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OPINION
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gainesvilletimes.com
Friday, November 16, 2018
Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com
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LETTERS
We’re only one
mistake away
from another
mass extinction
Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years,
arguably the most successful species the planet
has ever known. Then about 65 million years
ago, the dinosaurs suddenly disappeared. What
happened?
The important word in the above is “suddenly.”
At the time, the world pretty much agreed that
species could change over a period of time, but
that such change occurred very slowly.
The theory was called uniformitarianism. In
other words, the world could change, but single
catastrophes could not cause major geologic
upheavals.
Then within a very short period of time, the
earth’s dominant species was gone. All that
remained were a few fossilized bones.
Again — what happened? If you like mystery
stories, I suggest Walter Alvarez’s book, “T.rex
and the Crater of Doom.” Alvarez is a professor of
geology and geophysics at the University of Cali
fornia, Berkeley, a member of the National Acad
emy of Sciences — and a great storyteller.
In short, the dinosaurs were wiped out when a
giant meteor hit the earth near what is now the
Yucatan Peninsula. What followed devastated
the earth and caused a mass extinction of all the
higher forms of life on the planet.
Could it happen again?
Absolutely, but it need not be a visitor from
space. We can do it to ourselves.
One misstep in nuclear negations, one accident
with our nuclear arsenal, one act of international
sabotage, and enough energy could be released
to scorch a large part of the planet and release
enough debris to cover the world in soot and blot
out the sun.
It wasn’t the original impact that caused mass
extinction at the end of the Mesozoic era. It was
the environmental havoc that followed: fire, flood
and a layer of pollution that obscured the sun. This
is exactly what could occur if the world launched
even a part of its nuclear arsenal.
President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gor
bachev understood this when they negotiated
the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
in 1987 — the treaty that President Trump now
wants to scrap.
Trump thinks he can get a better deal. Maybe
he can, but it is also quite likely that he will initiate
another nuclear arms race. This will be a costly
and dangerous piece of brinksmanship that the
world can ill afford.
Joan King
Sautee
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Midterms set table for
Strap in, it’s all going to get
crazier.
More than a week after the
final votes were cast (but not
necessarily counted), it’s now
looking like the Democrats
had a blue wave after all.
It didn’t seem like it at first.
Election night was more of an
emotional roller coaster than
you’d expect in a true rout.
As of this writing, many of
the Democrats’ favorite can
didates didn’t win. And the Republican
seawall was stronger and more important
than people realized.
The Senate map was the most favor
able that Republicans have seen in a cen
tury. Gerrymandering helped the GOP
hold a lot of House seats and even gain in
the Senate. So did demographic sorting,
which can look like gerrymandering but
isn’t.
But the fact remains: The GOP had the
worst midterms since Watergate. Demo
cratic gains among young people, the
college-educated and, in particular, sub
urban Republican defectors were historic
and will have long-lasting consequences.
The GOP coalition is shrinking and
aging. The Democratic coalition is grow
ing and getting younger.
But it still doesn’t quite feel like it, in
part because President Trump refused
to follow his predecessors’ example and
admit defeat.
In 2006, under similar circumstances,
President George W. Bush conceded
he took a “thumpin’.” In 2010, Obama
acknowledged he was “shellacked.”
Trump, on the other hand, called the
results a “tremendous success” and a
“big victory” proving that the American
people “like me.”
It’s dawning on Democrats
that they had a big night. The
challenge, however, is that
it doesn’t mean much in the
short term. Nancy Pelosi,
the presumptive incoming
speaker of the House, can’t
do much to “check” Trump
legislatively.
This puts the Democrats in
a bind similar to the one the
GOP was in under Obama.
A common talking point on the populist
right is that the establishment “over
promised and under-delivered” during
the Obama presidency. And that’s true.
But so did the populists. Both factions
promised that Congress could “stop”
Obama and repeal Obamacare if they just
had enough votes, or if enough “RINOs”
went along with a government shutdown.
It wasn’t true. And that fueled an enor
mous amount of resentment on the right
— resentment that cleared a path for
Trump.
