Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2006 > September
September 2006
Beltline deal, Wal-Mart, state schools
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Bin Laden dead? The answer’s only marginally important. The death that matters is that of the last radical jihadist who is willing to act on a desire to kill Americans.
• You gotta hand it to Atlanta City Hall. Its proposal to take-by-gift Gwinnett County developer Wayne Mason’s 66 acres along the proposed Beltline and give him “development rights” to land he’d have to buy elsewhere is audacious. That’s about like seizing my car and giving me “riding rights” on the city bus (if I pay the fare).
• Uh, Vinings, if cityhood is an anti-density move, look around. Density’s done.
• One reason to be optimistic about education: Thousands of Georgia children who would have been promoted to higher grades, where they would have fallen further and further behind because they weren’t learning reading and math, are now screened by competency tests and held back. One reason to be pessimistic: About half will be promoted anyway if parents insist. Advancing children who can’t read out of the third grade is cruel.
• Should parents be allowed to edit movies to make them family-friendly? Absolutely. Technology exists, though a federal judge ruled that companies can’t sell DVDs edited to remove objectionable material.
Parents have a right to control everything that flows through their doors. Movie-makers are free to create any product, but their freedom of artistic expression shouldn't control my use. A car is an artistic statement, too, but we're free to customize as many as the marketplace chooses for personal use. The original is the artistic statement.
• Just as Wal-Mart revolutionized retailing, it may do the same with health care. Four dollars for a 30-day supply of 129 generics, including six of the 10 most popular. And now it’ll offer health savings accounts and low-premium, high-deductible coverage for new workers starting Jan. 1. Health insurance premiums for employer-sponsored plans rose at twice the rate of inflation last year. At some point soon we’ll need a law requiring people to have health insurance. Works for autos.
• The school workplace union, the Georgia Association of Educators - a union, not a teacher “group, ” the Georgia affiliate of the National Education Association, which consistently sends one of the largest delegate blocs to the Democratic National Convention — has endorsed the Democrat for governor and lieutenant governor in Georgia. Any Republican who has the support of the GAE, with one exception, is suspect. The exception is when they endorse an incumbent (Kathy Cox) because there’s no chance of defeating him/her.
• Sales tax exemptions, like the one for food, do need to be reassessed, as some academics suggest. But if reassessment is the stalking horse for spreading the sales tax to services, long the dream-child of those who wish to expand government’s revenue base, taxpayers should beware. Unless the state shifts from taxing earnings to taxing consumption, no proposed sales tax on services should get a minute’s consideration.
• Two election-related issues - electronic voting and photo IDs — get more hilarious by the hour. Tamper-proof driver’s licenses are coming by 2008, and even the libs have embraced photo IDs for voting. Just not right now. Comes now U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, liberal California Democrat, pushing legislation to reimburse states and counties that permit voters to choose paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines.
Electronic voting came because some voters couldn’t read well enough to follow instructions and didn’t follow through on down-ballot races. Democrats thought they lost votes — hence the premature rush to electronic voting. Conservatives, take heed: Always run pilot projects first before spending $75 million, as Georgia has, to buy the machines.
• Journalists are used by partisans who leak and interpret documents for political advantage, especially as President Bush noted, when an election nears. There’s no good remedy. I’m from the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” school, and if I believe a leaked document puts troops at risk or aids the enemy, I don’t publish. If not clear-cut and sensitive material is published, it should come without hype or spin — which are often payoffs to the partisan leaker. That does appear to have been the case with the selective leaks from the National Intelligence Estimate.
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Predict November’s outcome now
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By the end of the week, Congress will largely have finished its work for the year. The House on Wednesday gave President Bush the authority his administration needed to interrogate and prosecute terrorists. It’s expected that the Senate will agree to similar language today — after voting down an amendment offered by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania that would extend habeas corpus rights to enemy combatants, thereby opening the door for them to challenge in courts everything about their incarceration and interrogation. The fight among Republicans was whether to, as U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said, make clear whether the laws of armed conflict or domestic criminal activity apply. He’d argued, too, that it would invited judges, rather than military tribunals to determine who is and isn’t an enemy combatant.
That’s the most important matter before Congress. Certainly securing the borders required action. Left undone is legislation dealing with surveillance of calls to the U.S. from suspected terrorists abroad. But there’s a good chance Congress will return for a lame-duck session, probably between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Whatever your judgment of the performance of Congress, I come to the end still believing that Democrats lost their advantage during the second week of August, when they defeated U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, and the British reminded the world that terrorism is real, serious and active. Combine that with falling gas prices, improving consumer confidence and a stock market that’s near record levels, and GOP election disaster seems far less likely.
Congress didn’t have a spectacular year. Failures to achieve permanent tax cuts, including death tax repeal, hanging judicial nominations, token action on border security and the absence of more aggressive efforts to eliminate pork were all disappointments. But seriousness about the stakes in the war on terror and good economic news may have saved the day for Republicans.
Congress goes home tomorrow. Their achievements and failures are now largely known. Put yourself on the record. Be the pundit. Predict November. Are incumbents in the House and Senate off the hook?
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Crime in Atlanta
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Major crime in Atlanta has dropped to its lowest point in 37 years, with murders down 21 percent and rapes down 16 from 2004, says Police Chief Richard Pennington. Other major crimes, including armed robberies, thefts and aggravated assaults dropped too, though by lesser amounts.
Thirty-seven years ago the level of crime in Atlanta, and whether it was trending up or down, was front-page news. Now it’s not exactly a yawner, but the numbers don’t register as especially significant. For one, relatively few of us go to Atlanta’s downtown anymore. For another, the serious crime moves around metro Atlanta so we’re less likely to associate it with a place.
As the election approaches, crime seems largely to have faded as an issue. The Mexican meth labs concern me, as does illegal immigration and the emergence of drug gangs. I am concerned, too, by daily accounts of murders by the crazies and those without conscience who kill frivolously. The inability to impose and carry out the death penalty concerns me. (On that score, I was dumfounded by the press conference by black Atlanta-area liberals threatening to withdraw their enthusiasm for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor because he’s rolled out a proposal to end parole for some violent felons and because he’s advocated the death penalty for repeat child molesters. He’ll not do either, of course, because Democratic mouth-pieces won’t stand for it. But to suggest, as Joe Beasley of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition did, that talking about those issues “could have a chilling effect on his support in this community” does prompt a question: What community do they represent?}
In the election or in your life, is crime a major concern? I’m curious, too, whether thoughts about crime figure into your perception of Atlanta and whether it affects decisions about where, when or whether to go downtown. I don’t think it’s particularly unsafe, though it’s evident the city has no interest whatsoever in policing the annoying panhandlers who can spot a tourist a mile away. Is crime getting better, as the Atlanta numbers would seem to suggest.
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Market-based health care a better idea
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In health care, the race is on. It’s either government-managed universal health care or the marketplace.
The two competing visions struggle for supremacy. One, reflected in a proposal by Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor that’s based on a just-implemented Illinois plan, is an example of the incrementalism that has followed the defeat of HillaryCare. The other, a version of which was outlined last week by former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is primarily market-based.
“One hundred percent coverage is achievable through market-based solutions, private and corporate efforts, tax incentives, direct public subsidies, strong community support and faith-based outreach programs,” said Gingrich. “Personal responsibility, portability and health care consumerism are the hallmarks of such a system.” He continued:
“If the Georgia Legislature wants a market-based solution to health care and not a national universal insurance system, it is imperative that it utilize existing law, encourage current market trends and supplement the federal HSA [health savings accounts] legislation.”
Taylor’s incrementalism would expand Georgia’s taxpayer-financed insurance programs to cover all children younger than 19, regardless of their parents’ income. The cost to taxpayers of the existing Peachcare program for children whose parents earn less than 235 percent of the federal poverty scale, or about $37,800 for a family of three, is about $156 per child per month. That’s partially offset by premiums of up to $70 for a family with two or more children.
