Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > September
September 2007
House speaker takes tax case to professionals
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dillard, Ga. — What better audience to test a revolutionary proposal on taxation than a gathering of the Georgia Chapter of the National Association of Tax Professionals?
Turns out, however, that the tax preparers, lawyers, accountants and agents who are fattening themselves up for the long tax season to come at the Dillard House, one of Georgia’s finest dining establishments, are almost as much in the dark as the rest of Georgia about the proposal being put forth by House Speaker Glenn Richardson.
That proposal, which not surprisingly has drawn shoot-the-babies and plow-the-fields-in-salt opposition from local governments and school boards, would eliminate the property tax and, instead, expand the 4 percent statewide sales tax to services. It would end, too, most all of the 127 existing sales tax exemptions, including the one for groceries. Taxpayers earning up to $30,000 would get a refund for the tax on groceries and prescriptions.
After listening to Richardson’s explanation, the president of the Georgia chapter, David Fussell of Rome, thought the speaker had done “a great job of presenting it” but was not completely sold and had real reservations that Georgians will embrace it. “From a tax professional’s standpoint, I haven’t seen enough of the [proposal] to fully grasp it. If we become tax collectors for the Revenue Department, that becomes an issue.”
Fussell notes, as did the House speaker earlier, that local governments are manning the barricades. “I live in a small town, and I know a lot of city officials. Small towns being what they are, I don’t think they are going to be willing to give up control to the state.” Richardson has heard their mounting opposition and, in a conversation beforehand, unloads. “The reason why counties and cities and school districts are so vehemently opposed is because they have been able to grow their spending at a greater rate than peoples’ earnings,” Richardson said. “I can’t believe the gall of them using taxpayers’ money to oppose the right of citizens to change their method of taxation.”
Between 1996 and 2006, inflation in Georgia rose 28 percent, he said, while per capita state spending rose 26, spending by counties rose 40 percent, by cities rose 79 percent and by school boards, a whopping 98 percent. Local officials say that’s because of infrastructure spending for growth.
Richardson’s proposal, which he acknowledges is not yet perfected — it’s 85 to 90 percent there, he said — would eliminate all property taxes, including on homes, businesses and vehicles. Eliminating them would deprive local governments and school boards of between $8.2 billion and $8.5 billion per year, an offset that would come from the expanded sales tax. Existing “exemptions” amount to $10 billion per year, with groceries accounting for $1 billion, Richardson said.
All Georgians “ought to have some tax burden,” he said. “We’re rapidly becoming a nation that has more people who are not paying taxes than are paying taxes. That is a dangerous place for this nation to be. If we don’t stop it now we are soon going to kill the U.S. economy.”
The locals would not be deprived of revenues in the sums they’re now collecting. Richardson proposes a formula that would give each local government and school board the same share of the $8-plus billion they now collect. Another formula, now being drafted, would measure growth in the tax digest and give them the higher of inflation or actual property values. In addition, local governments could continue to seek voter approval for a 1 percent local sales tax, a portion of which could be spent on operations.
State spending has to be capped and, as Richardson proposes it, so too would local. He thinks if it’s capped just at the state level, politicians would shift taxes.
His problem with the property tax — by the way, check your mail, they’re coming due — is that 1.5 million homeowners bear half the burden of providing local services for 9.4 million Georgians.
As with the tax professionals, I’m not yet sold on Richardson’s GREAT plan, which stands for “Georgia’s repeal of every ad-valorem tax” and, frankly, may never be — though I share the concern that the nation is building a “gimmee”-class of citizens, now approaching half, who no longer care what government costs because somebody else is paying.
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Children’s health care, and the deceit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Immediately after Congress passed expansion of a children’s health insurance entitlement, the interest groups took to the cameras. Up promptly was a 9-year-old Baltimore girl “who survived brain injuries from a car accident.” Interesting that none of those paraded before the cameras were 25-year-olds declared to be “children” for eligibility’s sake. You’re not likely to see illegals before the cameras, either, though they too could be beneficiaries.
• You won’t hear this in advocates’ press conferences either, but the bill projects the cost as being $14.25 billion in the first six months of 2012, before “dropping” to $1.75 billion in the second six months. Deceit, smoke and mirrors. No wonder 89 percent of Americans think Congress is the pits.
