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July 2007
Earmarks may get you one step forward — but four backward
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s 1776! Celebrate? No. Express frustration. Anger. Despair, even.
The inability of politicians to wean themselves from earmarks, the single-member-designated appropriations that brought us Alaska’s famed “bridge to nowhere,” persists, despite repeated signals from fiscal conservatives. Republican politicians, even those considered secure, should take heed of the 10th Congressional District of Georgia, where physician Paul Broun of Athens came from 23 points down to defeat shoo-in “incumbent” Jim Whitehead of Evans two weeks ago.
Whitehead wasn’t the actual incumbent. U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood was until his death in February. But Whitehead had aura, money and organization. His defeat was a shocker.
Earmarks weren’t his downfall, nor a factor in the race. The point here is that voters are in what should be for politicians an angst-inducing mood and fiscal conservatives hate earmarks.
Even in Japan the frustrated voter phenomenon is seen. The incumbent Liberal Democratic Party sustained a crushing defeat in weekend elections, with “household names in the party falling one after another before opposition newcomers,” reported New York Times correspondent Norimitsu Onishi from Tokyo.
Earmarks and their persistence in the face of overwhelmingly negative publicity last year help to set a mood among the electorate that in Washington special interest provisions and pork have irredeemably gummed up the works. And despite flipping both the House and Senate last fall, nothing’s changed.
Democrats, upon gaining a majority in January, swore off the pork. Publicly at least. Behind the scenes, though, as the Los Angeles Times reports, they’re back. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid touted the elimination of earmarks in a $363.5 billion spending bill. The day after the bill was signed, the Times reported, he started lobbying agencies to fund the same projects the Senate had just stripped out.
The 1776 that’s not to be celebrated is not independence year, but the number of earmarks individual members of the U.S. House of Representatives slipped into last week’s defense appropriations bill. A 19-term Republican, C. W. “Bill” Young, who represents a coastal district of Florida stretching north and south of St. Petersburg, led the pack with 59 earmarks. He was followed by Democrat John Murtha, a 37-year veteran who represents a western Pennsylvania district in the vicinity of Johnstown and Pittsburgh, with 46 earmarks.
Clearly, the old guys don’t get it. But surprisingly some of the young ones don’t either. U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah is in the top 10 members of the House in defense appropriations bill earmarks, at 26. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco tossed in 15. Two Georgia Democrats had double-digit additions, with Sanford Bishop at 18 and Jim Marshall at 10. All three Georgians have major defense installations in their districts. Kingston and Bishop are on the Appropriation Committee’s defense subcommittee chaired by Murtha and Marshall is on Armed Services.
“On the earmarks debate, my philosophy is that you need to have sunshine,” Kingston said Monday, “you need to have scrutiny, you need to be able to tell people what you are putting in the budget and be able to justify it from California to Maine and back home, as well.” He continued:
“I’m not against earmarks, but they do need the scrutiny of the debate and that’s a good thing.”
Kingston said his earmarks come from requests offered up by the military affairs committees that support installations in his district, and some are for “gadgets” that the Pentagon thinks worthwhile, but doesn’t choose to include.
An example, he said, is unmanned aircraft, like the Predator, widely used in Afghanistan and Iraq, originally surfaced as an earmark inserted in the appropriations bill by Jerry Lewis, the second-ranking Republican on Murtha’s subcommittee. “Defense earmarks are a little less pork-barrelly and a lot more that the Defense Department is divided on what to do,” said Kingston, while visiting Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta.
Justifiable or not, earmarks are to members of Congress what roads are to county commissioners. Each one makes a friend at the risk of losing two — the two who paid the bill. And maybe two more — the two who read about the Road to Nowhere and went nuts.
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To be deported: Mom
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Is Maria Rivera a victim? She is an illegal immigrant from Mexico, a married mother of three, sitting in the Cobb County Jail awaiting deportation. Her offenses, initially described as driving without a license or proof of insurance and with an expired tag, are somewhat more serious, as is later revealed. She was previously deported for illegal entry in March, 2006. She turned around and came back the same year.
She perfectly illustrates the choice the nation has to make in determining how to deal with the problem of illegal immigration. Efforts to fashion a comprehensive bill on dealing with illegals collapsed last month because much of the country had no confidence that Congress or the Bush Administration would secure the borders.
The Senate last week took a step in that direction, adding $3 billion to the Homeland Security funding bill to bring the Border Patrol to 23,000 agents by 2012, finish the 700 miles of border fencing and 300 miles of vehicle barriers, double detention space to 45,000 beds and to add the sophisticated technology intended to bring the U.S.-Mexico boundary under operational control within two years. Bush had threatened to veto the additional spending, but may relent, since it passed 89-1.
The $3 billion would also be used to pursue those who overstay visas and the 632,000 illegals who have ignored deportation orders.
Cobb is doing its part.The Sheriff’s department is checking the status of inmates in the county jail. In four weeks, working with U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement agents, they’ve interviewed 86 inmates, putting immigration holds on 68 and filling out the paperwork to begin deportation proceedings against 42. It’s kind of shocking, actually, that of 86 interviewed, almost half are readily subject to deportation for illegal entry.
Undoubtedly some or even many of those subject to deportation will be like Maria Rivera, a parent with children in this country. Any born here are U.S. citizens.
But the fact is that if immigration law is to have any meaning, all illegals who come to the attention of law enforcement officials should be deported. During the recent national debate, legalization advocates made two points repeatedly. One is that by failing to secure borders and to police employers who hired them, the U.S. had sent an invitational message that illegal entry is OK. The other is that an easy route to legalization was the only alternative to “rounding up” 12 or 20 million illegals.
There is a third way. It’s what Cobb County and other law enforcement agencies across the country are beginning to do: Deal with illegals when they break the law. Shocking? Hardly. There’s no round-up, but Cobb’s action takes away the argument that intentionally failing to enforce immigration law is an implied invitation to illegals.
America’s children need a mom, dad — not entitlement
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As routinely as the coming of the dog days of summer, another of those interminable “studies” that purport to show that “Georgia” has failed children landed on the desks of reporters last week, prompting the usual grim-faced accounts that, by golly, the state ranks “among the worst … for taking care of its children.”
Georgia has about 2.25 million children under the age of 18. Of those, 16,000 are in the custody of the Department of Human Resources and, on a daily basis, about 20,500 are in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice. But Kids Count 2007, a selective collection of data assembled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation for the benefit of lazy journalists across the nation, largely ignores the most significant factor in determining the well-being of the 2.2 million children in Georgia: whether they have a mother and father in the home.
While noting that 35 percent of children in Georgia live in single-parent homes and that 39.2 percent of all births in 2004 were to unmarried women, its guidance on reducing the child poverty rate focuses not on marriage or fathers, but on government.
Its five most effective strategies for reducing the child poverty rate, according to a 2005 report, are to build political support to raise the minimum wage, expand programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and unemployment insurance, food stamps, health insurance, as well as incentivizing savings and more rigorous child support enforcement from men who can pay.
There’s no question that many or all of the foundation’s strategies have merit. And it should be noted, too, that its strategies report does take note that “children who do not live with both parents are much more likely to live in poverty than other children.”
But as a rich foundation with the financial resources to direct attention to any solution whatsoever that would better the lives of children, it skims over marriage to focus on indicators that suggest government has failed or is responsible for low birth-weight babies, for example, or infant mortality or child deaths.
Among its indicators of whether a state is “taking care of its children” are also teen deaths, births to teens, high school dropouts, teens not attending school or working, children in families where no parent has full-time, year-round employment, children in poverty, and children in single-parent families. All are relevant indicators of something.
Laura Beavers, research associate for the foundation, acknowledges that the annual report is directed to government. “We hope our information is used by leaders to make changes for kids,” she said. “The reality is government officials and the bureaucrats are the people who use or information the most, but they are certainly not our only audience.”
The reality is that 69.3 percent of black children, 46.4 of Hispanic and 24.5 percent of white children in 2004 were born to unmarried women.
Nothing government or any foundation or advocacy group can do to create a social safety net for children will do more for their well-being than giving them a mother and father in the home.