Taylor’s PeachKids proposes premiums of $40 to $90 per month, potentially obligating taxpayers to subsidize the children of the wealthy, who may find it more economical to buy better coverage for their children through the taxpayer-subsidized plan. One other group certain to be drawn to the Taylor plan are state employees who aren’t eligible to participate in PeachCare because they have access to coverage through the state health plan.
Taylor and Gov. Sonny Perdue differ sharply, incidentally, on the cost of his proposal. Taylor projected the cost at $13.8 million in the first year and $57 million later. Perdue’s campaign officials have estimated the cost at $111 million in the first year.
Nobody can say for sure what it will cost. One consideration is how many children whose parents are now voluntarily self-insuring would sign up. Many parents, like state employees with children, choose not to pay for coverage. Another consideration is how many upper-income bargain shoppers would drop coverage to buy the taxpayer-subsidized plan Taylor proposes.
In the creep toward government-provided universal coverage, able parents are encouraged to shift medical coverage for their children to a government provider.
The Georgia plan is patterned on one in Illinois that kicked off in July. That state’s Medicaid director, Anne Marie Murphy, told Associated Press writer Shannon McCaffrey that 35,000 children have signed up, with 50,000 expected in the first year. Illinois gets no federal reimbursement, and the first-year cost is projected at $25 million. Taylor has said 75,000 Georgians would be eligible.
Much of the conservative alternative is built around information, incentives and changed consumer habits. One key, made possible through 2003 federal legislation authorizing health savings accounts for individuals, gives consumers financial incentive to pay attention to what drugs and procedures cost.
Health savings accounts, combined with catastrophic care insurance plans, provide financial protection against major medical problems while giving individuals incentive to manage their health. A revolution is under way.
On Monday, The Wall Street Journal profiled the inflation-driven switch by one small business in Fort Wayne, Ind., Russ Moore Transmission Inc. Far more than he expected, part-owner and General Manager Nick Bond found himself drawn into hand-holding many employees through the transition, actually leading them through the price-information search. But that’s to be expected as price shoppers learn how to be smarter consumers.
A push is on nationally to get more price and quality information online. If consumers are paying or pocketing, they do have incentive to find out.
Two directions, two choices. The nation can go to universal government-provided health care, which is where we’re headed. Or we can change the system and the culture. I choose the latter.
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Blacks and the GOP
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Six weeks before November’s general election Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told a group that casts itself as the DNC’s African-American Leadership Summit that their party can no longer wait until three weeks before an election to solicit minority votes. “In many ways,” said Dean, voicing the truest words he may ever have spoken, “the Democratic Party hasn’t moved itself out of the 60s and 70s.”
Of party appeal, he said: “If we don’t get smart about having folks on the ticket that look like the people whose votes we’re asking for, in meaningful positions of authority, then we’re not going to win. And the party that gets to do that first is the party that’s going to win.”
Without question, to be successful both parties need to broaden their base. And without question too, Republicans need a steady, long-term outreach to appeal to the growing middle class of minorities who don’t see politicians and government programs as the link to their financial security. Democrats, along with business, colleges and media outlets too, tend to measure diversity with a camera. It’s the “look-like” standard. It’s smart of the Democrats to make virtue of what they have as a constituency, but the party would be more successful if it allowed an occasional conservative, too. It’s not Kodak diversity, but it would help Democrats “look-like” America.
But that’s a lead-up, actually, to a more important question: What can/should Republicans do attract blacks and Hispanics? This is not a question about the election six weeks hence. We’re in the Pandering Zone now. The question goes to the next 5-10 years. My belief is that it doesn’t change core beliefs and it doesn’t do what national Republicans just did in pandering on the Voting Rights Act. It stands for something that appeals to all, and explains and recruits blacks and Hispanics who share its philosophy.
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Gingrich has health care remedies ready
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in the finest spirit of representative democracy, returned from his high station in government last week to sit before a committee of the state’s legislators and plead his case for revolution.
Newt Gingrich, who once was third in line to be president of the United States and who one day may occupy the Oval Office, sat before the Georgia Health Care Transformation Senate Study Committee to argue that the nation’s health care system is on an unsustainable course. “Health care consumes 26 percent of all federal spending and is growing, dwarfing every other priority,” he said.
In response to a question from state Sen. Judson Hill (R-Marietta), who chairs the study committee, Gingrich offered three immediate recommendations for the Georgia General Assembly — things that can be done next year. All are based on technology and information.
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who but for the fact that he’s the president’s brother would be a major presidential candidate himself in 2008, has sown the first seeds of health care revolution in Florida. “While the vast majority of states keep secret the cost and quality data they collect, Gov. Bush and former state Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Alan Levine have made Florida the first state in the country to openly report a wide range of cost and quality measures for hospitals and outpatient facilities,” said Gingrich.
Bush and Levine created two Web sites. “FloridaCompareCare.gov has a wealth of information on everything from hospital infection and mortality rates to the cost and frequency of surgical procedures performed,” Gingrich explained. “Knowing which hospitals have the highest and lowest death rates — and the highest and lowest prices — allows the consumer to choose the best-performing, highest-value hospital.” High quality and low prices often go together, he said.
The other site, MyFloridaRx.com, lists pricing information for the 50 most commonly prescribed drugs in Florida. In one Miami ZIP code, he said, 30 pills of one drug cost $91 at one store, $220 at another.
“Look at the two Florida sites and ask yourself why Georgians don’t get the same information,” Gingrich told the senators. “Georgians deserve to know price and quality for hospitals, drugstores, laboratories, doctors’ offices. Period.”
The information is or could be available. Compiling it so that Georgians can compare would cost about $1 million, Hill estimated later. “It’s the right thing to do,” said Hill. ” … We have to go to full transparency and accountability, and to lower costs, you have to go to transparency.”
That’s one Gingrich recommendation of what could be done next year. A second is to give consumers, physicians and pharmacists information and incentive to make responsible choices about prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Rather than co-pays, consumers would be reimbursed for the full cost of the least costly of the equally effective drugs. The result would be downward pressure on drug prices.
The third recommendation would be to build on a bill passed this year that allows electronic prescriptions. The aim is to push the paper out of the health care system. His recommendation is to provide a slightly higher reimbursement for electronic prescriptions and slightly less for paper to give doctors and pharmacists incentive to change.
Gingrich offered a host of other proposals as well as components of a revolution designed to promote wellness.Within a decade, he believes, 100 percent insurance coverage will be “achievable through market-based solutions, private and corporate efforts, tax incentives, direct public subsidies, strong community support and faith-based outreach programs. Personal responsibility, portability and health-care consumerism are the hallmarks of such a system.”
Georgia has actually already started the revolution. Efforts to manage diabetes, a project that includes 27 major employers, including the state, are one example. Others are in the works.
This is a perfect example of the difference that conservative governance makes. It’s not tinkering, though initial steps may seem small. But it’s small steps toward a revolution. It’s a prime example of the way conservatives should use government to change antiquated systems and undesirable behaviors, all toward improving the quality of our lives.
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CDC, Chavez, photo ID, sales-tax votes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Of course the city administrator of McDonough, population 15,523, should be paid more than the governor. He’s got to prepare the city for the population and tourism explosion that will come when the nearby Lovejoy commuter rail line opens.
• Loser leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, defeated in this year’s presidential campaign in Mexico, forms a shadow government in the streets, complete with Cabinet positions and a treasury. Of the duly elected president, he said: “They can have their bootleg institution and their spurious president, but they can’t have … our conviction. We will never give up.” CNN does cover the world and plant American ideas abroad.
• There are always dangerous fools on the world scene, as Venezuelan President Hugh Chavez revealed himself to be in Wednesday’s address to the United Nations. His Bush-hating over-the-top rhetoric is, however, a reminder that domestic politics has been globalized. The Dixie Chicks-Jimmy Carter left doesn’t know where to stop, or which forums to choose, and neither does Chavez.