• U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Macon) appears to have learned the Max Cleland lesson: Go to Washington, vote as a central-casting national Democrat and Georgians will bring you home. Marshall was the only Georgia Democrat to vote against the big-dollar expansion of the campaign-fodder health insurance entitlement. He’s in a competitive district.
• United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger is the most interesting figure in the American labor movement. One day he may rank among its giants. In an industry on the brink and locked in global competition that could devour both company and jobs, the Gettelfinger-led UAW negotiated a bold deal with GM on retiree health care that could be a major turning point toward revival for both company and union.
• Half an hour before U.S. Rep. David Scott (D-Atlanta) voted for the resolution condemning MoveOn.org for the “General Betray Us” newspaper ad, he voted against it in committee. He was one of 11 John Kerry Dems who were against it before they were for it.
• Thinking Right’s Special “Murder and mayhem are on the rise” edition: My favorite prison sentence of the week: Phillip E. Hill, a white-collar criminal, was sentenced by a federal judge to 28 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $41 million in restitution for running a massive mortgage scheme that generated $112 million in fraudulent loans. His take from the scheme, involving inflated sales prices to straw borrowers who paid him kickback, was $14 million. If my band of right-wingers need to work a few hours overtime to pay for his prison upkeep, send the bill. I hate armed robbers, child abusers and white-collar crooks. Armed robbers have made up their minds that they’ll kill you before they walk in the door.
• Good riddance, too, to Marla Nicole Wells of Union City, given 30 months and a $220,000 fine for recruiting and helping others to file false tax returns, for which she netted $225,597, money she used to buy a Mercedes.
• Substitute the language in O.J.’s Las Vegas words of rage and think of wife Nichole and Ron Goldman: “Think you can’t steal my s—- and sell it?” Methinks this is a guy who knew he belonged in jail, and has found a way to get there.
• Ah. So now we know the money source of Hillary’s campaign sugar-daddy, Norman Hsu. Federal officials in New York charged him with operating a massive Ponzi scheme that swindled at least $60 million from investors nationwide. Hillary’s returning the $850,000 Hsu raised. If convicted, he could do 20 in the slammer. Unless, of course, he’s pardoned.
• More good news on the legal front: Melvyn Weiss, co-founder of a New York law firm that collected $250 million from filing class-action lawsuits against big corporations, has been indicted on charges of conspiring to pay kickbacks to people who agreed to be plaintiffs. He was added to an existing indictment of his firm and other lawyers.
• A motorcyclist, with passenger, is clocked at 135 mph on Ga. 400. We don’t need hate-crime sentence multipliers. We need stupid-and-reckless multipliers. This one would fetch a lifetime motorcycling ban. And why do we have non-racing motorcycles capable of 135 mph speeds? My liberal, sensitive side would impose a $100 per mile buyer’s tax on every mph capacity beyond 85.
• No more Michael Vick stories for me. Too depressing. I hate stories, even in the movies, that force me to bear witness to a talented or promising individual’s self-destruction.
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Leave leave alone
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An intown Democrat, State Rep. Margaret Kaiser of Atlanta, will introduce a bill in the General Assembly’s upcoming session requiring employers to provide up to 24 hours of unpaid leave per year for “medical or educational” needs.
It’s being proposed at the behest of an advocacy group, 9 to 5. As evidence of the need, the group cites a DeKalb County woman “with a previously flawless work history” during 20 years of company employment who allegedly was fired the day after she refused to work three hours of overtime. She couldn’t, she told the employer, because the overtime would conflict with the school registration schedule for her two children.
Now anybody who believes a company fires a loyal 20-year worker with a flawless work history over the inability to work three hours of overtime for the reason stated should, as former Gov. Marvin Griffin used to say, “pick up a bale of cotton and follow me.” (For city boys and girls, a bale of cotton is too heavy for an individual to lift.)
The legislation is unlikely to get very far. Democrats proposing to implement the agendas of liberal interest groups generally have a difficult time selling their proposals for more government regulation to their more conservative colleagues. It does, however, touch on a movement that should concern those who wish to see business and jobs grow in Georgia. That concern is more government mandates.
Mandates on minimum wages to be paid, on medical procedures to be covered by health insurance policies, and mandates of the sort proposed by the Atlanta legislator, have one of three consequences. They force businesses to flee to areas, often abroad, where costs are cheaper. They force higher prices on consumers — if consumers will pay. And they force business to seek taxpayer subsidies, or tax breaks, to pay for the higher costs that regulation imposes.