But yet the foundation’s emphasis is on government. Black leaders, facing an epidemic that is destroying the lives of children, are unusually silent, the greatest failing of this generation of leadership. Hispanic leaders, too, look away.
The National Urban League, at its annual convention last week, launched a campaign “for a stronger and more prosperous urban America.” As with the Casey Foundation’s Kids Count emphasis, the solution is government. Expanded childhood education and insurance and affordable child care recommendations constitute its recommendations for children. As with the Casey Foundation, it would raise the minimum wage and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, along with other suggestions for expanded government.
Listen to America. Children have no voice pleading for the right to be born with a mother and father in the home. They have adults in leadership positions railing, rallying and re-enacting. But rarely do they see, hear or read of influential voices, black, white or Hispanic, pushing for the cultural change that would do far more to create healthy children than all government programs ever can.
• Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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Of trailers, cleavage and Vick — oh my
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic:
• Almost two years after Hurricane Katrina, 78,000 house and travel trailers are still occupied. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is being accused by a Democratic congressman, Henry Waxman of California, of ignoring the dangers of living in trailers that reportedly “may be contaminated with dangerously high levels of formaldehyde gas.” During those two years, probably more than 300,000 homes have been built. But it’s easier to bash the administration by concentrating on the Katrina trailers. Congress doesn’t govern. It politics.
• More politics: The House Judiciary Committee’s party-line vote to approve contempt citations against the president’s chief of staff and former counsel for refusing to testify in its fishing expedition into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. They’re political appointees who can be fired at any time; Bill Clinton fired almost every one of them when he took office.
• Headline: “Poor families run out of rental options as costs eat up checks.” Featured is a 23-year-old mother of two, in a story suggesting that taxpayers are providing too little housing assistance to the poor. And the father or fathers contributing? No mention. Men don’t matter in stories about poverty, crime or the suffering of children.
• It is simply amazing that DeKalb County would limit the options of parents exercising their right under No Child Left Behind to flee bad schools to either technical/vocation schools or online courses. If the Georgia General Assembly ever needed an incentive to offer parents of children in nonperforming public schools real choice — vouchers —DeKalb should provide it. Bad options are no options. It’s what educators do to defeat reforms they hate.
• Women excoriate male reporters and commentators for making a to-do over what women — but not men — in politics and business wear. So what dunder-headed man went on and on about Hillary Clinton wearing a dress on the Senate floor that revealed a hint of cleavage? Oops, it’s a female, Robin Givhan. Come to think of it, just about everybody writing about what political women wear is female.
• One lesson from the Genarlow Wilson case: Hire media-savvy spinmeisters as lawyers. There are two court systems in America. One does law. The other does emotion. Sometimes the latter trumps the former.
• Henceforth when attending arts and crafts festivals, my new line — stolen from a New York arts dealer attending the National Black Arts Festival — will be this: “If that were a Jackson Pollock that would be going for $10 million.”
• The federal minimum wage got a 70-cent hike this week to $5.85. But, as the AJC reports, “it’s relatively hard to find people earning” the $5.15 wage in metro Atlanta. The real minimum wage is zero. If your skills are not worth $5.85, you’re unemployed. And if you’re still making minimum wage after a few months, you need to rethink school.
• If U.S. Sen. Joe Biden had a real shot at getting the Democratic presidential nomination, I’d be concerned. But fortunately he’ll never be in a position to follow through on his willingness to commit American troops to humanitarian police missions. “Where we can, America must. Why Darfur? Because we can.” Once again, some problem are the United Nations’ or the European Union’s or regional players. Others — those that pose a threat to us — are ours.
• Michael Vick needs legal/public relations help. Somebody better be gathering information that those fighting dogs bit children, snapped at grandmothers or were engaged in consensual misbehavior, or Michael Vick is in real trouble. Better yet, his campaign should make it clear that whatever happened between him and those two dogs was consensual.
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No way to run a railroad
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today’s assignment for Thinking Right contributors is to help this nation solve its dilemma with rail — Amtrak in particular.
Over the objections of President Bush and House conservatives, the U.S. House has rejected efforts to cut taxpayer subsidies for Amtrak. The vote was 268-153, enough to uphold the promised veto by President Bush. The bill obligates $1.5 billion to Amtrak, with $925 million for track and train improvements and for debt service.
The key vote came on an amendment by U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a good fiscal conservative, to end Amtrak’s taxpayer subsidy of almost $500 million. On its most inefficient money-losing routes, taxpayers provide subsidies of more than $400 per passenger, he said, arguing that cross-country train travel no longer makes economic sense. He lost 328-94.
The biggest money-losing route is the Sunset Limited train between New Orleans and Los Angeles, which loses 62 cents per passenger mile, said U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas). He lost a vote to kill it, 283-139.
Amtrak has survived the same way that manufacturers, contractors and others relying on Congress for taxpayer dollars do: by touching as many states and congressional districts as possible. Amtrak operates trains in almost every state, but continues at the public trough despite the operating inefficiencies of cross-country trains and high labor costs.
The questions today are these: Have you ridden a train in the past five years? How many times have you gone to a city — New Orleans or Washington, for example — where trains would have been an attractive option. If plane and train fare are equal, which would you take? Do cross-country or regional-service trains have a future? Would you pay a premium to ride the train. And finally, do you object — as I do — to the taxpayer subsidy?
You have 20 minutes for this quiz. Grading will be on a curve. Mid-South Philosopher is designated test monitor. No iPods, cell-phones or other electronic devices. Time starts now.
Cobb ‘targeting’ immigrants? Nonsense.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For decades now state and local governments have been stymied in their efforts to police public spaces — downtown streets and parks, for example — because those efforts prompted allegations that they were “targeting” some particular segment of the population.
Cobb County commissioners faced those same allegations Tuesday night in an effort to crack down on a growing neighborhood blight — single-family houses that had become multiple- or extended-family dwellings similar to boarding houses. In one instance reported by the AJC, a family of 10 from Mexico — including a husband and wife, their two children and two of the wife’s brothers, one of whom has a wife and two children — lives in the 1,511-square-foot home. Neighbors complained that the driveway and front yard had become a parking lot.
At its Tuesday night meeting, commissioners unanimously approved a new law requiring each adult to have 390 square feet of living space without county approval. The same would apply to each car visible from the street. No more than six adults, and only two unrelated, are allowed to live in a home, provided each has the 390 square feet of living space. The previous law required 50-square-feet of sleeping space. Critics contend the new law targets immigrants.
But as reporters noted other communities, including Athens, home of the University of Georgia, have similar local laws on overcrowded houses.
Cobb commissioners did the right thing. One rowdy house or one that appears to have gone to seed begins the process of destroying a neighborhood. One of the reasons the Five Points area of downtown Atlanta has been virtually abandoned by the banking, business and legal communities is that the city could never muster the will to police the streets of derelicts so that they became kind of an urban campground. Any attempt to do so brought forth protests that officials were targeting specific populations. The result was that business and people with options fled, allowing the dominant order of the streets to become the lowest conduct tolerated. Now it’s an open-air lounge for the unemployed and the unemployable.
The good news in the Cobb action is that public bodies may be regaining their confidence and their senses and are able to withstand the knee-jerk “targeting” criticism to do what’s best for their communities.
Georgia should redeem itself; roll out new Northern Arc
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The most joyous news of the past week was not that dogfighting had rescued the U.S. Senate from the embarrassment of its Iraqi slumber party stunt, giving full throat to West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, who orated for 25 minutes on its obvious evils — dogfighting, not Iraq.
No, it was not the diversion that uplifted the spirits and reinvigorated sagging optimism that public policy-makers will improve the quality of our lives.
The joyous news was that the state Department of Transportation is within two or three months of identifying an east-west transportation corridor across North Georgia. To “have to go to the south [and cross 1-285] to have to get back to the north” is “ridiculous,” said DOT Board Member Sam M. Wellborn of Columbus, speaking an undeniable truth.
A link between I-75 and I-85 across North Georgia is the state’s most important congestion-relief, economic development and quality-of-life opportunity. The failure to construct the 59-mile Northern Arc is one of the legacy failings of state leadership, including most recently Gov. Sonny Perdue, who took an ill-considered position opposing it during the 2002 gubernatorial campaign. But he was merely continuing an old Georgia leadership tradition.