• A beautiful headline: “Disease detectives on trail of outbreak.” Bull’s-eye. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doing precisely what it should.
• Lunacy reigns. That U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ comment that “If Gen. J.E.B. Stuart had better intelligence, we’d all be meeting in Richmond right now” generated a line of type or a minute of air time is evidence of political correctness run amok. That and that an election is near.
• Wonder how chat-room, pretend-pedophiles from one law enforcement agency avoid luring Internet pretend-pedophiles from another? So many are gathered there.
• Left, right and center agree: There ought to be a law. Proposals to borrow money or to impose local-option sales taxes should only be on the ballot during a primary or general election — or, I’d allow, during the month of April. It is absurd to schedule one less than two months before a general election, when hordes of voters will be coming to the polls.
• Aw, pshaw. Liberal Democrats won’t allow capital punishment for repeated child sex abusers, as Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor proposes. He knows that. It’s near-impossible to get the death penalty, even for murderers.
• A national government-sponsored voter ID by 2010, recommended by a commission headed by Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker, is good. But a free state-required voter ID now, as passed by the Georgia General Assembly, is bad, sayeth the Democrats. And requiring photo ID is unconstitutional because it is a “prerequisite” to voting, but requiring other forms of ID isn’t, says a Fulton judge. My, my. How the opponents do contort themselves.
• Headline: “Military stages coup in Thailand.” Possible here? Not in my lifetime, but yes. The prerequisites: 1. The generals can trust the privates to do what they order, lawful or not. 2. Military service is not a shared national experience. 3. Those in uniform start distrusting civilian leaders. We aren’t immune.
• CDC grumblers get a 24-hour hotline. Shouldn’t somebody declare an open-door policy? That’s what reformers always promise.
• Two of the good-sense members of the state transportation board, Mike Evans and David Doss, say tolls on existing Ga. 400 lanes should be prohibited after the road’s debt is settled in 2011. “The original deal was the tolls would come off when the bonds were paid off, and that’s in 2011,” said Evans, the chairman. “And I think really for public confidence in the system that has to be what happens.” That nails it. On this and all other transportation/congestion issues, it’s a matter of trust. Can decision-makers be trusted to spend money wisely? If not, taxpayers can’t — or shouldn’t — give them another dime. Trust.
• Four Asian students were attacked and robbed in three separate incidents near the MARTA Five Points station in the past month. Hate crimes? Since their attackers are generic “three to five young males” and possibly “one or two females,” no hate crime suspicions are raised. Otherwise, if it’s a minority attacked and the perpetrators aren’t that minority, it’s presumed to be a hate crime. Them’s the rules. Are we going to have hate crimes or not?
• A Norcross man has six wives. Don’t jail him. Require him to support them.
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Immigration: what’s the story here?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
What do you see here? This is a story from the weekend paper by Russ Bynum of the Associated Press. The Georgia community of Stillmore, population about 1,000, “has become little more than a ghost town since Sept. 1 when federal agents began rounding up illegal immigrants,” he reports. About 120 illegals were arrested by federal agents, while “hundreds” more fled. “The sweep,” Bynum writes, “had the unintended effect of underscoring just how vital those workers were to the local economy.”
“Trailer parks sit abandoned. The poultry plant is scrambling to replace more than half its work force. Business has dried up at stores where Mexicans lined up to buy food, beer and cigarettes just weeks ago.” The poultry plant is Crider Inc., which employes about 900. The company president said that when federal agents inspected the plant’s records in May they found about 700 suspected illegals. When asked to prove their status as legals, only about 100 kept their jobs. The writer notes that “the raids came during a fall election season in which immigration is a top issue.”
To replace the vanished workers, Bynum reports, “the poultry plant has limped along with half its normal work force” and “increased its starting wages by $1 an hour to help recruit new workers.”
In Congress, meanwhile, the U.S. House is expected to vote today on tougher enforcement measures, with language offered by U.S. Rep. Charles Norwood (R-Ga.) clarifying the authority of state and local police to enforce federal immigration law. The Senate has also voted to take up a House-passed bill to build 700 miles of fence on the border with Mexico. Both should pass. Enforcement first, as U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, Rep. Tom Price and others say.
The Associated Press story is presented because I think it will illustrate how differently we see the illegal immigration issue. I read it and am appalled that 700 of 900 workers may have been illegal and that, even with substanial prior warning, feds were still able to round up 120 illegals in a community of less than 1,000 — clear evidence that immigrations laws have no meaning. But I’m curious from others: What is the message you draw from the Stillmore story? And, if you’re empowered to fix what you see, how do you do it? My prediction is that liberals and conservatives see at least two distinctly different stories here.
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Mailing Address: America
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Perhaps all of us should be inured by now to the worldview ramblings of billionaires like Ted Turner and George Soros. Perhaps. But in remarks Tuesday night at a Reuters news service gathering billionaire Turner was in rare form. U.S. intervention in Iraq caused “incalculable damage,” that will require two decades to overcome “if we just act reasonably intelligently,” said he.
On Iraq: “It will go down in history, it is already seen in history, as one of the dumbest moves that was ever made by anybody. A couple of others that come to mind were the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the German invasion of Russia.” That war, Turner continued, “literally broke my heart. You don’t start wars just because you don’t like somebody…”
Of three world leaders in New York Tuesday — American President George W. Bush, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Citizen of the World Turner — two were in agreement. Ahmadinejad and Turner. Ahmadinejad insisted to the UN General Assembly that Iran’s nuclear program is “transparent, peaceful and under the watchful eye” of UN inspectors. President Bush, in addressing the UN, spoke to the people of Iran: “Your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation’s resources to fund terrorism, and fuel extremism, and pursue nuclear weapons.” Into that impasse steps Citizen of the World Turner to adjudicate, in the finest tradition of unaffiliated free-agent liberalism, the dispute before him. It’s a “joke,” said Turner, that Iran can’t have nuclear weapons if we can.
“They’re a soverign state. We have 28,000. Why can’t they have 10? We don’t say anything about Israel — they’ve got 100 of them approximately — or India or Pakistan or Russia.” And then this spokesman for the One World New Millenium issued his final verdict: “And, really, nobody should have them. They aren’t useable by any sane person.”
In a nation that lives daily under the threat of mortal danger, the signals from the left are powerful, clear and consistent: They don’t see threats, except those we cause. They see the world as a playground. If Georgie has 28,000 nukes, Ehud’s got 100, then of course Mahmoud should have 10. Let’s talk. The worldview that keeps coming out of the mouths of the anti-war left is the one that existed prior to 9/11. They simply do not get it. And that failure makes turning national leadership over to them a very dangerous prospect in a dangerous world. How many should Mahmoud have? Zero.
Time to ax tax to benefit local officials
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, with his proposal to stop collecting the quarter mill that the state adds to the property tax bills of 2.5 million Georgians, opened a can of worms that should have been opened long ago.
There’s never been any particular justification for the state to collect a quarter mill anyway. Certainly the state has a long history, dating to at least 1851, of levying against property. But with the advent of the 3 percent statewide sales tax in 1951, property taxes were left to the support of local government. A 1952 constitutional amendment eliminated the five-mill state collection, except for that .25 mill, a sum that now costs the average property owner $30 per year.
Rockdale County Tax Commissioner Dan Ray, the immediate past president of the tax commissioners’ state association, believes that “the quarter mill is there to fund the state’s administration of property taxes.” By making tax commissioners collect state revenues — the quarter mill — the state retains authority to oversee tax commissioners and assessors and to set training standards, he says. “This gives them the money to pay for that . . . that’s my understanding.”
The fee collected amounts to $76 million per year.
Wilbur Yaun of Conyers, who spent 34 years at the state Revenue Department before retiring in 2003, thinks the quarter-mill remains so the state could maintain control of auditing, training and maintaining uniformity of assessments at the county level.
There’s another reason as well.