If government wants to create new social spending programs, legislators should propose them directly — not as mandates on the private sector.
Grady Hospital: Save or close?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Consider this a sampling of the Internet community. The issue is Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta, a facility in perpetual crisis. In the pre-Medicaid world, it was in crisis. In the pre-Medicare world, it was. And before the existence of PeachCare, a program that provides top-drawer insurance coverage to children in families with incomes of up to $48,000 a year, it was in crisis.
Nowadays most everybody elderly or poor, except for illegals, single men and some who choose not to buy insurance, have a government funding stream attached to them. And yet, Grady still can’t make available revenues cover its costs.
State Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah), the top-ranking member of the Georgia State Senate, caused a stir among the “save Grady” advocates Tuesday by suggesting that Grady’s closing would not be the disaster that others are asserting. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it did go under,” he said at the Capitol. “Maybe the phoenix that would rise in its place would be better than the hospital that’s there now.”
Johnson said he was just “thinking out loud,” but he believes the marketplace will fill the void.
Johnson’s observations are worth considering. I’ve no doubt that with the shootings, stabbings and wrecks in Grady’s coverage area, a real need does exist for its trauma center. That center could be jointly owned, and perhaps staffed, by other hospitals without Level 1 units. Grady’s trauma center would be a central location where patients could be stabilized and then transported to the hospital of their choice. If they wished to remain at a dramatically downsized Grady, they could. The same model would apply to its burn center.
Most of the rest of Grady could become a pure charity hospital and clinic for preventive care and for the treatment of minor ailments.
Some audience sampling questions, though. How closely are you following the Grady story? How important is its “survival” in something akin to the model that exists now? Would you pay $1 a month to “save” Grady? Is Grady the state’s problem? And finally, what do you believe Grady’s problem or problems to be?
Life without parole? Option only a cop-out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Conceded. No quarrel. No dispute. The death penalty is, as Sunday’s front-page headline blared, “still arbitrary.”
It’s still “arbitrary” in that those who deserve to be put to death aren’t.
Robert Dwight Foster of Covington is Exhibit A. He brutally murdered a 5-year-old girl, Tacara Judon, beating her to death with a steel lug wrench. Her 10-year-old brother, Ronald Porter, who slept in a separate bedroom, was severely injured. Both were attacked by Foster as they slept in their beds at their Clayton County home in February 2004.
After months of physical and mental rehabilitation, Ronald survived. But because of brain injuries, he requires special education classes.
Foster, who briefly dated their mother, took the tire iron to the sleeping children because he drove by their home near Jonesboro about 12:45 a.m. and saw another man’s vehicle in her driveway. At 12:48 a.m., a 911 dispatcher took a call from the home. “I tried to kill my girlfriend’s kids,” said the caller.
Foster will not suffer the capital punishment he so richly deserves.
Yes, a system that spares him while executing anybody is a system in need of repair.
The squishy-soft jury in Foster’s trial did something increasingly common, especially in urban areas such as Fulton and DeKalb counties, and rationalized the brutality as warranting no more than life without parole.
No murderer in DeKalb, the state’s third largest county, no matter how horrendous the crime, was sent to death row between 1995 and 2004. Fulton County, the state’s largest with a population in 2005 of 915,623, sent but two.
If you set out looking for discrimination in the application of the death penalty, as liberals customarily do, you find it right there. In just under a decade, among a combined population of almost 1.7 million people, two murderers got the appropriate penalty. Two.
One who didn’t was featured in a front-page story Monday. The torture endured by 13-year-old Marsinah Johnson at the hands of a gang commanded by Ahmond Dunnigan was so awful that it’s normally identified with the depravity of the genocide directed at the Jews by the Nazis or at the Tutsis in Rwanda by the Hutus. And yet Dunnigan is not under sentence of death. He’s another life-without-paroler.
An outrage? For certain. How to fix it?
Georgia really should repeal the life-without-parole option. It gives juries an easy out. It allows them to rationalize their way to an alternative death penalty without worrying about conscience. It’s their chance to impose capital punishment slowly and to walk away disassociating themselves from their verdicts. Foster’s not getting out. Dunnigan’s not. It’s the jury’s wink-and-nod plausible denial death sentence. They don’t have the stomach for lethal injection — or at least one person on the jury doesn’t — so they “compromise” on slow death behind bars. Absurd.
