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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 17, 2018)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, November 17, 2018 East Oregonian Page 5A Grateful for a town that cares I t’s that time of year again. November, dark and getting darker. Time to pull our chairs closer to the fire and remember all we have to be thankful for. That warm fire, for sure. Family, friends, community — in fact, all the communities that expand around us like the concentric rings around a stone dropped into water. The more we think about gratitude, the larger those rings grow. As a writer, I’m particularly grateful to Pendleton Center for the Arts and the people in our community who have supported PCA’s First Draft Writers’ Series. For over five years, you have gathered on the third Thursday of every month to hear the words of Northwest writers, words chosen with care to make our lives richer, deeper. Words can be dangerous, we know; we have all witnessed words used as weapons. Seen the damage language can cause. The human suffering. But this year you have listened thoughtfully to the words of people whose experiences have differed from your own — writers of seven different ethnicities, poets and storytellers with wide-ranging economic and cultural backgrounds. Orphans, young parents, a white-haired carpenter. You have drawn them out with questions, shaken their hands, bought their books. You have let them take you “from here to anywhere.” Many of you have shared your own words at the open mic. The community grows closer — we understand each other better — every time you do. None of this would happen without the structure of community: Pendleton Center for the Arts director Roberta Lavadour, J.D. Smith and the PCA staff, as well as the Arts Council of Pendleton Board of Directors. And Charlie Herrington’s guitar lets us begin every First Draft with music. I’m grateful that my own novel, a story about the possibility of healing set on the contemporary Umatilla Indian Reservation, was published this year. Writing a novel is not easy, and getting it published is even more challenging. And contrary to the popular image of the lonely writer scribbling in the attic, it’s a community effort. I can’t say enough good things about all the people who helped me shape the final version of the story and get it out into the world at last, especially my daughter-in-law Cecelia Husted, whose photo from the top of Thorn Hollow Grade inspired the cover, and the staff at Oregon State University Press. Sometimes kindness gets lost in the Thanksgiving holiday’s mad rush of food and football. And I’m incredibly grateful for my own community of writers, local friends Judith, Lynn and Pam, who meet to help each other with our work, and the friendship and support of the Side Porch Poets who gather monthly in and around Portland. Even losing our much-beloved member Ursula this year has been made endurable by our mutual support. What I’m really talking about, I suppose, is friendship. It’s no coincidence that so many of my friends are writers — by definition, writers open themselves to others. Those monthly trips to connect with these friends sustain me. So does my tai chi family, another growing community in Pendleton. I was fortunate to join the first class Tom Bailor offered in January 2000. I’ve found deep friendship and support as well as strength and sanity through this daily practice, and learned a bit about opening to the ideas of others, too. Whatever your own communities — maybe you gather around birds or books or bikes, church fellowships, support groups, horses, dogs or ukuleles, sports or music, or maybe you simply invite a neighbor over for coffee or meet friends at GP or the Prodigal Son — you will be using words. They’re our universal human currency. One word we’ll all be thinking of this coming week is gratitude. Being thankful. But my dictionary tells me that gratitude also means “readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.” Sometimes kindness gets lost in the B ette H usted FROM HERE TO ANYWHERE Thanksgiving holiday’s mad rush of food and football — particularly if people talk politics — but it’s the most important reason we gather with family and friends in the darkness of late November. So this year, let’s hope we all remember that words have power, and that returning kindness is ultimately the root of community. It just might get us through to the Solstice when we’ll turn once again toward light. Why was Trump’s tax cut a fizzle? L ast week’s blue wave means that but weren’t worth doing at 35 percent, the Donald Trump will go into the rate before the Trump tax cut. 2020 election with only one major Also, a substantial fraction of legislative achievement: a big tax cut for corporate profits really represents corporations and the wealthy. Still, that rewards to monopoly power, not returns tax cut was supposed to accomplish big on investment — and cutting taxes on things. Republicans thought it would monopoly profits is a pure giveaway, give them a big electoral boost, and they offering no reason to invest or hire. predicted dramatic economic gains. What Now, proponents of the tax cut, they got instead, however, was a big including Trump’s own economists, made fizzle. a big deal about how we now have The political payoff, of course, a global capital market, in which never arrived. And the economic money flows to wherever it gets results have been disappointing. the highest after-tax return. And True, we’ve had two quarters they pointed to countries with of fairly fast economic growth, low corporate taxes, like Ireland, but such growth spurts are which appear to attract lots of fairly common — there was a foreign investment. substantially bigger spurt in 2014, The key word here is, however, Paul and hardly anyone noticed. And “appear.” Corporations do have Krugman a strong incentive to cook their this growth was driven largely Comment by consumer spending and, books — I’m sorry, manage their surprise, government spending, internal pricing — in such a way which wasn’t what the tax cutters that reported profits pop up in low- promised. tax jurisdictions, and this in turn leads on Meanwhile, there’s no sign of the paper to large overseas investments. vast investment boom the law’s backers But there’s much less to these promised. Corporations have used the tax investments than meets the eye. For cut’s proceeds largely to buy back their example, the vast sums corporations own stock rather than to add jobs and have supposedly invested in Ireland have expand capacity. yielded