County-level constitutional officers — sheriffs, probate judges, court clerks and tax commissioners — have an independent power base in every county. Since the beginning of time, that has made their statewide organizations a key power bloc under the Gold Dome. What they want, they get.
In 1958, when many Georgia counties were dirt poor, few offered pension plans. Tax commissioners persuaded legislators to allow them to come under the Employees Retirement System of Georgia, which was created in 1949. But to provide legal justification, they had actually to be state employees. And they aren’t.
The quarter-mill is the legal route into the state retirement system. The law states: “The offices of the tax commissioners, tax collectors and tax receivers of the counties of this state are declared to be adjuncts of the Department of Revenue, such offices assisting in the returning and collecting of state taxes.”
For tax commissioners, it gets even better. Most everything past General Assemblies have done that passed as reform included provisions taking care of themselves and the politically connected. So it was with a 1990 law affecting tax commissioners. A law that appeared to be reform included this language:
“No tax commissioner, tax collector, tax receiver or any employee of any such official shall be eligible for membership in the retirement system if such official or employee is covered or becomes covered by any other public retirement or pension system, excluding Social Security coverage and coverage under any county or local retirement or pension system.”
Read it again. This is the law that came about after most counties adopted pension plans for county officials and employees. So while this law appears to prevent double-dipping, the reality is that it made certain that tax commissioners are eligible to participate in both state and local systems for the same day’s work.
The state system treats those tax commissioners and employees as though no other benefits exist. Salaries are based on population and range from a base of $29,832.20 in the smallest county to $109,425.84 in the largest, with supplements that add a minimum of about $7,700 per year.
The state certainly should eliminate the quarter mill, as Taylor proposes, along with the basis for county elected officials to participate in a retirement system created for state employees. Besides, the state has no need for or claim to the quarter mill in property taxes. That taxing authority should be left at the county level to support schools, jails and other local needs.
“The big guy likes big tax cuts,” Taylor told delegates attending this weekend’s Democratic Party convention in College Park. This is not a big tax cut, but it is an important one, because it has the potential to save taxpayers twice.
It could save property owners a few bucks. And it could eliminate any justification for some county employees, including tax commissioners, from double-dipping by collecting two retirement benefits for one day of work.
Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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Messages from Sweden
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sweden’s politics are not high on the agendas of most Americans — or most Europeans, for that matter. But the outcomes of two contests there yesterday are revealing.
In the big one, the leftist Social Democrats party which has ruled Sweden for 64 of the past 70 years, including the last 12, was ousted by the center-right Moderates. Their strategy was to attack high unemployment by proposing to cut taxes for the lowest wage earners and to shrink unemployment benefits so the jobless have incentive to work. In a sense, the Moderates followed the strategy that George W. Bush has pursued here: Don’t threaten to dismantle the welfare state, but introduce incentives to change undesired behaviors.
In an interview with the Swedish newspaper The Local , Johan Norberg, author of “In Defence of Global Capitalism” who is a free-trade champion and a critic of his country’s welfare state, was asked about his observation that Sweden was “rotting from within.” “How do you mean?” the interviewer asked.
“I mean that the welfare state was built on specific preconditions: wealth, a strong work ethic, a sense of trust in a homogenous society, and an aversion to living on welfare. All of which made it possible to create a strong social security system. Now that may sound great but with it came a gradual distortion of incentives.
What we now see is that taxpayers are footing the bill for people who choose not to work. Plus we have the strange situation whereby Sweden is one of the healthiest countries in the world but also has the highest level of sick leave. The collapse of the initial preconditions has meant that attitudes have changed to the point that people are no longer sure what is right and what is wrong. “
Vaguely familiar?
The other item of interest from the Swedish elections was a seven-month “experiment” in Stockholm with “congestion-pricing.” It was called an experiment, though it involved spending $525 million to implement. It levied electronically recorded charges on motorists on heavily-traveled corridors into Stockholm based on time-of-day. The fees ranged from $2.76 per trip between 7:30 and 8:29 a.m. and 4 to 5:29 p.m. to $1.38 at the start and end of the day. Between 6:30 p.m. and 6:29 a.m., tolls were lifted. Taxis, buses, electric cars, hybrid vehciles and foreign-registered cars were exempted.
The toll did reduce traffic, with volume falling 20-25 percent, though some or all of that could have been shifted to non-toll streets and to the no-toll hours. The “experiment” was halted July 31 to await results of Sunday’s referendum. All results weren’t in as of this morning, but with 457 of 461 voting districts reporting, the yes votes led 51.7 to 45.6. Surprise! They loved it in-town and hated it in municipalities surrounding Stockholm, where not a single one favored it. Eleven of 14 had reported results and every one of them rejected time-of-day tolls.
Government spending has to be tamed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s a simple question posed by state Sen. Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock).
“Do the voters have a right to tell us how much of their money we should spend?”
It is, acknowledged Angela Palm, policy director for the Georgia School Boards Association, at the core of a recurring debate: How big should government be?
The chairman of the Houston County Board of Commissioners, Ned Sanders, avers that “I don’t know anybody that wants to grow government bigger than it already is.” But with demands, mandates, judicial orders and the like, it grows, he said.
The debate about the size and role of government, occurring on the day that Gov. Sonny Perdue announced a plan to exempt Georgians older than 65 from the state income tax levied on retirement income, does highlight one of the essential challenges confronting a party that presents itself as fiscal conservatives.
It is to determine how much of taxpayers’ money government should be allowed to spend and where it should come from. It’s not just Georgia, either. Around the country — in Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska and Nevada, among other states — taxpayers are attempting to find ways to limit government’s growth by limiting its spending. There is no other discipline.
Thursday’s debate came in presentations to the state Senate’s tax and expenditure limitation study committee, headed by state Sen. Mitch Seabaugh (R-Sharpsburg).
The search is for a “fair” way to check government’s growth. Most efforts, including Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), passed as a constitutional amendment in 1992, attempt to do that by limiting spending to increases in population and inflation. Colorado’s caused problems because voters also mandated increases for education that worsened cuts elsewhere. The idea, however, is sound.
At Thursday’s hearing, Emily Daniels, policy director for the nonprofit Georgia Family Council, charted budget and spending growth dating back a quarter-century. Using an average of the rate of inflation and population growth for the preceding three years — done to avoid relying on the gyrations of a single year — she tracked the impact of a TABOR-like cap.
It reveals three or four spending spikes. Many came after economic downturns and were accounted for in the ’90s by higher spending for Medicaid and for teacher salaries, she notes, made possible in part by Olympics-related job growth.
Had a cap been in place starting in 1980, the state budget would have grown to $14.75 billion in 2006, said Daniels. Instead it was $17.85 billion.
Had it started in 1990, the budget would have been $17.38 billion. Employed from 2000, it could have been $18.02 billion, she said, or more than it actually was.
Any cap would include an emergency provision. And spending could be raised if voters agree. Said Rogers, “It seems like such common-sense legislation because it really does put the power back in the hands of citizens, whose money we’re spending.”
Local officials, such as Sanders, were concerned that they not get boxed in. Palm, the school boards’ representative, questioned whether caps don’t “put fiscal policy on remote control.” Other government programs can be contained by limiting eligibility.
But with education, “Government has no control over the demand. Nor does any one level or branch of government solely control the regulations that may be added.”
Some form of spending discipline is an idea whose time has come. One key is finding a formula, especially a formula for inflation as experienced by government — concrete, for example — that disciplines spenders without creating unnecessary problems.
This, however, is just part of a larger questions that needs addressing: What should government do? What can be delegated to the private sector? And how and where should taxes be levied? For years, tax reform has been a stalking horse for expanding the sales tax to services, thereby ultimately giving politicians more to spend.
Reform the system, yes. But with an idea toward controlling spending, not making it easier.
