Cutter Files for House Seat
Dann Cutter
Waldport City Council member Dann Cutter will run for the Oregon House of Representatives in District 10 in 2012 to succeed Jean Cowan, who will not seek another term. Cutter said he is running to “bring Oregon back to a sensible fiscal reality, to start rebuilding a decimated school system, and to make choices based on economic benefit and not party politics.” Cutter added, “My message is it should be the person, not the party, you vote for.”
Cutter, a Republican, was born in Coos Bay and grew up in Portland. A Navy veteran, he moved to the Oregon Coast to work at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in 1996, and has lived in Waldport since 1999. He spent six years on the Waldport Planning Commission before being elected to the City Council in 2006. He was reelected in 2010. Cutter was named a Stanford REE Fellow in 2008, holds degrees in Finance and Environmental Science and is doing post-baccalaureate work in Economics. He was appointed by Governor Ted Kulongoski to the Rural Health Coordinating Council, and is an executive board member on the Cascades West Council of Governments.
“In Salem I will put aside party politics and propose and support plans which fix the problems now, and not pass them along, as so often has been done, to our next generation,” Cutter said. “For too long we have allowed Salem to play politics instead of acting like leaders. You will hear everyone this election year talk about jobs – that is a smoke screen,” Cutter said. “The reality is that…global markets have forever changed manufacturing in America and we cannot legislate those jobs back into existence. You do not want ‘government’ creating jobs,” Cutter said. He added, “Encouraging job growth will be about getting government out of the way of business creators and innovators,” he said.
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The man, a Navy veteran (i.e., gov’t supported) who apparently worked at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, i.e., government created & supported institution (federal & state) for some years (the article doesn’t mention how many) is saying that government doesn’t create jobs. So, he didn’t get paid while he was in the Navy? That wasn’t a job? His work at the HMSC wasn’t a job? He didn’t get paid?
What business did he start & run?
He is saying that we don’t want to have the government create more government jobs which we pay for in taxes.
Yes…Mr. Cutter is hypocriticallly parroting Republican talking points about the evils of government while collecting a paycheck from …uh… the government for his entire working life.
I also work for the government, but unlike Mr. Cutter, I think the government can and SHOULD create jobs during this economic criis — jobs rebuilding our publicly-owned infrastructure — and at the same time eliminate all subsidiies and tax breaks for corporations that simply hand them over to CEOs and shareholders rather than using this public money for the public good.
Government can and should do a much better job of making sure that public money benefits us all than the private sector can, and the idea that all government is evil and wasteful is, at best ignorant, and a worst part of larger-scale plan to solidify government of the corpoarations by the corporations and for the corporations.
@Mark, so when you mentioned in the hallway that ‘they’ were already trashing me, you meant you. ;-)
Efficiency of government vs private sector is not foremost a GOP idea, it is an idea popularized by Milton Friedman during the 70s and 80s and became the cornerstone of capitalistic growth over the last several decades. That the GOP (and by presidential candidates often incorrectly and foolishly) co-ops this philosophy is not to the idea’s detriment.
And I don’t necessarily disagree that subsidies and tax breaks take money away from critical programs. In the same way that I don’t think the private sector is who we want running our schools – there are some things so critical that we must accept the inefficiency of government to ensure access to all.
At the end of the day however, I will continue to say, we do NOT want to increase the number of state or federal employees as some way of addressing the unemployment issue. We do not want the government to create jobs. Nor do we want jobs created out of one time monies to fix infrastructure – that money tends to be expensive, and unlike adding new infrastructure, rarely achieved a high economic multiple to create more dollar flow.
If you rely on government to create jobs, then you are handing the power to innovate, to compete and to expand over into governmental control – and employment will be subject to whomever is in office at the time.
Government is not evil – no one, and certainly not me, said it was. Government is undeniably wasteful and inefficient. To think otherwise is to have spent no time studying budgets at the state or federal level. However, good people work hard to minimize that waste.
What government can do however, and what I will do in Salem is take a good look at our competitive advantages (in production, in innovation, and in research) and by use of subsidies, incentives, and taxes encourage the maximum flow of production into these areas. A good example of how that didn’t work recently is the efforts of our state to bring solar production jobs to Oregon. That is not our expertise. Just because Intel has fab plants here did not make solar products a natural fit. Wherein lie our strengths? The high energy consuming plants getting cheaper northwest power from Bonneville. The terawatts of untapped wave energy sitting off our coast. The expanses of natural resources and our willingness and commitments to sustainable management to ensure they last for generations to come. Do we always get it right? No… but good people try hard to make it work. Some of those are government, but many are small business owners seeking out niche markets and addressing them.
So, you may call it ‘parroting’, but I will continue to advocate for sensible and peer reviewed removal of obstacles to private sector growth, and discouraging the increasing size of government just because it’s a downturn. My parents lost their business and almost their home in this economy, and I understand the heartache which goes along with that struggle. But we cannot, should not and will not become an Economy by and for the Government.
Government and private enterprises both have their places. And NEITHER should usurp the other – as make no mistake – I am as much in favor of getting corporate dollars our of government and politics as I am of getting government out of running businesses.
Nothing like a good old fashioned pissing contest between two politicians for a refreshing change of pace.
“@Mark, so when you mentioned in the hallway that ‘they’ were already trashing me, you meant you. ;-)” Dann Cutter
Hi Dann, I’m glad you found this page!
….and so begins the zipping and unzipping of flys by the respective peanut galleries.