Now it’s the Democrats’ turn. Accord
ing to exit polls, the vast majority of Dem
ocrats favor impeaching Trump now.
Many Democrats avoided talking about
impeachment, but they vowed to “hold
Trump accountable.”
To be sure, the Democrats can inves
tigate the president with all the intensity
of a zealous prison guard snapping on his
rubber glove to search for smuggled con
traband. But that won’t stop Trump from
dominating virtually every news cycle
and occupying the headspace of liberals
on a daily basis for the next two years.
Nor will it weaken the resolve of Trump’s
base to rally to his defense.
The things Trump does that most
JONAH GOLDBERG
goldbergcolumn@
gmail.com
crazy 2020
enflame liberal passions are beyond the
Democrats’ power to check. He can still
tweet and troll the media with abandon.
He can still use executive authority on
immigration. And he can still send an
unprecedented number of judges over
Pelosi’s head to the Senate. (Gird your
loins now for the impotent Democratic
rage that would follow if Trump gets a
third Supreme Court pick.)
Pelosi may want to hold off on
impeachment proceedings, at least until
special counsel Robert Mueller releases
his report. But it’s doubtful the Demo
cratic base shares her patience. And it
remains unlikely that Mueller will find
anything that would induce a third of Sen
ate Republicans to vote to remove Trump
from office. (Removal requires 67 Senate
votes.)
This could create the same dynamic
that led 17 Republicans to throw their
hats into the ring in the 2016 presidential
primaries. The Obama team poured
attention on Trump because they thought
it would make the GOP look bad. Instead,
they elevated him. It’s likely Trump could
pursue the same strategy with some
Democratic firebrand.
Trump never won a majority of pri
mary votes. He merely had a strong and
loyal enough following to get a plurality
in a divided field. The bigger the field, the
fewer votes you need to win. The greater
the passion in the base, the more incen
tive there is to pander to it.
And that’s why it’s all going to get even
crazier.
Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of
National Review Online and a visiting
fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute.
DAVID HORSEY I Tribune News Service
Amazon played those cities for suckers
Your government officials
Hall County government
Board of Commissioners, 2875 Browns Bridge
Road, Gainesville, P.O. Drawer 1435, Gainesville
30503, 770-535-8288, www.hallcounty.org.
Chairman Richard Higgins, rhiggins@hallcounty.
org; District 1, Kathy Cooper, kcooper@
hallcounty.org; District 2, Billy Powell, bpowell@
hallcounty.org; District 3, Scott Gibbs, sgibbs@
hallcounty.org; District 4, Jeff Stowe, jstowe@
hallcounty.org.
County Administrator, Jock Connell, jconnell@
hallcounty.org
Planning Commission, 2875 Browns Bridge Road,
Gainesville, 770-531-6809.
Tax Commissioner’s Office, 2875 Browns Bridge
Road, P.O. Box 1579, Gainesville 30503, 770-
531 -6950, taxcommissioner@hallcounty.org
Tax Assessor’s Office, 2875 Browns Bridge Road,
Gainesville 30504, rswatson@hallcounty.org.
Real estate property, P.O. Box 2895, Gainesville
30503, 770-531-6720; personal property, P.O.
Box 1780, Gainesville 30503, 770-531 -6749
Public Works, 2875 Browns Bridge Road,
Gainesville, 770-531-6800, krearden@
hallcounty.org
Extension office, 734 E. Crescent Drive,
Gainesville, 770-535-8293
Marshal’s Office, P.O. Drawer 1435, Gainesville,
770-531-6762
Elections Office, 2875 Browns Bridge Road,
Gainesville, 770-531-6945, elections®
hallcounty.org
Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Gerald Couch, 610
Main St., Gainesville, 770-531 -6885, www.
hallcountysheriffsoffice.org
Fire Department, 470 Crescent Drive, Gainesville,
770-531 -6838, www.hallcounty.org/fireservices
District Attorney’s Office, District Attorney
Lee Darragh, P.O. Box 1690, 770-531-6965,
ldarragh@hallcounty.org
Public Safety, Director Marty Nix, 470 Crescent
Drive, Gainesville, 770-531-6774, mnix@
hallcounty.org
Los Angeles Times editorial board
Over the 14-month “Bachelor”-like
competition for Amazon’s second head
quarters, more than 200 cities across
the country went to embarrassing and
expensive lengths to woo the online
retailer. City leaders raced to hire
consultants, compile data and draft
elaborate proposals, offering ever more
generous financial incentive packages,
all in hopes of landing the promised
$5-billion corporate office with 50,000
high-paying jobs.
