them win back control of
Congress and, eventually, the White
House. But those same lies now
leave them unable to govern.
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