More than two decades ago the good ol’ boys in the General Assembly, realizing that the day would soon come when political power shifted in response to metro Atlanta’s population explosion, developed a priority-funding list for a statewide four-lane highway network, called “developmental highways.”
Originally developed by the DOT as part of a campaign to boost the gas tax, it put into law a priority list for a $4.5 billion 2,700-mile network of four-lane highways to bring new industry and prosperity to Georgia.
The very last project on the list was the Outer Perimeter, a 200-mile loop some 15-20 miles outside I-285. As Georgians should now recognize, it was one of the old guard’s monumental mistakes. While taxpayers built four-lanes across parts of rural Georgia that are under-utilized to this day, land in metro Atlanta became prohibitively expensive.
Meanwhile, environmental and other anti-highway groups, such as the Sierra Club and Georgia Conservancy, mounted opposition. The Outer Perimeter was killed, except for the Northern Arc, which would link manufacturers and communities in fast-growing Northwest Georgia to I-85 and join the Carolinas-Alabama auto and supplier network to I-75. Most important, it would have kept cars and trucks off congested portions of I-285. Estimates were that by 2035, the Northern Arc would carry 70,000 to 100,000 vehicles a day.
Former Gov. Roy Barnes was close to pulling the trigger on the Northern Arc. But politics once again intervened.
By 2002, newcomers who had settled the fast-developing neighborhoods across the Northern Arc route — newcomers who vote Republican — were actively opposing construction. All three Republican candidates for governor — Perdue, former School Superintendent Linda Schrenko and former Cobb County Commission Chairman Bill Byrne — opposed the Northern Arc.
So its history has been first that anti-metro Atlanta prejudice kept it from being built, then environmental, anti-highway and no-growth forces kept it at bay, and finally Republican politics intervened. In each case, it was the wrong outcome for Georgia.
The Northern Arc idea being discussed now is a toll road, a public-private initiative that would rely on the private sector to finance construction. “We don’t have the money to build an east-west connector,” said board Chairman Mike Evans of Cumming, who regards the project as a “perfect” candidate for private-sector involvement.
Georgia has wasted decades and millions of dollars in pushing back an essential transportation project. Leadership has been parochial and short-sighted.
Georgia should have built the Outer Perimeter. It most certainly should build an I-75/I-85 connector across North Georgia.
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On public nudity and college rankings
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s this-and-that Monday:
• The president of Macon’s Wesleyan College, Ruth Knox, says she’ll no longer will participate in the peer assessment portion of U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings. “It’s hardly scientific, and the general public should be fully aware of the methodology behind the rankings,” she says. “I, like most college presidents, simply do not have enough information on any of the 200-plus colleges that I’m asked to judge.” The methodology asks top college officials to rate other schools, with 1 being marginal and 5 distinguished. If they don’t know enough to have an opinion, they can declare that. The assessment counts for 25 percent of how a college is rated. Wesleyan will continue to provide other information requested for the magazine’s annual rankings.
Knox touches on one of my pet peeves — and that’s the assessments of judicial candidates done just before elections by the bar association. Lawyers who couldn’t possibily have first-hand knowledge of the judges they’re assessing issue reports that, with rare exceptions, support the incumbents. Lawyers in that instance are not providing any useful information to voters; they’re acting as an incumbent-protection interest group.
• Apology Window Open. Law enforcement authorities were accused by civil rights groups of targeting South Asians who ran convenience stores in Northwest Georgia in a two-year undercover operation against merchants selling drugs and other products they knew were being used to make methamphetamine. After 49 arrests of owners and clerks, all but five of them South Asians, the number of meth labs discovered dropped from 299 to 72 in the next 16 months. The sting ends with two convictions and 32 guilty pleas. Charges against 17 were dismissed, 14 because more culpable relatives pleaded guilty.
• All government actions send signals and encourage some kind of behavior, while discouraging others. In the aftermath of the national debate on illegal immigration, a wave of immigrants are making the choice to become citizens. More than 110,000 per month applied from March through May, reports the AJC’s Mary Lou Pickel, up from about 72,000 per month during the same period last year. Moral of the story: When the nation gets serious about illegals, individuals uncertain about the future of immigration policies are induced to make choices, in this case to become citizens. This is, incidentally, one reason rounding up 12 million was never in the cards. Once a nation’s policies are known, fixed and enforced, illegals react by either making themselves legal or by going home.
• New Haven, Conn., on Tuesday becomes the first city in the nation to offer illegal immigrants local identification cards that will allow them to open bank accounts and to access city services, such as libraries. A city that makes itself appealing to illegals or to the homeless or to any other group, either by not enforcing laws or by providing services that allow them to live worry-free, will get them. Anybody ever wonder why the Five Points area in downtown Atlanta is covered with vagrants? It’s comfortable and easy being a bum there.
• Oh yes, in addition to deadbeat parents who don’t pay child support and contractors who rip-off taxpayers during tragedies, add another group of bad guys the law should pursue to the ends of the earth: government officials who victimize people over whom they have authority. That’d be the Fulton County erosion inspector guilty of demanding bribes from developers. And it could be the Smyrna jailer charged with pocketing $600 in bond money.
• Quote: “Vermont doesn’t need to conform to the rest of society’s uptight rules,” said a 19-year-old, objecting to a decision by the Brattleboro town council to ban nudity in some parts of town. They were reacting to a 68-year-old Arizona man who strolled naked through downtown. When my band of right-wingers take over, our uptight rules will declare that only babies are allowed to stroll naked in public. The fine will increase with age.
Forward march to Hillarycare? Slow this roll
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
America has a choice on health care. It’s either Sicko. Or the private sector.
The latest round in that conflict advanced this week in the U.S. Senate when the Finance Committee agreed 17-4 to a huge expansion of the federal program that subsidizes health insurance for children and some adults in families with incomes too high for Medicaid. It’s the program that provides about 70 percent of the funding for Georgia’s PeachCare.
Over the last five years, PeachCare’s federal funding source, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, has cost the nation’s taxpayers about $20 billion. The bill that passed committee on Thursday would expand that over the next five years to $60 billion, double what the administration proposed. President Bush promises a veto.
“There is a disconnect between what the American people want and what the House and Senate want,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) Friday. “What the House and Senate want is an incremental movement toward a Washington-run health care system, and this is their next step. If there was ever a doubt in anybody’s mind about what the Left wants to do on health care, it should be completely removed by this bill.”
Supporters of government-sponsored universal health care, having given up on the notion that Americans will suddenly switch, have adopted another strategy. It’s the strategy of incrementalism, the same strategy used to virtually eliminate capital punishment in this country, and the strategy now being employed to make the traditional family just another lifestyle choice for child-rearing. That strategy is to create one more exception and to exaggerate flaws in the system to undermine public confidence in it, while misrepresenting or ignoring inconvenient facts.
On PeachCare, for example, one of the inconvenient facts is that parents who can afford private health insurance drop it in favor of the more generous and less expensive government program. A Congressional Budget Office report in May found that parents of as many as half the children enrolled nationally made the rational dollar choice to switch.
The legislation being debated would include children in families with incomes up to $82,000, said Price, and would make eligible 90 percent of the children now covered by private health insurance. “I don’t believe that the American people desire or want fundamental, personal individual medical choices made by families and patients moved to Washington.”
This is a program that is less than 10 years old and has drawn little analysis at the state level to determine how it’s working and whether it’s serving the intended population.
Even though it’s not an entitlement — federal spending is limited to the sum Congress allocates — it’s following the entitlement pattern. It’s expanded based on anecdote and good intentions, not hard analysis.
The SCHIP program is up for renewal in September. Ideally, the analysis of effectiveness would have come before expansion. But the liberal strategy is to bring the nation along, one group at a time, to Hillarycare. A decade ago the program was created for families with income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or $34,340 for a family of three. Several states, including Georgia, took advantage of high-revenue years to expand it. The cap here is 235 percent of poverty, or $40,349 for a family of three, with some earnings and expenses subtracted to determine eligibility.
Some states also expanded eligibility to include adults. The Senate bill would gradually move adults without children out of the program, though it would give states the option of covering them through Medicaid.
