THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
A4
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news@bakercityherald.com
EDITORIAL
Fairness
with the
mandate
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is giving more than
20,000 state employees, many of whose only contact
with the public might involve processing paperwork,
an extra six weeks to comply with the COVID-19
vaccination mandate.
People who might save your life?
They’re getting no such concession.
This is untenable, and must change.
State offi cials announced last week that 24,000
state employees represented by the Service Em-
ployees International Union will have until Nov. 30
to comply with the mandate, instead of the original
deadline of Oct. 18 to either be fully vaccinated or
receive a medical or religious exception. That’s more
than half of the 42,000 state executive branch work-
ers affected by the mandate.
Yet the deadline remains Oct. 18 for health care
workers and for school employees. The former group,
which includes hospital staff and emergency re-
sponders, including fi refi ghters, most of whom also
operate ambulances, is the most important in this
situation.
Baker County Commissioners on Wednesday,
Sept. 22 declared a local emergency related to the
Oct. 18 mandate. Commissioners fear the mandate
could prompt enough emergency responders to quit
that the county’s agencies will no longer have enough
workers to respond to traffi c crashes and other emer-
gencies.
This is unacceptable.
The simplest solution, of course, is for health
care workers to be vaccinated. It’s perplexing that
this should even be an issue. Dr. Dave Richards,
medical director in the emergency department at
Saint Alphonsus in Baker City, told the Herald ear-
lier this month, while the hospital was busy treat-
ing COVID-19 patients, almost all of whom were
unvaccinated: “This is simple — get vaccinated. It’s
a slam dunk.”
Richards is absolutely right.
According to the Oregon Health Authority (OHA),
as of Sept. 5, 68% of licensed health care workers in
Baker County were vaccinated. That list includes
some workers who aren’t part of the emergency
response system, such as dentists and chiropractors,
and doesn’t include all emergency responders.
The value of vaccination is indisputable, the
evidence overwhelming. Since Aug. 1, when the surge
in cases driven by the delta variant was in its early
stages, about nine of every 10 cases in Baker County
have been in an unvaccinated residents. The vaccines
are even more effective at preventing people from
become seriously ill.
That the county faces even the potential of a crisis
in responding to emergencies is unfortunate, and
unnecessary. It’s reasonable to expect that health
care workers, who presumably have seen the terrible
effects of the virus more directly than most people,
would understand how vital vaccination is in combat-
ting the pandemic.
But we must deal with the situation as it is, not
as we wish it to be. And if 24,000 state employees,
whose tasks don’t involve saving lives, are given
more time to comply with the mandate, then the
same concession should be afforded to those we de-
pend on to protect us in the most perilous situations.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Letters to the editor
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Mail: To the Editor, Baker City Herald,
P.O. Box 807, Baker City, OR 97814
Email: news@bakercityherald.com
Your views
Forest health problems result
from mismanagement
The Sept. 25, 2021, issue of the Baker
City Herald, from “Just get the shot” to
the public forests in Oregon and much
of the West are sick, and often on fi re, is
hardly a revelation.
Stating that the loggers and environ-
mentalists concur is wrong. The loggers
and ranchers are the real environmen-
talists, it was and is their livelihood.
When a fi re occurred on public land the
logger was handed a paper sleeping bag
and a sack lunch and put the fi re out.
They did not “contain and monitor.”
The 1990 Wallowa-Whitman forest
plan was a reasonable plan until the
so-called environmentalists, along with
judges, started amending the plan (spot-
ted owl and eastside screens, 21-inch
rule). Next came the big business of
fi ghting wildfi res. The industry was de-
stroyed and we lost 15 mills in less than
10 years, including our own private mill.
Our company had 23 large compa-
nies work out of our shop, both private
and government. There wasn’t enough
hours in the day to keep the hard-work-
ing, independent loggers in the woods.
We now have many displaced log cutters
working at Ash Grove, and several have
retired from there. Many of the young
people came by and shook our hand on
their way to fi nd work.
You can’t blame this on climate
change. Put the blame where it is due
— on mismanagement. It took 17 years
for the feds and Western Oregon to
recognize Eastern Oregon had a serious
problem — tussock moths, pine borer
beetle and spruce budworm, and tus-
sock moth again.
“Senators demand climate action in
federal budget plan.” This picture was
taken in 2007 at the Oregon Leadership
Summit in Portland. “We are working
as quickly as possible but want it done
right.” How is this working out?
By the way, in the letter to the editor.
Separation of church and state is not
in the Constitution. That was case law
against the Department of Education.