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Stingrays, Lewinsky, free Whitney
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Get the counselors to the classrooms. Since “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray, alleged revenge-seekers have killed 10 of them. A two-part plan of action is needed. First, counselors. Then work up a lesson plan on stingray tolerance. Maybe cut 15 minutes out of the math class every Thursday to squeeze it in.
• On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) declared “violence is obsolete as a tool of our foreign policy.” These are the people who would lead us in an unsafe world.
• Some heed Lewis’ guidance. The opportunity existed with an armed drone to kill more than 100 Taliban fighters packed together at a funeral for one killed earlier in the day. The United States declined because of the setting. So now they live to kill another day. Terrorists live because somebody thinks the bad press worldwide will cause more harm than the live terrorists.
• A Vent author speculates that the pandas hired the Seegers’ restaurant PR guy. Nah. He’s working the Mark Taylor-Cathy Cox snit.
• Chicago Mayor Richard Daley vetoed the proposed “living wage” ordinance directed at Wal-Mart, contending it would drive businesses from the city. What a crazy thought — that government can legislate business out of existence or out of the market. This is not news to conservatives. • It’s kinda late in the Braves’ season. Shouldn’t we have a magic number by now?
• Monica Lewinsky may yet be revealed to have been an important historical figure. At a crucial time in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, she distracted President Clinton and therefore the country.
• In the Georgia House of Representatives, where new University System Chancellor Erroll B. Davis Jr. was being installed, Albany State University student Kendria Bailey sang an a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace,” a favorite of Southern funerals, so beautifully that it was darn rude of all there not to have been a corpse.
• Timothy Shelnut of Augusta, a member of the University System Board of Regents, spoke, too. You gotta love America. His father, a cotton mill worker, died at 83, never having learned to read or write. His mother has a third-grade education. He quit school in the 12th grade. And here he is speaking at the installation of a chancellor who presides over 35 colleges and universities. And the chancellor, Erroll Davis, was born into a world where the idea that a black boy would grow up to achieve this honor was too preposterous to imagine.
• And finally, from this event, there’s my new inspiration, a 10th-grader from Carver Early College high school in Atlanta. Givonte Latimore stood before the governor, the chancellor, the regents and the presidents of 35 colleges and legislators as a representative of the next generation of college students. And drew a blank in delivering his remarks. Yet he stood there, kept his composure and manfully worked his way through it. A classy performance in overcoming one of everybody’s worst fears. All others spoke less memorably.
• Eliminating the state income tax on retiree income, as Gov. Sonny Perdue proposes, is one shoe. Surely there’s another. Reform, maybe. Not that tax-services “reform” that Democratic policy wonks have pushed for years as a way to get more money for social programs.
• A law that criminalizes parents for choosing a better or more convenient school for their children is fundamentally wrong. Fayette County school officials have led police to arrest a mother and grandmother of three children for “false swearing,” a felony, for declaring the children to be residents of the county. The fix is to transfer the sum Clayton County would have spent to educate them to Fayette.
• Oh, how far I have fallen. I have an opinion about Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, whose relationship prompted a special exception to my 25-year Rule of Marriage. The rule: Never try to comprehend anything about the relationship of couples married for 25 years or more. With this exception: For the two of them, it’s a 14-year Rule. But for that, I’d say dump him and try to straighten out Osama bin Laden —who is allegedly obsessed with her.
Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Fridays, Sundays and Tuesdays.
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Chafee or conservative GOP?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The success of U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee against a conservative Republican primary challenger in Rhode Island on Tuesday was no real surprise. Though he had voted against the Bush tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and Sam Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, the First Lady and other prominent Republicans campaigned for him. The reason was simple and obvious. They think he can win in November, while conservative Steve Laffey couldn’t. And with six seats flipping Senate control, an in-house Democrat is far preferable to an out-house Democrat. It’s evidence of the “big tent” GOP, said White House spokesman Tony Snow.
The Georgia Republicans, who are just beginning to get their bearings as a governing party, are at the stage where they have to decide whether they want to govern as conservatives or “big tent” Republicans. In the mold of Chaffe, the big tent Republicans are comfortable with Big Government and see down-the-middle compromise as to its size, role and cost as a virtue. They’ll not fly the plane into the mountain, but gradually and incrementally, they’ll expand government’s cost and reach, though less they believe than the Democrats.
Conservative governance, on the other hand, would be to find ways to reduce its size and reach, while cultivating personal responsibility and self-reliance, thereby reducing dependence. (That sentence, incidentally, will be instantly understood by most conservatives and though jibberish by most liberals. We speak two languages in this country, and they’re not English and Spanish) Quickly, though, it means that conservatives use government to seed ideas like health and retirement savings accounts that offer incentive to make responsible choices. In a generation or two, Americans can grow out of the dependence we’ve grown into.
Is it better, therefore, to create the big-tent majority so that government’s growth and reach are slowed slightly over time — the Lincoln Chafee option — or to hold out for a conservative governing majority? Obviously getting into the position to govern is vital, even if it takes a dozen Chafees. But both parties can’t be just a jumble of politicans who grow government at slightly different rates.
Lots of red-blooded fiscal conservatives are talking of sitting this one out, or of voting for a third party. Both are folly. Do either and Nancy Pelosi is Speaker and Ted Kennedy matters.
Business and politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For business executives, politicians, generals, admirals and CEOs, Thinking Right today offers free career-saving public relations advice — though I note with some shallow pretension of sadness that it comes too late for Hewlett-Packard’s Chairwoman Patricia Dunn. She announced Tuesday that she is stepping down on Jan. 18 after revalations that investigators hired to find the source of media leaks impersonated at least one board member and journalists who cover H-P in acquiring their personal phone records. The director and suspected leakee, George Keyworth II, resigned too.
The free advice, highly valuable to all in positions of authority, is this: Don’t ever be this stupid. Obsessed efforts to find leakers, so tempting, are invitations to trouble. H-P executives have learned their lesson. “I am taking action to ensure that inappropriate investigative techniques will not be employed again,” said CEO Mark Hurd.
Two questions arise. One is whether those in business, or in some particular segment of it, like energy or finance, are less ethical than the rest of us?
The second concerns business and politics. The premise of much of the class/political warfare in this country is that Big Business, and certainly Big Oil, is corrupt and, furthermore, that it has undue influence in politics, especially on the GOP. Do you believe any or all of those allegations to be true — and if so, what should be done about it?
Three filters to honest conversation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Continuing a conversation begun yesterday, the question remains: When does the angry conversation end? Surprisingly, some contributors are ready to divide the dishes and send the Red States and Blue States their separate ways. Today, then, we step back.
In listening to anybody’s arguments, but especially the Left’s, on Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, the war on terror, treatment of detainees, the draft and the whole range of post-9/11 national security issues, three filters apply, screened in this order:
Is America’s best interest your highest concern? Even when listening to the angriest and most radical voices of the Left, the answer for me is almost always “yes.”
The second filter then is whether you believe we are in a war against terrorism and if so, are you committed to winning? This is where we begin to divide. Some view the response to 9/11 as a law enforcement matter and place the highest priority on capturing Osama bin Laden and others actually connected to the attack. For others, and I am in this category, it was the beginning of a long war that will have many phases, fronts, successes and setbacks. This is where the conversation also spins into orbits of vitriol about strategy in Iraq, why we’re there and how long we remain. This second filter is where much of the national dialogues grinds to a halt.
The final filter is this: Do you want to see George W. Bush succeed as president? If I’m led to believe your answer is “no” or “not particularly,” the mind begins to close to your arguments. We can talk about mistakes, about missed opportunities, about strategy and what key administration figures contribute or don’t, as one of yesteday’s posters suggested, but there has to be a “safe harbor” for those conversations. Otherwise, Bush supporters are doing nothing more than arming his adversaries. The beginning of the safe harbor is acknowledgment that Bush is the legitimate, fairly elected president of a country threatened by serious enemies — and his success is important to me and each of us and to America’s future.
Those are the filters for the Right to honest, good faith conversation. Any takers?