The single-payer strategy, as demonstrated in Georgia and elsewhere, is to bring more and more individuals into taxpayer-financed programs until the only group left out are non-poor single men. At that point, of course, Hillarycare is here.
“We are ready to renew our commitment to low-income children today,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt after the finance committee vote, “but we cannot agree to a gradual government takeover of health care.”
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Michael Vick; subprime loans fiasco
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s free-for-all Friday. Pick a topic: • Gambling’s weekly highlights: Michael Vick is indicted in a dog-fighting/gambling enterprise. The Georgia Lottery reports our gambling enterprise raked in $3.4 billion in the 2007 fiscal year ending June 30, $244 million ahead of the previous year. There’s a major difference. We don’t shoot the losers. We simply try new marketing strategies.
• Quote of the week, this from Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson, who will be 70 when his resignation is effective later this year: “I feel it is time for me to get back into business while I still can.”
• Regulation may be needed to force lenders to be more prudent in making subprime loans. But the market is doing a superb job of conveying that message. More than 30 subprime lenders have gone bankrupt. And subprime losses could reach $50 billion to $100 billion.
• Don’t call now. I can’t talk. I’m eating my prediction that former state Sen. Jim Whitehead of Evans was a shoo-in for the 10th Congressional District. Little did I know that physician Paul Broun of Athens, who may be more conservative than Charlie Norwood, and from the light side of the district — light in terms of voters — would win. Perdue. Cagle. And now Broun. Underdogs soar. Pundits perish.
• While commuting sentences, President Bush should heed the plea of U.S. Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and commute the sentences of two border patrol agents imprisoned for 11 and 12 years for shooting a fleeing Mexican drug smuggler. The two, Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, wounded smuggler Osvaldo Aldrete Davila in the buttocks after he abandoned a van containing 743 pounds of marijuana.
• Yes, allow toll roads to be built by the private sector. But do it to fill the gap between genuine congestion-relief needs and available funding, not to free up money for transportation boondoggles.
• A news story confirms it: Turkeys live in Druid Hills. Their brethren in D.C. pull all-night stunts on the floor of the U.S. Senate, trying to force a withdrawal deadline for troops in Iraq. Notice, though, that two Georgia congressmen who came close to losing in 2006 — John Barrow of Savannah and Jim Marshall of Macon — were among just 10 House Democrats who voted against the House version of legislation to require troops to be out of Iraq by April. The Senate’s 52-47 vote was well shy of the 60 needed. Four Republicans deserted.
• Headline: “Rally urges racial justice.” Racial justice, as applied to the Genarlow Wilson case, means “let him go and imprison the DA.”
• My gosh. Illegal aliens awaiting deportation — some of whom have committed violent crimes here — are not happy to be incarcerated in rural Stewart County south of Columbus. And they’re really put out with the Georgia Legislature for passing a law requiring a valid Georgia driver’s license or ID card to register a car in Georgia. To get a license, they have to prove they’re in the country legally.
• The driver’s license requirement does reveal a loophole that should be closed in the next session of the General Assembly. Illegals who overstayed visas and may already have Georgia licenses can order tags online for themselves and others.
• The need always in assessing threats to our safety and security is to determine which pose immediate danger. The threat represented by a too-short commercial jet runway in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is so immediate and obvious that both the airlines using it and the government officials responsible should be indicted in the deaths of 189 people. The TAM plane crashed while trying to land in a rainstorm. In the United States, advocacy groups, combined with the 30-second sound bite, reduce all threats to the same level. We’re losing the ability to draw distinctions.
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Hillarycare?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President Bush on Wednesday vowed to veto Senate legislation that would increase spending on the federal program that funds 70 percent of Georgia’s PeachCare spending. The President had recommended an increase of $4.8 billion over the next five years. Democrats want it expanded by $50 billion.
At the heart of the dispute is the broader ideological dispute over health care financing in this country — whether it’ll be Hillarycare or a system that relies on the private sector. Since the defeat of Hillarycare, the left has moved to get there by gradually expanding taxpayer-financed coverage. PeachCare provides coverage to children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, the taxpayer-provided health care program for the poor.
The program, called the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, was targeted to the children of families earning up to 200 percent of poverty. Georgia has expanded it to 220 percent. In other states adults are included and proposals have been floated to extend it to all children under the age of 18.
“If Congress continues to insist upon expanding health care through the SCHIP program - which, by the way, would entail a huge tax increase for the American people - I’ll veto the bill,” the President said Wednesday. Democrats plan to pay for the expansion with a 61-cents-per-pack tax on cigarettes.
“Members of Congress have decided … to expand the program to include … families earning [up to] $80,000 a year, which would cause people to drop their private insurance in order to be involved with a government insurance plan,” said Bush.
A group of Democrats and some Republicans indicate they’ll support a $35 billion expansion to a total of $60 billion over five years. The Democratic proposal would have raised spending from $25 billion over the previous five years to $75 billion.
One reason the PeachCare debate now underway in Georgia is so important is that it is a test of whether conservatives can rein-in spending for a non-entitlement. It shouldn’t grow into something that entices parents to drop medical coverage for their children in favor of a more attractive taxpayer-financed plan.
The responsible course for state officials is to deal with the problem at hand, not to appeal to Washington for more and more money.
Vick, terrorists — and, yes, good news
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Amid the gloomy news of the day — Atlanta Falcon quarterback Michael Vick is indicted for alleged involvement in dog fighting, al-Qaida intensifies its efforts to strike inside the U.S., and the poor illegals in Metro Atlanta are having a tough time registering their cars — there is exceedingly good news.
It comes from Renee Glover, executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority. On Tuesday, she delivered the good news to residents of the Englewood Manor public housing project near Zoo Atlanta. The project will be razed and most of its residents will be given federal Housing Choice vouchers that will allow them to rent private sector housing anywhere in the U.S. One resident interviewed by AJC reporter Ernie Suggs, a 32-year-old mother of two, said she did something last week she never thought she’d do in her life: She went apartment hunting. “I went to look at a couple of condos and apartments in Norcross,” she said. “It was great.”
The woman, Markisha Brice, moved into Englewood 18 months ago from Cincinnati, where she’d lived in public housing since 1991, the year her first daughter was born. “I always wanted the comfort of my own home,” she told Suggs. “Now I am going to get it.”
Under Glover, Atlanta is a national leader in ridding communities of those awful public housing projects, where one generation of tenants begets another, all conditioned to lifetime dependency on government.
To qualify for Housing Choice vouchers, residents must have a job, pay their rent on time, and resolve past problems with credit, criminal history and unpaid utility bills. About 82 percent of the 300 families in Englewood will qualify. Taxpayers pay moving expenses, apartment deposits, up to three apartment applications, and for 27 months of support services. Eventually, all 12 remaining public housing projects in Atlanta will be torn down and rebuilt as mixed-income developments, with some units available to the poor and some to those who pay full freight.
This program is an example of how conservatives can change the world, while making life better for the poor. Obviously sitting for a lifetime in a cracker-box in a crime-ridden public housing project surrounded by misery cultivates dependency. It costs more initially to give residents a chance to live in a setting where people get up and go to work every day and assume personal responsibility for their lives and families, but over time the money will be well spent.
State GOP can’t give in to a money grab
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In vetoing a $142 million tax cut on the 39th day of a 40-day session, Gov. Sonny Perdue said he was reminded of a Chinese proverb: “A man who cannot feed himself has one problem. A man who is full has many.”
Sonny has many. The Georgia General Assembly does, too.
Republicans, in general, have a media problem. They can’t set an agenda. They can’t control the playing field. And with an embarrassment of riches flowing into the state’s coffers, they’ve set themselves up for a big-league fall in the 2008 legislative session. A party that looked to govern Georgia for decades to come is burning its days at both ends. If the Democrats weren’t wrong on message and reduced to living off trial lawyers and Mark Taylor, the GOP would be in more serious trouble than it actually is.
Vetoing the tax cut was a mistake. With record tax collections announced by the Department of Revenue on Friday, the state will end the fiscal year with a surplus of $600 million. For the year, tax collections grew by $1.2 billion. Georgia now has reserves of $1.2 billion, up from $51 million four years ago.