Although Amazon may have flirted
with mid-sized cities like Pittsburgh and
Denver, and eyed Rust Belt resurgence
in Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, the
company ultimately picked two of the
nation’s biggest metropolitan areas for
its new corporate centers — New York
City and Greater Washington, D.C. —
with each landing half the jobs.
The company managed to extract
well more than $2 billion in financial
incentives and tax breaks in the process.
Whether those incentives pay off for
taxpayers will depend in large measure
on how well Amazon does in the com
ing years, and whether its success gets
passed on to workers in the new offices.
In the end, did all that wooing really
make a difference? Nah. It sure looks
like Amazon used the “open bidding”
process to play cities against each other
so it could extract more financial incen
tives from a short list of locations the
company was seriously considering
for headquarters. The process gener
ated some offers that certainly seemed
irrationally exuberant; for example,
Philadelphia and the state of Pennsyl
vania offered subsidies worth about
half a billion dollars more than Amazon
said it was going to invest in the new
headquarters.
Research has shown that companies
typically choose their locations based
on availability of skilled workers,
infrastructure, business environment
and the quality of life employees can
expect. Tax breaks can sometimes make
the difference between two similarly
situated cities. But all the incentives in
the world are not going to convince an
Amazon-like behemoth to move to, say,
Indiana, if it can’t attract the extremely-
in-demand tech talent to work there.
Indeed, the company said as much.
“We looked at what our employees want,
and where they would want to live,” an
Amazon executive said Tuesday at a
news conference. The company ended
up seeking two headquarters instead of
one because no single city had enough
tech workers to meet its hiring needs.
Amazon is one of the world’s biggest
companies. It needs to expand and it has
to do that in the few cities with large,
highly skilled workforces — such as
New York City and Washington. Google
recently announced it was planning
to expand its offices in New York to
accommodate more than 20,000 work
ers — without subsidies. So why are
financial incentives for Amazon even on
the table? After all, Amazon had already
decided to create the jobs; the only ques
tion was where it would put them.
To make matters worse, Amazon’s
planned headquarters in New York’s
Long Island City is in a newly designated
“opportunity zone,” potentially eligible
for tax breaks designed to increase
investment in low-income communi
ties. But the neighborhood has already
gentrified — there are shiny new high-
rises and the median income is $138,000
a year — meaning the arrival of the
online retailer will be an additional boon
to real estate investors, including possi
bly Amazon itself, according to the New
York Times.
If a tax break goes to a company that
would have moved in even without such
a subsidy, then taxpayers have traded
away money that could have been spent
on education, infrastructure and other
public services. Nor are such tax give
aways fair to existing businesses that
pay their required share of taxes and
rely on the services and infrastructure
funded by those tax dollars. Worse,
researchers have found that incentives
are often poorly targeted and don’t
deliver the promised benefits in terms
of jobs and economic activity. That’s not
economic development. It’s corporate
welfare.
Cities and states can’t continue
this race to the bottom. They have to
be more savvy when the next mega
company comes knocking for subsidies.
Some academics have proposed a kind
of armistice or interstate compact in
which states collectively refuse to offer
company-specific financial incentive
packages.
That would make it harder for the
next Amazon-like company to goad cit
ies and states into offering bigger, pric
ier subsidies. States can compete with
each other on other, more important
factors — the quality of their education
systems, housing costs, tax structures
and the availability of skilled workers.
Amazon played the incentive game
masterfully.
Cities just got played.
She Stines
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