Alice Knapp
Baker City
Those opposed to abortion
restrictions leave out details
There’s a lot of talk by both sides and
by some women also who don’t know or
believe the truth of God’s word on this
subject of abortion. Yes, she has the right
over her own body, but the child she is
carrying is, according to God’s word,
not her body. The child is a completely
separate human from the mother, with
a genetic code of its very own. Otherwise
now we are dealing with two humans
not just one.
Present day society condones sexual
permissiveness, which leads to abor-
tion, but God does not. God judges this
permissiveness as sin and abortion as
murder. Believers and unbelievers one
day will give an account of their deeds
before Him. Think. What is the differ-
ence between a murderer destroying a
body and the abortion clinic doing the
same to a human baby? God calls both
murders. He speaks of a special place in
hell for those who do these things.
Exodus 20:13: “Thou shalt not kill.”
Revelation, 21:8: “Murderers shall
have their part in the lake which bur-
neth with fi re and brimstone.”
We are not to have any part in put-
ting an innocent human to death. In
Exodus 23:7 God says “I will not justify
anyone taking part in such wickedness.”
This includes you, me, any politi-
cians, presidents, anyone dealing in or
condoning by knowing and not speaking
the truth against such things. The truth
is that the moment a male sperm cell
fertilizes a female egg cell the command
is given to begin the construction of a
human life. This is not the preparing of
a “tumor” or a “fetus” that will become
a human, but is a designed individual
that is different from anyone who has
ever lived. Abortion clinics don’t tell the
prospect that a heartbeat is detectable
at 18 days, brain waves measurable at
43 days, all systems are formed by eight
weeks. All functioning at 11 weeks and
except for size, by 20 weeks the child is
virtually developed. In closing, it seems
we have forgotten God’s law and made
it legal by man’s law to murder and just
call it inconvenience.
Richard Fox
Baker City
OTHER VIEWS
Congress shouldn’t allow IRS to
spy on personal bank accounts
Editorial from The Detroit News:
The Biden administration is actively
pushing Congress to require banks to
report to the Internal Revenue Service
on the account activity of a huge swath
of Americans. This unwarranted snoop-
ing would be an invasion of privacy,
and lawmakers should make sure it
doesn’t happen.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen
and the IRS have asked Congress to
mandate banks send along annual in-
fl ows and outfl ows from accounts with
at least $600 or $600 worth of trans-
actions. That’s a low bar that would
expose the majority of bank accounts to
additional scrutiny.
The administration claims this
would allow the IRS to conduct audits
more effi ciently.
In reality, it’s all about the federal
government trying to squeeze Ameri-
cans for additional tax dollars in an
effort to fund Democrats’ $3.5 trillion
budget wish list. Or as Yellen phrased
it in a letter to Congress, the govern-
ment has “a shortage of necessary
funds for key national priorities.” Biden
offi cials estimate this could bring in
upward of $400 billion over a decade.
This is a sleazy way to go about it,
and it offends Fourth Amendment pro-
tections against unreasonable search
and seizure. Taking all these records
and sifting through them for possible
audits is an incredible overreach and
an unprecedented invasion of the pri-
vacy of untold millions of Americans.
It’s also none of the federal govern-
ment’s business.
Business and banking groups are
pushing back hard, as are some state
legislatures.
The Small Business Association
of Michigan and the Michigan Bank-
ers Association are among them. The
proposal would be cumbersome for fi -
nancial institutions to implement, and
they have raised concerns about how
this could put the fi nancial information
of consumers at risk.
Rann Paynter, president and CEO
of the Michigan Bankers Association,
says the plan would hamper both
fi nancial institutions and consumers.
“It’s certainly a burden to the hold-
ers of those accounts, and an invasion
of privacy to Americans for that type of
information to be shared with the IRS,”
he says. “It’s a lot of information to
provide to the government that is not
necessary.”
Paynter notes that if the IRS is
concerned about some individuals
or businesses avoiding their share of
taxes, the agency already has the tools
it needs to investigate.
The pushback has caused House
Democrats to put aside the proposal
for now — at least in its existing form.
They are still considering a version
that would impact fewer people.
U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., has
noted the concern over the negative
impact this could have on low-income
Americans, whom Democrats purport
to want to help. Yet Kildee, who is on
the Ways and Means Committee, also
said the issue isn’t “completely gone,”
according to The Wall Street Journal.
Given the invasiveness of the
proposal, it needs to go away. Congress
should ignore the demands of the
Biden administration and make sure
this extraordinary approach to tracking
of the bank accounts of average Ameri-
cans never happens.