It’s not yet certain that fiscal conservatives are a majority in Georgia. Fiscal conservative talkers are. But taxpayers should shudder at the prospect that excess money, piled to either $600 million or twice that, is on the table in a state lacking in leadership and discipline.
I’m beginning not to trust this crowd any more than the one in Washington to rein in spending. Now, having allowed too much money to accumulate, they have just signaled the money-grabbers who market woe that the cash drawer’s open. It’s near impossible to contain the special interest pleaders when money’s tight. It’s considered cruel and inhumane to deny them when the coffers are flush. Absent a strong agenda and vision, it’s penny-ante to the poorhouse, a nickel and a dime at the time, like every other winner of a lottery scratch-off bonanza.
Republicans can’t do media. Most of them don’t know how. The rest of them are bummed out on it, convinced that it’s a filter filled with bias. They get elected with direct mail, phone banks, TV and grassroots organizations and are convinced they can govern the same way.
So they spend the legislative sessions — and they will again in 2008 — reacting defensively to critics’ charges, which are themselves based on stereotypes. Some dumb bill — Sunday liquor sales, for example — will be crack for critics. Meanwhile, every outstretched hand will come with an indictment-by-stereotype. A failure to hire more bureaucrats or to create new spending programs is evidence of the GOP lacks compassion for the poor, concern for the environment or a commitment to “save Grady.”
The dirty little secret among fiscal conservatives is that this crowd, unaccustomed to power and uncertain about their course, is awfully vulnerable to spending your money to prove that the stereotypes apply to somebody else.
A handful of school districts using taxpayer money to sue state taxpayers for more of their money insists that the $142 million was just what they needed. “Ironically,” said Joseph G. Martin Jr. of Atlanta, “the amount of the proposed refund was almost exactly equal to the continuing ‘austerity cuts’ in the funding of k-12 education long after the end of the recession.” Martin, a former Democratic candidate for state school superintendent, is executive director of the Consortium for Adequate School Funding, a group like many around the country that sue states and hope on activist judges will get them more money.
Expect more lines of outstretched hands from here to Hahira.
Republicans will find themselves in PR disaster they’ve not shown they can handle. Having $600 million in excess collections, and special interest pleaders lined up with their marketing campaigns in tow, should convince legislators of the need to adopt a taxpayer bill of rights that limits new spending to the rate of inflation, plus population growth, a version of which has passed the state Senate.
Georgia needs a vision, leadership and the discipline to manage as fiscal conservatives when the state is flush with cash. It needs a cap on spending.
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Beat me, kick me, vote for me.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The weekend’s tempest among Democratic Presidential candidates was prompted by post-debate remarks John Edwards uttered to Hillary Clinton. “We should try to have a more serious and a smaller group,” the former North Carolina senator said to her.
She agreed. “Our guys should talk,” Clinton replied. The private exchange as they walked off the stage at an NAACP forum in Detroit was picked up by an open microphone. All the Democratic contenders had participated.
The long-shot candidates reacted badly to the suggestion that they should be excluded. And I’m with them. The Republican field dropped by one with the announcement Saturday by former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore that he is abandoning the race. “It has become apparent to me that the combination of my late start, and the front loaded nature of the primary schedule, have made it impractical to continue… I believe that it takes years of preparation to put in place both the political and financial infrastructure to contest what now amounts to a one-day national primary in February.” John McCain may not be far behind.
The point is that the field will shrink well before the first votes are cast. As for the extended debate season, candidates of both parties are providing a valuable service educating the nation on what core constituencies in each party stand for. Edwards certainly would like fewer competitors, upping his chances of gaining traction. But the first votes are still months away. No hurry.
A second question arises from the early rounds of this year-long campaign season. It’s whether candiates should appear before interest groups whose support they have zero chance of winning. Republican Mike Huckabee was the only GOP presidential candidate to accept an invitation to speak to the National Education Association.
That union, the parent of the Georgia Association of Educators, is held under lock-and-key by national Democrats. The same is true of the NAACP. All eight Democratic candidates spoke. Only U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado appeared, though the rest of the field had been invited.
My rule would be that if a candidate has a specific message to deliver to the organization’s membership, he or she should show up. Otherwise, no. Find another way to reach those voters. Republicans should never accept a single interest group’s leadership, membership or agenda as the filter through which to speak to teachers or other education employees or to blacks. The same applies to Democrats who are invited to appear before groups determined to elect Republicans.
Talk radio and the blogosphere demonstrated during the immigration debate that on critical issues public opinion can form and be conveyed quickly. Organized interest groups are of passing importance — and they often represent not grass-roots opinion, but the views of the few die-hards who control them.
My advice on these two matters: Don’t shrink the debates. And don’t waste time with interest groups that support the opposition and, furthermore, are yesterday’s news.
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School options are lesson in common sense
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The pent-up demand for alternatives to traditional public schools erupted in Georgia last week.
That’s right. Erupted.
Some 3,300 families of children with special needs applied for vouchers to cover or supplement the purchase of services they want for their children elsewhere. And most will have real options. The State Board of Education on Thursday approved 115 private schools. Both the number of families and the number of schools certified as voucher-eligible top the start of a similar program in Florida. “With well over 100 schools, we will have the fastest start-up in the country,” said state Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah), who sponsored the legislation in this year’s General Assembly.
On the same day the state board certified the 115 eligible service providers, which include such top-of-the-line schools as Woodward Academy in College Park and Paideia School in Druid Hills, emotional parents from Greene County who want the option of attending a new charter school near Lake Oconee expressed their frustration to board members. The 10-year charter, approved Thursday, has attendance boundaries parents want expanded.
The charter school is not for special-education children. It’s an alternative to underperforming public schools. Black parents in the Greensboro area wanted the charter option for their children. “We should be remaking every school like a charter school,” state School Supt. Kathy Cox was quoted by the AJC’s Bridget Gutierrez as telling one group. “Look at the history of Greene County schools. They haven’t had a good track record of raising student achievement.”
When parents are near tears because they want alternatives they don’t have to traditional public schools, and when 3,300 families step forward to take responsibility for the education of their special-needs children, the public and policy-makers should take note. The world has changed.
The truly significant lesson from the week’s education news is that the marketplace has shown a willingness to embrace concepts that educrats think radical and that their interest groups and unions have resisted forever.
A successful introduction is not, however, success. Johnson and other supporters managed to resist attempts to saddle potential competitors with all the rules and regulations that cover traditional public schools. Critics note, for example, that private schools aren’t required to have curriculums tailored to special-needs children, or to hire certified teachers or those trained in special education. True enough.
They note, too, that competitiors are free to accept or reject applicants. True enough.
And hallelujah.
What’s happening here is that the locus of authority is tranferring from government to parents. For the first time in well over a century, the earth is moving in a direction that empowers parents — all parents, not just those with money.
For choice to be real, providers of education services should never, ever, be required to take every applicant. If they can’t serve a child’s particular needs — either because he’s disruptive, not up to grade, or deemed to have problems the school’s not equipped to address — they should be free to reject him.
When enough like-needs children exist, creative educators and entrepreneurs in the free market will create new schools.
Those schools should be free to employ anybody they see fit and to configure themselves in any model they choose, so long as fully informed parents are satisfied with the results and academic performance is no worse than the average of traditional public schools in the county.
Despite the successful start of the special-needs scholarship/voucher program, opponents have not given up. And won’t. Here’s a prediction: Within a year, the experiment will have been declared an utter failure. Along the way, the evidence will mount that parents really are too dumb or distracted to make responsible choices and that some of these 115 schools are failing.
Be prepared.
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Of snitches, change agents, spinelessness
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Words to be banned from civilized conversation: a) “Snitch,” as spoken by British Admiral Sir Alan West, in urging Britons to share information on those suspected of terrorism. Jailhouse clothing styles are merely unattractive; a jailhouse vocabulary involves terms that are demeaning. b) “Going forward,” a cliche-in-the-making going forward. c) “Change agents,” as in Grady Hospital’s CEO Otis Story’s assertion that consultants will examine how the hospital functions. “They are change agents,” said he.