Life without parole is no deterrent to people such as Dunnigan. It’s lifetime association with dead-end criminals with a daily routine and free meals and medical care. Over time, of course, as more Dunnigans and Fosters populate the prisons, the worse lock-ups will become.
The first fix, then, is to eliminate the easy-out plausible denial option for juries.
The second fix is to make it clear to juries that their job it to find guilt and make a recommendation to the judge on sentencing. Judges, based on an awareness of what’s happening in other judicial districts, should have the sole responsibility for deciding and imposing sentences, as is the case in Florida, for example.
Another consideration should be to create a state panel of active prosecutors and retired judges to decide, in consultation with local DAs, which crimes warrant asking for the death penalty. The Brian Nichols case, for example, has such significant statewide criminal justice implications that no single district attorney should be allowed to pursue the lesser penalty of life without parole. To his credit, Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard has steadfastly refused to yield to a lesser sentence.
Another fix would be to create a state or regional team of prosecutors experienced in death penalty cases who would take over prosecution of capital offenses throughout the state.
We can either accept that juries reflect the will of the people and, therefore, disparities that superficially appear “arbitrary” will result. Or we can change the system.
You decide.
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The ‘root causes’ of terrorism
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust and believes Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth. So why should anybody believe his denial Sunday night that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons?
Asked on CBS’s “60 Minutes” whether his country is pursuing a nuclear bomb, Ahmadinejad said no. “Our plan and program is very transparent,” Ahmadinejad said. “You have to appreciate we don’t need a nuclear bomb. We don’t need that. What need do we have for a bomb?” He continued:
“In political relations right now, the nuclear bomb is of no use. If it was useful it would have prevented the downfall of the Soviet Union. If it was useful, it would have resolved the problem the Americans have in Iraq. The time of the bomb is passed.”
The program was recorded Thursday in Tehran in advance of his speech today at Columbia University and an address Tuesday at the United Nations.
He also said that: “It’s wrong to think that Iran and the U.S. are walking toward war. Who says so? Why should we go to war? There is no war in the offing.”
Ahmadinejad asked to visit Ground Zero while in New York. The request was denied, as it should have been. The prospect a Ahmadinejad paying his “respects” to victims of 9/11 while his nation continues to provide the weapons used to kill American soldiers in Iraq pushes tolerance past its limits. He said on CBS that “usually you go to these sites to pay your respects. And also to perhaps air your views about the root causes of such incidents.”
Ahmadinejad’s public-relations aim here appears to be to cut out the middle man and to explain his views directly to Americans. That’ll start today when he speaks at Columbia University. he can use the Columbia speech to air his views about the “root causes” of the attack on America.
The question of the day is whether Ahmadinejad can say anything that will change any minds? If the CBS interview is a taste of what’s to come, the answer’s no.
Democrats use kids health care in political war
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The absurdity of Democratic efforts to expand a government health care program for the poor to children of the middle class is captured in an observation made recently by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt.
“Families making $80,000 a year would be offered coverage” under the bill just about to pass Congress, said Leavitt. “Many who are currently having to pay the AMT [alternative minimum tax] would be eligible. So they have to pay the tax for those who are rich and would qualify as being poor at the same time. Only in Washington.”
The alternative minimum tax was passed into law in 1969. It was one of periodic congressional efforts to chase down the rich — in this case 155 high-income households spread across America who managed to avoid most taxes by taking advantage of available deductions. It set a minimum tax rate for some high-income taxpayers, beyond which some deductions are disallowed. But since the law was not indexed to inflation, the covered “rich” are now marrieds with middle-class incomes. So much for “soak the rich” tax pursuits. The “rich” can dodge; the middle-class stand, checkbook in hand, dumbstruck and befuddled while stroking a check to the tax man.
For that injustice, Democrats offer some compensation to the middle class. They’ll be able to drop private insurance and transfer their children onto the government dole — something only the most obtuse and unaware wouldn’t do. When passed a decade ago, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which pays 73.3 percent of PeachCare, was intended for children of the working poor — those without access to insurance in families with incomes of 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or $41,300 for a family of four. Georgia is one of a handful of states that expanded eligibility including children in families of four with incomes in excess of $48,000 per year.
The U.S. House of Representatives upped eligibility to 400 percent of poverty, covering children in families of four with incomes of up to $83,000. The Senate version, which appears likely to prevail, would make it 300 percent of poverty, or about $62,000.