remarkably few But why have the tax jobs and remarkably cut’s impacts been so little income for the minimal? Leave aside the Irish themselves — glitch-filled changes in because most of that huge individual taxes, which investment in Ireland is will keep accountants nothing more than an busy for years; the core accounting fiction. of the bill was a huge cut Now you know in corporate taxes. Why why the money U.S. hasn’t this done more to companies reported increase investment? moving home after taxes The answer, I’d argue, were cut hasn’t shown is that business decisions up in jobs, wages and are a lot less sensitive to investment: Nothing financial incentives — really moved. Overseas including tax rates — than subsidiaries transferred conservatives claim. And some assets back to their appreciating that reality parent companies, but this doesn’t just undermine the was just an accounting case for the Trump tax cut. maneuver, with almost no It undermines Republican impact on anything real. economic doctrine as a So the basic result whole. of lower taxes on corporations is that About business decisions: It’s a corporations pay less in taxes — full stop. dirty little secret of monetary analysis Which brings me to the problem with that changes in interest rates affect the conservative economic doctrine. economy mainly through their effect on That doctrine is all about the supposed the housing market and the international need to give the already privileged value of the dollar (which in turn affects incentives to do nice things for the rest of the competitiveness of U.S. goods on us. We must, the right says, cut taxes on world markets). Any direct effect on the wealthy to induce them to work hard, business investment is so small that it’s and cut taxes on corporations to induce hard even to see it in the data. What drives them to invest in America. such investment is, instead, perceptions But this doctrine keeps failing in about market demand. practice. President George W. Bush’s tax Why is this the case? One main cuts didn’t produce a boom; President reason is that business investments Barack Obama’s tax hike didn’t cause have relatively short working lives. If a depression. Tax cuts in Kansas didn’t you’re considering whether to take out jump-start the state’s economy; tax hikes a mortgage to buy a house that will in California didn’t slow growth. stand for many decades, the interest rate And with the Trump tax cut, the matters a lot. But if you’re thinking about doctrine has failed again. Unfortunately, taking out a loan to buy, say, a work it’s difficult to get politicians to computer that will either break down or understand something when their become obsolescent in a few years, the campaign contributions depend on their interest rate on the loan will be a minor not understanding it. consideration in deciding whether to make ■ the purchase. Paul Krugman joined The New York And the same logic applies to tax rates: Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed There aren’t many potential business Page and continues as professor of Eco- investments that will be worth doing with nomics and International Affairs at Princ- eton University. a 21 percent profits tax, the current rate, That doctrine is all about the supposed need to give the already privileged incentives to do nice things for the rest of us. No single answer for destructive fires USA Today R ising casualties. Aerial assaults. Weary ground forces. The charred desolation of thousands of homes. The most apt metaphor about California’s rampaging wildfires is warfare. And just like in any war, one of the first casualties is truth. Who or what is to blame for the conflagrations? Whether it’s timber interests on one side complaining about environmental rules, or environmentalists on the other side claiming it’s all about global warming, neither faction has it completely right. Even as the tragedy was unfolding, President Donald Trump weighed in on the side of lumber interests, threatening “no more fed payments” because of “gross mismanagement of the forests.” What federal payments he’s tweeting about is anyone’s guess, and 57 percent of California’s forested area is owned by the federal government. If the president has a beef with how those areas are managed, he should take it up with his own administration and properly fund forest management programs. There might, indeed, be a need to make it easier to thin dying or dead trees out of densely forested areas, reducing the fuel for wildfires. But the problem is actually more complicated. Even if dead logs are stripped away, the tinder-dry brush acts like kindling when wildfires spread. Even more to the point, dense forests were not a factor in these recent California fires. “They’re using these fires to talk about forest management that has nothing to do with the landscape in which the fires are occurring,” says Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College in Claremont, California. The Camp Fire 90 miles north of Sacramento that killed about 50 people, destroyed nearly 8,000 homes, devastated the city of Paradise, and cindered 117,000 acres — making it the state’s most destructive fire ever — burned through a mix of trees, brush and grassland. And fires that forced massive evacuations outside Los Angeles fed off of chaparral or brush. Climate change is making wildfires worse. The resulting erratic weather patterns have created shorter, wetter winters in California, producing a sudden, heavy growth of shrubs, grasses and trees. After winter, the state’s ongoing drought and record-high summer temperatures draw moisture out of the plants, rendering them near-perfect kindling. With the hot and dry Santa Ana winds of fall, fires explode out of control. Yet these tragedies can’t be blamed solely on global warming. Wildfires are actually a vital part of the state’s ecosystem. Lodgepole pines, for example, thrive in fire- prone areas where millions of structures have been erected in rural areas of California since the 1940s. When they burn, the cost in lives and treasure soars. Answering these disasters with a clipped, one-dimensional solution helps no one, although it might score short-term political points. The proper response includes placing limits on, and fireproofing, residential expansion into wildlands; better management and removal of dry brush; and relentlessly addressing the growing concern of climate change. In other words, the solution isn’t either/ or. It’s all of the above. President Donald Trump weighed in on the side of lumber interests, threatening “no more fed payments.”