• Ah, yes, this is the George Bush we know and love having in the White House in a world where Islamofascists are trying to kill us: “When we start drawing down our forces in Iraq, it will (be) because our military commanders say the conditions on the ground are right, not because pollsters say it’ll be good politics.” Memo to poll-watchers Sens. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Gordon Smith (R-Orgon) and others: Get a backbone.
• John Mark Karr should next appear in the news in 2035 when some enterprising young reporter is assigned to find out “what ever happened to … ” Until then, no more. Please.
• Headline: “What’s the use of Fulton County?” Easy. To run courts and the jail and to keep DeKalb from bumping into Douglas.
• The problem with hate crime legislation is demonstrated by the unprovoked assault by 10 or more thugs on young Joshua Martin outside Six Flags Over Georgia. All are the same race, but suppose otherwise. So when is it a hate crime? By the way, wonder how many of the gang have fathers in the home?
• Republicans should be champions of open records and open government. One reason is that many of its functions should be farmed out to the private sector. To avoid suspicion, embrace full and timely disclosure. In that vein, the Georgia Public Service Commission should adopt a proposed rule prohibiting utilities and the interest groups that stalk the halls from closed-door meetings with commissioners deliberating on a rate case.
• Gosh a’mighty, the whole country’s in therapy. We’re not good at staying any difficult course — the war, in particular. Not surprising. The new north Fulton city of Milton is paying a therapist $6,400 and claiming “doctor-client privilege” to help City Council members with “conflict resolution.” Therapists now sort through issues that were once dealt with by mommas and daddies, preachers, teachers and wise aunts and uncles. We are not a nation that ought to be making long-term commitments requiring sacrifice until we figure out who we are.
• American politicians are able to play partisan political games with the war. Imagine them in the role of Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, constantly the target of assassination attempts, and yet he has the courage to confront — and kill — hard-line pro-Taliban cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi and dozens of his die-hard followers. Or of Lebanon’s President Emile Lahoud, whose troops are in a bloody fight with al-Qaida-inspired Islamic militants who have taken over a refugee camp north of Tripoli, in a to-the-death struggle to claim a nation. They fail, they die. Our politicians fail, they sip latte.
• DaimlerChrysler’s tiny new Smart car is coming to the U.S. from Europe next year. It may be ideal for congested urban streets filled with bicycles and motor scooters, but micro-cars shouldn’t be allowed on interstates, where there are big cars and trucks, without an SUV escort.
• Between Mark Taylor and the trial lawyers the Democratic Party of Georgia remains afloat. Better sue a few more manufacturers, guys. This need could go on for awhile.
• The plot for my latest novel, entitled “When Good People Do Stupid Things,” features a renegade board member from a major urban hospital who shows up at a neighboring county demanding $4 million, thereby sabotaging any charitable impulse that might have existed to help the neighbor solve his problem. In Chapter 2, he goes to three more neighbors demanding money — where he is arrested by the short sheriff in Slayton (this is fiction) for panhandling.
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In search of “good news, but…” king
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hillary and Barack won’t mention this. Nancy and Harry won’t tell you either, but the economy is on a good, sustainable, roll. Employers added 190,000 jobs in May and 132,000 in June. Unemployment is a low 4.5 percent, where it’s stood for three months. And wages average $17.38 per hour, up 3.9 percent from a year ago.
With higher tax collections, the budget deficit’s now projected to be $205 billion in September, down from the $244 billion projected by the President in February. Last year the deficit was $248 billion. Three years ago it was $413 billion. Thank tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 that are now due to expire in 2010.
Democrats are eager to recapture those “lost” revenues, but they’ve been politically astute in managing to avoid calling a great deal of attention to their tax-raising ambitions. That’s smart because they’re so in danger of overplaying their hand on Iraq and on the confrontation with the Bush Administration over executive privilege, specifically related to the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. (Even 84-year-old George McGovern, the anti-war candidate in 1972, doubts an anti-war candidate can win. “Some people point to the fact that the war in Vietnam was dreadfully unpopular,” he told Politico, “but that when I came out for an immediate withdrawal, it helped me win the nomination but not the general election. And there may be some truth about that.”
Iraq and the painful and high-profile, but necessary, effort to restore competitiveness to the American auto industry put people in a gloomier mood than economic conditions warrant. But all of us know that Harry and Hillary would be shouting economic gloom from the rooftops if the numbers offered them the opportunity.
In fact, after getting reports of a lower projected deficit, Democrats responded by brushing over it with the warning that there’s no way “Bush’s policies” could produce a balanced budget in 5 years, as promised.
This should prompt a national contest to select the “But King and Queen” from all the Dick and Debbie Downers who are determined to find the downside of good news. The King and Queen will reign over the “Sure it’s good news, but…” festival to be held in prime time at the next Democratic National Convention.
Iraq. Dems. Run. That’s the policy.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President George W. Bush, whose poll numbers are in danger of dropping to the levels of Congress, made another stab Tuesday at explaining to the nation why premature withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous.
The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), meanwhile, proposed legislation that would direct Bush to begin pulling troops from Iraq within 120 days and to end combat operations by April 30, 2008. Democrats are desperate to get Iraq off the table before the next presidential election, when they might actually have to take responsibility for it.
Though some weak-willed Republicans, like Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) may join in, a filibuster would likely greet the date-certain withdrawal proposal and the President has promised a veto. “Setting a date for withdrawal is equivalent to setting a date for failure,” he said.
Bush put himself in a box by agreeing to interim benchmarks for Iraqi government progress in several areas of political and economic change. Those goals are not expected to have been met. Bush is required to give the report to Congress by Sunday. He urged Congress and the nation to await the report from Gen. David Petraeus that’s expected in September.
The President has two legacies. One is national security and the war in Iraq. The other is his effort to rebalance the U.S. Supreme Court.
Democrats are determined to use this Congress as a two-year pre-election campaign. For Bush, that means charting a course and sticking to it. He needs to beef up support from his base in an effort to keep Senate Republicans from succumbing to poll numbers. He needs, as well, to veto everything that attempts to set arbitrary withdrawal schemes.
His legacy is what it is. The course left for him is to fight for what he believes is right. Leave the poll-watching to those running for re-election.
Study’s merits in the eye of the beholder
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An extraordinary thing happened last week — so extraordinary, it was front-page news.
Activists determined to torpedo the expansion of nuclear power produced a “study” purporting to link high cancer rates to Georgia Power Co.’s Plant Vogtle in Burke County near Augusta. The spin put on the “study” commissioned by the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League was that Georgians would die of cancer if two new reactors proposed for Vogtle get built.
As AJC reporter Margaret Newkirk noted, however, it took Georgia Power “approximately a nanosecond” to refute the charge. Utility officials note that a six-year study of cancer rates within a 50-mile radius of Plant Vogtle and the Savannah River Site, financed by the U.S. Department of Energy, found that “most cancer rates in the area are about the same as in similar communities” and about what you’d expect in non-metro areas. It was conducted by researchers from the University of South Carolina and Emory University.
The “study” commissioned by nuclear power opponents took raw numbers and did not factor in other possible causes for a rise in cancer rates, says Georgia Power spokesman John Sell.
In this instance, the purported study targeted a single company, giving Georgia Power a survival interest in debunking the allegations leveled. Ordinarily, in the rush of the news, they’re taken as gospel, regardless of the sponsor’s agendas.
Studies involving race are particularly suspect. Lending practices and prison populations are frequently presented as evidence of discrimination. The problem, however, is that many of those who conduct the studies stop when they get the answer they’re looking for. And on issues like global warming or the environment, unless we know the preconceptions of those who analyze the data, it’s hard to know whether, as with race, they found evidence of what they already believed — or whether the evidence led them to one conclusion to the exclusion of other possibilities.
One currently popular topic of study is how and where we live. Sometimes the problem is how the study is conducted, but it can also be how a study’s conclusions are framed. One example is commuting distance, a fixation of traffic-choked places like Atlanta. In “Volunteering in America,” a study released Monday, long commutes are blamed for reducing volunteerism.
Without question living in one place and working in another lessens our awareness of local volunteer opportunities and, to some extent, reduces the time we have available for outside activities, including volunteering. But, as the study also noted, other “key social and demographic trends” affect volunteerism. The others are community attachment, high school graduation rates, poverty and the “prevalence of nonprofits and their capacity to retain volunteers from year to year.”