“The legislation would raise taxes on working people and would raise spending by between $35 [billion] and $50 billion,” President Bush said Thursday.
The final version is likely to come his way within days. The program is set to expire next Sunday. Bush has promised to veto either the House or the Senate version — and should. “Our goals should be for children who have no health insurance to be able to get private coverage, not for children who already have private health insurance to be able to get government coverage.”
By Congressional Budget Office estimates, almost eight of 10 children with parents earning between 200 and 300 percent of poverty are covered by private insurance and that between 300 and 400 it’s nine of 10. “We believe SCHIP should put poor people in line first before putting those who can afford private insurance,” said Leavitt.
As Democratic leaders have demonstrated repeatedly in grandstanding on Iraq, offering pullout legislation they know has no chance of succeeding, the SCHIP bill that will hit the president’s desk in the coming week is entirely about politics.
U.S. Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said Bush is “going to get a chance to side with 10 million kids or not,” and if he vetoes the bill “it will be a political victory for us.”
Politics. Pure 2008 White House politics. That’s the essence of Democratic strategy on Iraq, and it’s the essence of their strategy on children’s health.
It’s phony — even down to the financing, which as Leavitt noted, drops the cost “from $16 billion in the final year to a little over $3 billion.” Physician reimbursement rates are raised in 2008 and 2009 but are unrealistically lowered in the following two years to conceal the bill’s true cost.
Deceit and politics. Veto it, yes.
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Local elections and voter IDs; Jena Six case
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Headline correction: “Billable hours aren’t everything.” The headline writer neglected to observe that the story was about lawyers. (Of course, billable hours aren’t everything if one earns as much working 15 hours as when working 40, as asserted.)
• The Thinking Right translation service offers as a public service this translation of Jane Kidd, head of the state Democratic Party, referring to the three weak challengers lined up to take on U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss: “We’re still kind of eyeing that one.” Translation: “Surely there’s a rich trial lawyer or a wealthy businessman out there who can self-finance a statewide political campaign.” No charge. Public gratitude is sufficient.
• President Bush yields to Democrats and appoints a consensus nominee for attorney general. So how do the Dems react? Precisely as they would had he appointed former U.S. Solicitor Ted Olson. U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, says he’ll use the nomination to pressure the White House to turn over documents unrelated to the case for the nominee, Judge Michael B. Mukasey. This is political 2008 guerilla warfare, not governance.
• Headline: “Saudi women want to drive.” Some days I’m for that, and some days I’m not.
• Just after I popped for new ties comes this word from the British Department of Health, concerning hospital-borne infections and the role of doctors’ dress: “Ties are rarely laundered, but worn daily. They perform no beneficial function in patient care and have been shown to be colonized by pathogens.” Well, yes, but cartoonist Mike Luckovich, whose tastes ran to ’40s and ’50s styles, jettisoned those ties. And besides, they weren’t colonized by pathogens. Those were the patterns.
• George W. Bush has a chance to redeem himself. “My biggest frustration remained the president’s unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending,” former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan writes in his just-released “The age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.” War-related spending is essential; higher domestic spending’s not. Make Greenspan happy. Veto the bloat.
• Voter ID Apology Window open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. to accommodate the long lines of naysayers expected. Tuesday’s local elections around the state, all requiring photo ID, came off without a hitch. Ordinarily I’d say: Thank Secretary of State Karen Handel, who was everywhere spreading the message that they’d be required. But I never thought the problem the critics hallucinated existed anyway.
• Jack! Jack! What’s a good conservative congressman from Georgia, a young guy with a promising future in statewide office, doing defending earmarks? Being the pork champion of Georgia’s U.S. House delegation may play well in U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston’s coastal district, but the way to shrink government is not to demand anything of it. You ask; they own you.
• Jena, La. Whites hang nooses in a tree on a school campus in September, for which they’re punished with in-school suspensions. Three months later, a white student who had nothing to do with the first episode is beaten severely in the school cafeteria by black football teammates, who are criminally charged. Supporters think the first explains the second. It doesn’t. The beaters may well have been overcharged initially with second-degree attempted murder, but it’s often difficult to get a full and impartial read on stories involving race, as was the case at Duke University.
• Jesse Jackson declared Jena to be “a defining moment, just like Selma was a defining moment,” and accused Barack Obama of “acting like he’s white” for refusing to take up the cause of the “Jena Six,” according to The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., where Jackson spoke. Jackson doesn’t remember the acting white comment. Jena is not Selma or even Duke, where no crime occurred.