Politicians can still be honest, effective
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The first order of business in a political campaign, it now seems patently clear, is to convince the public that the other guy’s a crook. It feeds the cynicism of the times.
Barring some dramatic shift in public perception, Gov. Sonny Perdue will be re-elected. People like him and believe, for good reason, that he’s done a good job. His efforts are modernizing the state’s day-to-day business affairs, the humdrum stuff that has no political benefit whatsoever but is absolutely vital to a state that has grown the way country houses used to — one tacked-on addition at a time.
The state has long needed somebody to tend to the dull stuff: counting the cars, locating property, consolidating the leases, managing properties to lower costs, planning for the transition of a state work force that will lose to retirement 25 percent of its experienced employees over the next five years. If it’s done really well, nobody notices.
Though Perdue is Georgia’s first Republican governor, there’s been no upheaval. As James R. Lientz Jr., his chief operating officer, noted recently, 90 percent of the governor’s top staff has been recruited from the private sector and from other governments on the basis of national searches. “We have done this without fanfare, and there has been no bloodletting.” It is a diverse group, he said; “but we hired the best individual talent without regard to race and gender.”
The point is that Georgians never bounce elected officials they like and perceive to be doing a good job. Perdue comes across as competent and likable, a grandfatherly figure who projects warmth. Politicians like that don’t lose.
Ah, but corrupt politicians do.
This is the year when the Democratic master plan nationally was to run against a “culture of corruption” as exemplified by corporate scandal, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham and the general smear that Big Oil and Halliburton had undue influence in the Bush administration. But that strategy fell on hard times when U.S. Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) was caught on videotape accepting $100,000 from an FBI informant, cash later found hidden in the freezer of his New Orleans home.
So how do you defeat a grandfatherly figure people like? By throwing him into the “culture of corruption” mix.
It’s the strategy that, I’m convinced, was employed against President Bush after Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is always slow in its response to disasters. Moving substantial quantities of relief supplies quickly through devastation is slow business.
Bush’s strength, like Perdue’s, is that people like him and think his administration is competent. How to beat him? Convince the public that his administration’s not competent. So the usual slowness, combined with the utter failing of state and local officials, set the stage for the avalanche of criticism targeting Bush.
Perdue is not vulnerable there. In fact, though Katrina was not his disaster, he responded admirably, demonstrating both compassion and competence in dealing with evacuees.
The only opening opponents have, therefore, is to somehow convince voters that Perdue’s corrupt. The problem, however, is that he hasn’t been shown to have done anything scandalous. He sold inherited land and invested the proceeds out of state. That was done, he said, to avoid the charge that a decision he made or influenced as governor could affect a personal investment.
He deferred federal taxes by taking advantage of a provision of federal tax law that goes back 20 years. Democrats believe, but have not yet nailed the case, that he deferred state capital gains taxes improperly through routine state tax legislation altered in legislative committee for Perdue’s benefit.
The problem with Perdue’s transaction, and with Republican charges that Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor’s family has improperly benefited from property leases with the state, is that they don’t yet smell. In Taylor’s case, leases are competitively priced, and there’s no evidence that they were awarded on the basis of insider dealing or favoritism.
Like Perdue’s land transactions, they’re fair game for reporting and most assuredly ought to be brought into the open. But the case is not yet made that there’s anything improper about either.
One’s launched in desperation. The other’s tit-for-tat. Both feed the cynicism of the times.
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How does angry conversation end?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Five year ago this morning, I was at a Metro Atlanta Red Cross planning conference, seated near the front, ready to make a presentation that was minutes away. The giant screen before us went to CNN. We sat there, with the rest of America, and watched in horror as the plane hit the Twin Tower.
A few people left the room. I continued to watch the screen. Minutes passed. The scene of destruction, and the second plane, marked this moment, just as the JFK assassination had decades earlier, as one America would never forget. The planning conference halted. I rose and saw a nearly empty room behind me.
Another image, days later, from a blood-donation center where Metro Atlantans had gathered by the hundreds to do one of the few things they could think of that might help the suffering. In particular, I remember a young college-age woman whose thin, frail, underweight body struck me as having no blood to spare, standing in line to offer her blood.
That feeling lingered for weeks. Everybody wanted to do good. For weeks and maybe for as long as four or five months, partisanship stood aside. But then something happened. The sniping returned, and with it the finger-pointing and the bitterness of the 2000 presidential election. It returned and now has grown to the point where everybody talks and nobody listens.
I’ll admit it. Often I read other commentators whose views I know well and say dismissively: “Yea, yea, Bush bad. No WMD. So get out of Iraq and elect Democrats.” For me, the test is whether they ever supported the war on terror or whether they saw it as 9/11 police action that diverted attention and resources from efforts to build the welfare state.
For the left and the right, these questions on the 5th anniversary: How does this angry conversation end? How does the debate move beyond the Bush-lied vs. stay-the-course exchange? And what have we learned about ourselves and our nation in the five years since that awful morning? By the way, where were you then?
No time for Americans to be impatient
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the days leading up to Monday’s milestone anniversary of the attacks that took America into the war on terrorism, President Bush spoke to the nation with sparkling clarity on the nature of the threat and the enemy we are fighting.
In another era, it might have been enough. Now, though, the nation has grown so polarized that it’s not certain any evidence will be sufficient to convince the determined left that dominates the national Democratic Party. For every American, for every voter especially, it boils down to a single question: Who do you trust to keep America safe?
On Wednesday, Bush introduced the country to 14 terrorists, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and “the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11th, 2001,” along with “those believed to be responsible for the attack on the USS Cole and an operative believed to be involved in the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.”
He presented them as an anniversary payment to “the families of those murdered that day [who] have waited patiently for justice.” And he presented them, too, to the Congress that will decide the rules for the military commissions charged with imposing justice.
Asking Congress to do anything that offers opportunity for political posturing two months before an election is ordinarily a guarantee that nothing of substance will come from it. But in this instance, Bush framed the issue brilliantly.
Congress knows, and the American people are reminded, that in authorizing military commissions for terrorists, as the U.S. Supreme Court directed, the construct of the tribunals may well determine whether the outcome is justice or eternal legal wrangling. With the 14, Congress and the nation can see that the issues are not mere legal abstractions involving proceedings for those who are caught up in a sweep of the battlefield.
Two Bush speeches of the past week are worth reading. One is his White House remarks of last Wednesday. The other was his address here on Thursday to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. Both are available at www.whitehouse.gov/news.
In each, he attempted to address questions raised by the war’s opponents, including the mission in Iraq. “The fighting has been difficult and it has been bloody, and some say that Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror. The terrorists disagree … Al-Qaida leaders have declared that Baghdad will be the capital of the new caliphate that they wish to establish across the broader Middle East … The terrorists know that the outcome of the war on terror will depend on the outcome in Iraq — and so to protect our own citizens, the free world must succeed in Iraq.”
The war on terror, he said, “is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century. And we’re only in the opening stages.”
That is the truth. The question, though, has always been whether Americans have the patience for wars that, five years after Sept. 11, are still in the opening stages. The temptation is to think not.
That would, of course, be a disaster for the nation. However premature abandonment of Iraq is presented — as redeployment, early withdrawal or repositioning — the defeat will be starkly evident to the entire world. This nation, then, begins a long journey into appeasement as national security policy.
One of the great national blunders of the past 30 years was to abandon the draft. It had its problems, of course, with fairness and with military usefulness. But it forced young men to come to terms with their own values and to become a part of something more important than the individual. Many of them hated the military. But in an important and necessary way, it connected them to the country.
Now this war is treated as a Super Bowl. Every commentator is an armchair general advising the secretary of defense and the president on the appropriate strategy for the war, all the while insisting that the “mission” be defined so that we know whether we are halfway there, a third or some other checklist number. And we position ourselves, too, as arbitrators, almost impartial, determining which threat is legitimate and which isn’t.