The study was commissioned by the Corporation for National & Community Service, which sponsors three major federal programs: Senior Corps, AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve America. The study was based on data obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I don’t take issue with the study, but with the fixation on commuting. Among its other findings is that high home ownership and high education levels lead to high volunteer rates, which are highest in communities associated with Middle America: Minneapolis-St. Paul, Salt Lake City and Charlotte, among others.
The commute, however bad it may be in gridlocked metro Atlanta, is a popular villain. But it’s one of a number of factors determining whether people volunteer. The unfortunate reality of any metropolitan area is that it’s big and often incomprehensible, the sentiment that gives rise to incorporation of places like Sandy Springs and Johns Creek. In big cities, people either don’t know of local opportunities or they find their time used unproductively. And, too, the rise of paid volunteerism in programs like AmeriCorps cultivates an expectation of compensation.
Long commutes are bad. But they’re not the cause of all America’s ills.
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Hidden taxes not the Grady solution
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia is holding $142 million that should have been returned to taxpayers. It wasn’t.
The Legislature has on the table a proposal to spend at least $85 million per year to support existing trauma care hospitals. That’s half the sum hospitals say they absorb in uncompensated trauma care. This is a bottomless pit — if, indeed, legislators intend to get serious about funding a statewide trauma care network.
Then there’s PeachCare — a program that demonstrates the inability of the fiscal conservatives who run Georgia to exercise any discipline in containing the growth of discretionary programs that function as near entitlements. Georgia’s solution is to beg Congress for more federal money via a new funding formula.
And now the state is on the verge of taking on Grady Memorial Hospital’s financial woes as its own. Frankly, the solution to Grady’s money troubles is beyond the state’s expertise. Previous legislatures have generally followed the Grady version of the advice allegedly given in 1961 by Gen. Douglas McArthur to President John F. Kennedy, though I always associated it with the legendary Georgia Sen. Richard B. Russell: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
And why not? Because its political and cultural complexities are a quagmire, as are Grady’s.
On most matters that fall within the purview of lesser governments — cities, counties, authorities — the state has nothing to offer but money. It has no expertise running airports and transit systems, fixing pipes or managing hospitals. All, when broken on a massive scale, are land wars in Asia.
Grady’s financial troubles, as spelled out by the business community’s task force, are overwhelming, the sums staggering. This year’s cash shortfall is projected to be $120 million. Longer term, it’s estimated to be $40 million to $55 million per year. Capital needs are in the $200 million to $300 million range. And on top of that, there’s the perpetual show-stopper, racial politics, the killing field of all solutions that involve structural change.
Even if class and race issues are negotiated, serious legal and political questions remain about how money is extracted from property owners in Fulton and DeKalb for Grady’s support. A new governing system could address some of Grady’s day-to-day management ills, but legitimate questions exist about any board’s relationship with elected officials who are obligated to levy and collect the taxes.
House Speaker Glenn Richardson (R-Hiram) launched an adventure last week, appointing a special committee to study “the current situation at Grady” and to “create a plan to keep Grady viable in the future.” And in their spare moments, the committee should study “the current situation” in the Mideast and “create a plan” to bring peace to Israel.
The wise, or more seasoned leader does not make an addict’s troubles his own.
The state should proceed with great caution, focusing primarily on legal obstacles that prevent locals from developing a business model at Grady that can work. The speaker suggests a $1 per phone tax, similar to the 911 levy, to pay for the statewide trauma network and for any other commitments that might be made to Grady. It would produce about $80 million, by some estimates.
A point of order should be raised here about the pending $142 million tax rebate and funding for the proposed trauma network, along with future Grady commitments.
Gov. Sonny Perdue proposed raising speeding fines to fund the trauma network. Richardson proposes adding a tax surcharge on phones. Perdue reasons that wreck victims need emergency care. Richardson reasons that phones are used to summon help. Such is the thought process of fiscal conservatives drifting into Washingtonia. Georgians did not elect Republicans to be smarter about hiding tax increases.
If Grady funding and the trauma network are state priorities, the governor should propose, and the General Assembly should levy, an honest-to-God, straight-up tax increase. Or they should pocket and spend the $142 million now set aside for a property tax increase. Don’t hide tax increases in fees, surcharges and add-ons.
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The problems with money, Democrats
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s Friday free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Good choice. France awards its Legion of Honor to Barbra Streisand. “You are the America that we love,” said French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Quote of the Week: From Lex Luger, a former professional wrestler, who went through millions: “Money makes you more comfortable being miserable.” If you can’t be happy without money, you won’t be happy with it.
• We can place any environmental, social and regulatory burden on local governments and the private sector to achieve any objective we want — affordable housing, purer air and water, fuller employment and minimum wages — so long as we realize the costs are passed on to consumers. Georgia Power Co. is asking for a 7 percent increase in the monthly bill next year, or about $6.67 on the average user. Half the spending is for upgraded environmental controls at its coal-fired plants. We demand, they provide. Pay the man.
• Thinking Right’s what happened to: shag carpeting?
• Far too little research and reporting has gone into examining the role of foundations in framing public policy issues and in influencing legislation. Kudos then to fellow conservative Phil Kent, whose new book, “Foundations of Betrayal: How the Liberal Super-Rich Undermine America,” makes the case that, as he writes, thousands of them “doggedly fund their own ideological objectives in myriad ways that harm the United States” while ignoring medical and educational needs.
• U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a DeKalb County Democrat, signs on to impeach Vice President Cheney. A frivolous rep in a theatrical body — Hank Johnson in the U.S. House.
•Think President Bush’s poll numbers are in the pits? Congress is 5 points lower — and under 25 percent.
• Be thankful for small favors: “We don’t have quite enough votes to get done everything we want,” says U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) of the Democratic do-nothing House.
• Our search for security from terrorists has its limits. Foreign-born physicians and other professionals whose lives and careers raise no red flags — even those from nations that produce or abet terrorists — will always be able slip through. That’s no reason to limit visas for professionals. It is reason to be more alert, even at the risk of being accused of profiling or of being an alarmist, as with the removal of the six imams from the US Airways flight in Minneapolis last year. The other reality is that terrorists will indeed employ low-tech weapons like the car bombs in London and Glasgow.
• A “greenie” possessing marijuana and prescription drugs of unknown origin who is speeding down the highway at 100 miles an hour in a statement car for the environmentally conscious, a Toyota Prius, need not be too concerned about global warming as a threat to life. But a lad such as Al Gore III clearly needs help more than he needs criticism.
• Two classes of villains should be pursued to the ends of the earth at whatever expense. One is adults who don’t support their children. The other is people who exploit tragedies. Father-and-son operators of a Comfort Inn in Union City have been charged with mail fraud, accused of bilking federal taxpayers of $20,000 in Katrina funds. It’s just an indictment, not evidence of guilt. But U.S. Attorney David Nahmias should be encouraged in his work. “We continue … to look at all types of fraud related to hurricanes Katrina and Rita,” he said.
• Coca-Cola, located in the iced-tea capital of the world, considers a bid for Snapple, an iced-tea brand owned by a London company. That threatens the delicate tea agreement that has long existed between the two countries: We don’t milk it, and they don’t ice it. Besides, when Southerners concede that somebody else makes better sweet tea, there’s no hope of saving chitlins and grits.
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“I’m not going to let this go.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s tough being a cop. The on-going saga involving the jaywalking professor in Atlanta and the hissy-fit by part-time Atlantan Elton John when stopped by a policeman while enroute to his dressing room, are reminders that …well, it’s tough being a cop.
Two types strike me as particularly difficult. One is the “don’t you know who I am?” crowd (those were Elton John’s words). Though the professor never uttered those words, his conduct in ignoring a cop’s directives reflected the sentiment.
The other particularly difficult group,I’d guess, are those aren’t rich or famous who aggressively assert rights to behave irresponsibly. Atlanta seems to have an unusually large number of people who aggressively jaywalk, defiantly stepping into traffic without regard to oncoming vehicles, signs or signals. It’s a hit-me-if-you-dare mentality. Bicyclists, incidentally, often fall into this category, running through traffic lights or aggressively crowding traffic lanes, forcing motorists either to come to a near-stop or to vacate the lane.