The danger here is that America will quit too early because an impatient populace demands instant results. There’s no checklist for Iraq. When the young democracy can survive on its own, it’s time to leave. Not before.
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CDC reports, Streisand, public schools
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Show me a Southerner, governor or not, who won’t buy the adjoining dirt and I’ll show you one who’s broke. Gov. Sonny Perdue bought about 100 acres next to his Houston County home in 2004. What does that tell us? That he wasn’t broke. Nothing more.
• Don’t back down. Voter ID is a legitimate requirement. No matter the delays partisans entice from judges, the state should persist until all are swept aside.
• Some Christian conservatives, upset about what their children are being taught, flee public schools. That shouldn’t be necessary. Every classroom should be broadcast over the Internet for parents or anybody else. There’d certainly be far less temptation to preach to children values that are at odds with their parents’.
• Another sad Katrina legacy: Every tropical storm now is a major preoccupation.
• I’m embarrassed to say: I don’t have an opinion about Michael Vick. I’m told everybody does. I do have an opinion about Fulton Sheriff Myron Freeman. That guy can flat pass the ball.
• Most every report I read about that originates with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta sounds like something that could have come out of a blue-state liberal arts college. The latest examines radio advertising by the alcohol industry. The nanny state has finger-pointers aplenty. Chart disease, not radio airplay.
• Notice to Atlanta panhandlers: Don’t expect handouts from liberals in November. They’ll all be tapped out. Tickets to the Barbra Streisand performance here on Nov. 2 cost up to $752. Or up to $5,000 per person for VIP packages. Surely there’s a federal program available that buys tickets for the homeless.
• Dang straight. The place to find oil is where geologists believe it to be, as demonstrated by this week’s revelation that Chevron and two partners had discovered what could be the biggest oil find since Prudhoe Bay in Alaska almost 40 years ago. Open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, too.
• Want to frighten the children? Tell them, as the Wall Street Journal did, who’ll be running the U.S. House if Democrats take it over in November. There’s Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a cast of characters that includes a tax committee chairman, Charles Rangel, who opposed President Bush’s tax cuts, a possible intelligence committee chairman, Alcee Hastings, who as a federal judge was impeached and convicted of lying to beat a bribery charge, and a Judiciary Committee chairman, John Conyers, who looks to impeach President Bush.
• The telling number about Georgia Power Co.’s so-called “green energy” offering is how many liberals sign up. It costs more to produce, so the price is higher. The company estimates that 0.4 percent of its customers will sign up; nationally, it’s about 1.5 percent. Liberals want companies to embrace their environmental agendas — on your dollar. They don’t want to pay extra themselves.
• Here’s a sign-off for CBS’ new anchor: “Thanks for watching our opinion of the news. I’m Katie Couric. Good night.” Simple, honest.
• MARTA has two finalists for its top job. One guy, Richard McCrillis, is here — and even Ernie Brooks, president of MARTA’s union, likes him. I favor getting good people, bringing them along and leaving them alone. That would draw me to MARTA veteran McCrillis, who has a degree in mathematics and believes in piggy banking the profits. Besides, the other guy’s boss says it “would be a tragic loss to Los Angeles” to lose him. Some praise is a bit too much.
• Duh. Catch-and-release, a border security practice applied to non-Mexicans, is being discontinued. Mexicans could be returned immediately. Non-Mexicans were detained, given a court date and released. Most vanished into the U.S. population. Now they’re detained. Enforcement messages matter. For the three-month period ending Aug. 6, the number of non-Mexicans detained was 1,661, down from 10,621 during the same period last year.
• Now we know where Cynthia McKinney got it. The wackiness. In Japan. An exhibit in the national military museum there accuses FDR of engineering war with Japan to strengthen the U.S. economy following the failure of his New Deal, reports the Financial Times. After objection from a Japanese political commentator, it’s being removed.
Bush dumb, you say? Look again.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While the dumb and stupid laugh at jokes about how dumb George W. Bush is, the reality is that while fools are sniggering, Bush wins. A good example was Wednesday’s announcement that 14 seriously bad guys who had been in CIA custody around the world would be transferred to Guantanamo for trial. Those seriously bad guys included Ramzi Binalshibh, an alleged would-be hijacker on Sept. 11, 2001, and suspected terrorists responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
While they’re to be afforded some Geneva Convention legal protections, there’s no recognition — nor should there be — that they’re entitled to POW status. They will be tried by a military commission and will surely be eligible for the death penalty. Bush could not have been clearer on who they are: “The terrorists who declared war on America represent no nation. They defend no territory. And they wear no uniform. They do not mass armies on borders or flotillas of warships on the high seas.” And more: “They live quitely among their victims. They conspire in secret. And then they strike without warning.” Terrorists. “These aren’t common criminals or bystanders accidentally swept up on the battlefield.”
With the 14 seriously bad guys awaiting trial, Bush asks Congress to clear up the impairment the U.S. Supreme Court imposed on treatment and trials by providing specific authorization and clarity. Bush flatly denies that the U.S. engages in torture — “it’s against our laws and against our values” — but he preserves both the CIA prisons and the right to use unspecified techniques known to the CIA’s inspector general and key Congressional leaders to gain information from terrorists.
So what’s the dumb Bush done? He’s given up nothing of value to terrorists. He’s given Congress a bill that comes attached with the suspected deeds of 14 seriously bad guys so that those tempted to play games for political advantage are dealing with faces and cases, not legal abstractions. And he makes clear that the obligation of Congress is to provide clarity and protection to the troops who handle the evil-doers. Not bad for a fellow constantly under-estimated by critics and enemies.
Katie, you won too late. Anchors don’t matter.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Once upon a time, my news world was the daily newspaper and the evening news. Even before Walter Cronkite, there was Douglas Edwards, a friendly button-down fellow who could have sold us an insurance policy, buried our dead and principaled our schools, all with our complete confidence. Douglas Edwards, like most of his era, liked America, thought we were good guys, and expressed alarm only when alarm was warranted. If he had an agenda, it was to see us all do well.
The big news Tuesday night was that Katie Couric ascended to the chair that on the Wooten’s first TV was occupied by Edwards. And thereafter, Cronkite and Dan Rather. Edwards owned me. Cronkite had me until Vietnam. The opinionated Rather failed to recognize, or at least to acknowledge, his own biases. Sometime in the process, I mostly quit watching the Big Three’s evening news.
Comes now Katie Couric, whose debut is accompanied by considerable promotion and some anticipation. First woman to anchor the Big Three’s big newscast. My sense of it is that it hardly matters anymore who reads the news on the three networks. The innocence we had, and the trust, are gone. Over time, and certainly with the arrival of cable TV and the Internet, we began to see what wasn’t there and how stories were being spun. Immigration, for example. The Media Research Center analyzed 309 network news stories on immigration in March, April and May. Almost twice as many voices (504) advocated looser immigation laws as advocated border control (257), analysts found. The majority of the country would have gone the other way. The GOP’s “conservative” base was addressed scornfully 89 times — as in Bush was split from his base on the issue — but only three stories , all on ABC, mentioned the word “liberal,” said Brent Bozell., the center’s founder.
Today’s question: Do anchors matter? Do you trust them? If not, when did you lose it? And, finally, is there anything the networks can do to regain the trust they’ve lost, especially with conservatives? Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I want Douglas Edwards back. I don’t want to know what anchors think. I don’t want to know their politics. And most of all, I want to believe that they’re pulling for America. Naive? Then I am.
Frat boys of the Old South
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OK, I don’t want a fraternity house in my neighborhood either. But when a proud, old fraternity like Kappa Alpha Order, ousted from its Athens home by University of Georgia officials, proposes to rebuild in a mostly run-down rental area, it should be nothing more than a routine development issue. (Read the original story.)