The Tufts University professor, respected as a historian, was here for a convention, when Atlanta police officer Kevin Leonpacher arrested him for jaywalking. It was a bad scene, with the professor, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a British citizen, ignoring the officer’s instructions. He said he didn’t know Leonpacher was an officer and, furthermore, jaywalking is not illegal in Britain.
A just-released 101-page internal investigation of the January incident exonerates Leonpacher, agreeing that he acted properly. The professor called the internal investigation incompetent and declared: “My goodwill is not inexhaustible. I’m not going to let this go.”
Elton John blew off steam after an officer stopped him enroute to his nearby dressing room after a Concert for Diana performance Sunday. The route in security-conscious London was blocked, apparently because of concern for the safety of Princes William and Harry. After “do-you-know-who?” didn’t work, he stormed off on foot to his dressing room.
The professor’s words should be the creed-of- the-cult for those who are convinced individuals can rewrite the law on the spot if, in their view, the law doesn’t (or shouldn’t) apply to their circumstance:
“My goodwill is not inexhaustible. I’m not going to let this go.”
Gators and Scooter
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tempting though it be to weigh in on two of the day’s most-discussed topics — the Peachtree Road Race and the audacity of University of Florida fans to insist on driving through Georgia with a prestige license plate — the more important matter is the fall-out from the President’s decision to commute the sentence of Scooter Libby.
But before departing the Gators license-plate brouhaha, a word of warning, one conservative to another, should be directed to the President Pro Tem of the Georgia State Senate, Eric Johnson, a Savannah Republican. Johnson has declared it “absolutely unacceptable” that Florida Gators should adorn Georgia license plates.
“A Gator tag will cause accidents. Gator fans cannot drive or read traffic signs. A car up on blocks cannot move.” Such was Johnson’s jestful commentary on the proposal that the Georgia Department of Revenue issue prestige tags to University of Florida supporters when a sufficient number pay the additional $25 required.
Two warnings here. One is to Florida fans, the other to Johnson. Florida fans should understand that the $25 fee is “per year,” meaning it’ll have to be paid again next year. That means going at least half the year without buying a lottery ticket. And for Johnson, a politician subject to the whims of voters, a sterner warning: If Florida fans ever start start voting — that is, if Georgia ever takes the step that Florida just did and restores voting rights to felons — he could be in serious trouble in close elections. His district is dangerously close to Florida.
On the serious matter of Scooter Libby’s “excessive” sentence, commuted by the President to eliminate jail time, the fall-out from Democrats and others was predictable. Tony Snow, the President’s press secretary, noted on Tuesday that “this is hardly a slap on the wrist.” Even with the commutation, Libby retains a felony conviction and the probable loss of his legal career, along with two years’ probation and a $250,000 fine.
My preference would have been for a pardon now. But that still could come. “As to the future, I rule nothing in and nothing out,” said Bush Tuesday. The commutation keeps Libby from an undeserved punishment — time in jail — while allowing the appeals process to work. If necessary, Bush can grant the pardon later.
America’s poor diet: That’s sicko
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While the bylaws of the Band of Right-Wing Conspirators does not permit me to fork over hard currency that increases the wealth of propagandist filmmaker Michael Moore — so I will not see “Sicko” — the left and the disgruntled herald its arrival as a cure for cancer. With a limited opening, it drew $4.5 million in ticket sales over the weekend, finishing ninth.
Noting that the American health care system is dysfunctional, as some critics and professionals do, is the equivalent of noting that metro Atlanta is mired in gridlock. Where we diverge is in solutions.
It is admittedly a superficial observation, but a stroll through the streets of Havana and other parts of Cuba — one of the health care systems Michael Moore finds enchanting — reveals few people who look like Michael Moore. You’re more likely to see him at Five Points in downtown Atlanta, at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Marietta or at a dollar store in rural Georgia.
We could make Georgians look like those in Havana — that is, reasonably fit with presumably fewer self-induced lifestyle diseases. But neither the Michael Moore’s of this world, nor the rest of us who start out less drawn to the British, Canadian or Cuban health care systems would consent to endure the Cuban model.
Southerners who grew up in the Stroke Belt — one of the 10 Southeastern states that are among the 11 in the country where stroke deaths exceed the national average by more than 10 percent — know that we were killing ourselves on fatback and cigarettes. Tops among the risk factors are poor eating habits and physical inactivity. The solution is not to be found just in medical care, as now structured or in the financing, as suggested by the Moore perspective, but in managing lifestyles.
Deaths from strokes are far higher in Cuba than in the United States. Other risk factors, such as diabetes, affect mortality rates.
Among men ages 35-74, it was 42 per 100,000 in the United States, and 96 in Cuba. Georgia in 2004, according to the Department of Human Resources, had a stroke death rate 21 percent higher than the national average, and among blacks it was higher still, 1.4 times higher.
Comparing the lifestyles and health care systems of the two countries, Michael Moore notwithstanding, and even with our lifestyle excesses, the place to be sick is here.
Combining the free market’s medical care innovation and invention with a totalitarian state’s ability to manage lifestyle would, no doubt, produce a remarkably healthier population. But that has to come from free-market solutions that, for example, give individuals financial incentive to take better care of themselves. And it comes from giving private health care providers a financial incentive to manage wellness, in addition to providing appropriate treatment when people get sick.
If it’s possible to bring that element of authority that keeps women from abusing their bodies with drugs and potato-chip diets while pregnant, the health of newborns could be improved immeasurably. Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate (5.6 per 1000 live births) than the United States’ (7.0), based on 2002 data. Combined with providing children the basic vaccinations and medical attention, as both Cuba and the United States do, the result would be a far healthier population.
Cuba rations basic foodstuff and induces people of all ages to walk by allowing them few alternatives. It does, too, put high priority on training doctors and other medical personnel. Cuba has increased the number of doctors from one for 1,393 people in 1970 to one for 159 people in 2005, reports Julie M. Feinsilver of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington.
Walk through Five Points in downtown Atlanta or an all-you-can-eat buffet, and you realize that America’s plenty is part of its health care problem.
The solution is not socialized medicine. It’s to build incentives into this one so that we’re not killing ourselves, while insisting that somebody else pay whatever it costs to keep us from dying.
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Feel safer with surveillance cameras?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Discoveries over the weeked of two car bombs in London, followed by a firey attack on a Scottish airport, prompted U.S. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff to make the rounds of Sunday’s talk shows to reassure the country that the necessary precautions are being taken here.
“I think given what we know now, we’re comfortable that we’re at the right posture” said Chertoff. More air marshals will be added to overseas flights and security will be beefed up over the July 4th holiday “at various rail locations and other mass transit locations in cooperation with local authorities,’ he said. That’s not because of any specific threat, but because more people are travelling.
My favorite former Democrat, U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, Sunday advocated greater use surveillance cameras here. “The Brits have got something smart going on in England,” Lieberman said on ABC, “and it was part of why I believe they were able to so quickly apprehend suspects in the terrorist acts over the weekend.” That “something smart” is cameras all over London and in other major cities, he said.
“I think it’s just common sense to do that here much more widely. And of course we can do it without compromising anybody’s real privacy.”
I’m curious here on two points. One is whether the weekend’s events in England and Scotland will affect anybody’s travel plans there or elsewhere — or raise concerns about attending events here that attract large crowds? For me, no.
The other is Lieberman’s “common sense” proposal on surveillance cameras. Frankly, monitoring cameras are by now so integrated into everyday life that I’d welcome them in most any public place where they’re used for security, as opposed to revenue-raising, which is done with traffic cameras.
Terrorists, especially those who turn autos into crude car bombs have so many opportunities, that it’s impossible to protect everything and everybody everywere. Cameras that are monitored may not prevent harm, but they do increase the chances of finding the bad guys, as was the case in England.
An anti-terrorism program that concentrates on border security and on matching arrival and departures for visa-holders — who can then be tracked down and deported — is a higher priority than screening fans at a baseball game or every container passing through the Port of Savannah.
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