Ah, but… The Kappa Alpha Order is an Old South fraternity where brothers dress for ceremonial occasions in Confederate uniforms, cavort with the Confederate battle flag, and live in house designed to look like an Old South plantation. That’s half the story. The other half is that the new home they plan — on a site purchased by 13 KA alumni for $2.7 million nine months ago, is in a neighborhood that was “once a center for black professionals, ” writes the AJC’s Andrea Jones. Though, as she notes, few of them remain.
A black preacher, the Rev. Ben Rivers, invokes the weapons of class and race to declare that “they are using their wealth to rape the community, not make it better.” The house design and location evoke memories of “pain and abject poverty,” says he.
Unless Rivers and others wish to buy the property and compensate the fraternity for the delay, KA should proceed as planned. There’s nothing illegitimate about the fraternity, its costumes, rituals or heritage. The issue may be that the neighbors don’t want a rowdy frat house in the neighborhood. Fair enough. White neighbors didn’t want Sigma Nu to relocate to their neighborhood, either. Ah, that I will live to see the day that race is not invoked in every dispute where skin colors differ, and simple little zoning disputes are simple little zoning disputes.
Public pension system needs an overhaul
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Outrage of the week? Try this: Former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, whose administration was a cesspool of civic corruption, will collect $3,652.84 a month from the wallets of his administration’s victims while serving 30 months in federal prison.
Former City Councilman Ira Jackson suns on Hilton Head while collecting $5,124.46 per month from the public purse. This is a guy whose full-time service as aviation commissioner lasted less than three years, who was convicted of 130 counts of mail fraud, accepting bribes and tax evasion. A local businessman, Dan Paradies, was convicted of giving Jackson payoffs in excess of $1 million.
Less than three years of full-time employment — on top of 21 years as a part-time city councilman. The payoff? A public pension of $5,124.46 per month, even though the service was corrupt.
Buddy Fowlkes, who held the part-time office as city councilman for 32 years, was convicted of accepting bribes from an airport concessionaire. He now suns on Marco Island, Fla., with a city pension of $1,675.86 per month.
Former state school Superintendent Linda Schrenko, who reports to federal prison a week from Monday, will collect in excess of $5,600 per month from Georgia taxpayers while serving eight years for defrauding those who pay doubly for her upkeep.
There is a way to stop this. And, in fact, had Schrenko come along now, her offense would have caused her to lose pension benefits. A state retirement law that went into effect on July 1, 1985, declares that any public employee convicted of a job-related crime is entitled only to reimbursement, without interest, of contributions the employee made to the retirement system. It applies, however, only to those who “first or again” become public employees after July 1, 1985.
It is equally vile that part-time politicians — members of school boards, city councils, county commissions and the Legislature — are able to tap into a pension system created for those who earn their full livelihood from public employment. By taking a full-time job on top of a part-time career, Jackson — and a long line of state politicians before him — are able to get pension payouts as though they had worked full time for government for their entire careers.
Legislators, in another of the mid ’80s reforms that came because of public outrage at scandalous abuses of state retirement systems, agreed that legislators who took office after Dec. 31, 1985, would not be able to transfer part-time service from the Legislative Retirement System to other systems for full-time benefits after Jan. 1, 1986.
The General Assembly needs desperately to do two things. One is to apply the law prohibiting full-time benefits for part-time service to all state and local pension systems. The other, and the more important reform, is to take steps now to protect both employees and taxpayers from temptation and abuse.
The ideal solution is first to guarantee that benefits will be paid as they now exist and are promised to all existing employees in the Teachers’ Retirement System, the Employees Retirement System of Georgia and the dozen or more smaller retirement systems the state maintains, and then to close them to new hires.
In the place of the defined benefit plan now offered, the state should create a defined contribution plan, something like a 401(k). New employees would immediately own both their contribution and the state’s, plus interest. When they leave, the benefits go with them.
The system that exists now is a magnet for abuse. Retirement laws affecting hundreds of thousands of employees and retirees are routinely rewritten for the benefit of well-connected individuals based on the changed circumstances of their lives.
And, as with Schrenko, the interpretation has been that if an employee works one day during any period that any benefit exists, it becomes a lifetime contractual benefit. The General Assembly could change that, too, by writing a general law declaring that a retirement benefit is not a contractual right. It’s not with Social Security.
It is truly offensive that working men and women, waitresses, maids and janitors alike, are forced to pay taxes to support lavish pensions, often unearned, for politicians who are additionally corrupt. The General Assembly can change that. And it should. If they stay honest, give them what their contributions earned — and no more.
- Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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Middle East, spelling bee, Carter’s plan
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
T hinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• A U.N. peacekeeping force in Southern Lebanon is to peacekeeping as a canary is to mine safety. Both indicate when conditions aren’t safe, but neither actually does anything to alleviate the problem.
• Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says the cease-fire, with a call for 15.000 U.N. peacekeepers, is a major diplomatic success. It was, too. Just not for Israel. His ministering time draws nigh.
• GOP legislators are squeezing the Georgia High School Athletic Association to set rules for athletic practices in hot, humid weather. A difference between liberal and conservative legislators is that conservatives legislate as a last resort, while liberals legislate because they believe nobody else has good sense. School officials do.
• No bigger home-schooling fan exists in the media, but when an 8-year-old wins a spelling bee by correctly spelling the word “mail,” there’s the c-l-u-e that the competition’s not t-u-f-f enough.
• The Bush administration urges the U.S. Supreme Court to end the practice of drawing school attendance boundaries to achieve an arbitrary racial mix. The practice, employed by a thousand districts nationwide, should be halted. Schools desperately need to get back to the job they do best — academics — and leave the social engineering to parents. And to Hollywood, of course.
• John Mark Karr is to the JonBenet murder what Al Gore is to the Internet. They didn’t do it. Thought they did, but they didn’t.
• Think the bad guys don’t read American politics? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad challenges President Bush to a televised debate on world issues. Now where do you suppose he’d get the idea that he’s smarter than Bush? The American left, of course.
• U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) gives the party of fiscal conservatives a bad name — not that he or a number of others in the party are actual fiscal conservatives. His previously secret “hold” on legislation to create a searchable database on the $2.5 trillion in government contracts, grants, loans and other financial information, has been outed. Go home, Ted. Quit. Go.
• How can Americans — any and all Americans — delude themselves into believing they’re not better off here than they would be anywhere else in the world? In Cuba, 300,000 families are getting new Chinese-made refrigerators. “Actually, they’re quite expensive,” said one purchaser. “I’m paying the equivalent of $286. My wife and I make about $25 a month. So, like most people, we’re financing it over a 10-year period at 10 percent interest.” Another, 42, said, “This is the first time I see a brand- new fridge.”
• Welfare reform’s lesson is immigration’s. Its success came because it sent a clear, unmistakable message: You’re expected to work and to move off the dole. The message, combined with a few incentives, changed expectations — and behaviors.
• A “grim milestone,” it’s called. And it is. American military losses in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon surpass the death toll in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, and next month combat operations in Iraq will pass the length of time U.S. forces fought in Europe in World War II. The temptation is to ask: And this proves what? World War II veterans of the 4th Marine Division gathered here last weekend. One of their battles was Iwo Jima. Some perspective: 2,972 died on Sept. 11. In Iraq and Afghanistan, 2,941. In less than a month on Iwo Jima, 6,891.
• I’m not into golf, but even I can appreciate the dream foursome that celebrity golfer Buck Lanford, a Fox 5 sports anchor, would assemble: Bobby Jones, Ronald Reagan and his 3-year-old son, Will. Throw in Furman Bisher for conversation and I’d caddy.
• Have the Michael Moore-Howard Dean Democrats done a party swap-out with Mexico? Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the defeated presidential candidate in Mexico, urges fellow citizens not to recognize the winner and vows to create a parallel leftist government in the streets.
• Jimmy Carter agrees to host a meeting with former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. Stand by for a joint statement condemning the Bush administration.
• OK, I can’t have the IKEA PR pro. Or the Atlantic Station spin-sters. But can’t I just borrow the Seeger’s restaurant promoter for a few hours? He/she’s real good.
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