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Move on from the 60s. But no.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After Wednesday’s failed effort in the U.S. Senate to pass legislation that would guarantee troops more time at home from Iraq, Democrats really should admit defeat and move on. It’s no wonder the nation’s approval rating for Congress has dipped to 11 percent, the lowest ever. Congress, believe it or not, hovers at a third of President Bush’s 29 percent — and he’s the guy the Left loves to hate. Eleven percent. That’s mass murderer territory.
You’d think the polls and Wednesday’s vote on the proposal by U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) to require the administration to grant troops as much time home from Iraq as spent in the country, would convey a clear message to move on — and to the moveon.org crowd.
Wednesday’s 56-44 vote — four shy of the 60 needed to advance — makes it clear that, even with the wobbly Republicans heading for the hills, Democrats cannot pass legislation that will directly or indirectly force a premature withdrawal from Iraq. Webb’s back-door approach to deny the Pentagon the manpower necessary to support troop levels in Iraq was their best shot, since it could be cast as an effort to “support” the troops. Most soldiers spend about 15 months in Iraq and a year at home.
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who joined John McCain in leading the opposition, opined that “the idea of winning the war in Iraq is beginning to get a second look.” Head Dem Harry Reid of Nevada saw it otherwise. “In blocking this bipartisan bill, Republicans have once again demonstrated they are more committed to protecting the president than protecting our troops.” Bipartisan means they had the likes of Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Gordon Smith of Oregon.
To his credit, Virginia Republican John Warner, who voted for the measure in July, reversed course, concluding after talks with senior military officials that the consequences would be disastrous.
Since it’s now obvious to everybody that the Democrats will not prevail in their surrender campaign, you’d think Wednesday’s vote would be the end of their efforts. But no. Carl Levin of Michigan has a proposal to order combat troops home in nine months that’s likely to come up for a vote in coming days. Reid and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin also have legislation pending to cut off funding for combat next year.
Congress is shooting for a new record: Single-digit approval ratings. When another couple of percentage points of the country comes to realize that this is a majority incapable of moving beyond a political campaign, it’ll be there. It’s a party that can’t move on — from the 60s.
GOP front-runners ‘ignoring’ blacks?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Republican presidential candidates — the presumed front-runners at least — are making themselves scarce for a Sept. 27 debate, said to be “African-American oriented” and organized by talk show host Travis Smiley. It’s scheduled for Baltimore’s historically black Morgan State University and will be aired by PBS.
As of now, only U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter of California, Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Ron Paul of Texas will participate. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee are sending regrets — much to the ire of Smiley and his fans.
“No one should be elected president of this country in 2008 if they ignore people of color,” said Smiley. “”If they want to be president of all America they need to speak to all Americans.”
Agreed.
The question remains, however, whether a failure to attend any single event, or to appear before any specific organization or interest group, amounts to “ignoring” a particular constituency. The correct answer is no.
Anybody who’s paid attention to the ongoing series of debates involving candidates of both parties recognizes that their views are getting fleshed out pretty thoroughly on the major issues facing the next president — issues equally important to all Americans.
This is, I suppose, a chicken-or-egg proposition. Republicans should reach out to black voters year-round — but that’s not the same as saying that they should embrace the Big Government views that attract most black voters to the Democratic Party. They do need, however, to be smarter and more aggressive and more consistent in selling conservative policies to Democrats of color. Eventually the single-digit support among blacks will grow.
Don’t let ‘affordable housing’ push trigger subsidies
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Holding the good liberals back when the opportunity arises to expand government and hide the costs — the opportunity being the fallout from the subprime lending foreclosures — is a bit like turning the lead cow in a stampede or quelling panic on Wall Street: More than likely, a trampling will precede sanity.
We are now said to have an “affordability crisis” that was masked by subprime lending but is now revealed by the wave of foreclosures that resulted from irresponsible lending and borrowing.
That problem was best described by Lewis Ranieri, former chairman of Salomon Brothers. Talking about the industry, Ranieri explained: “We’re not really sure what the guy’s income is and … we not sure what the house is worth. So you can understand why some of us become a little nervous.” Lots are now nervous. More than half of bankers responding to a Federal Reserve survey report that they’ve tightened subprime lending standards. No question some buyers and sellers over-reached, taking far greater risk than was responsible.
But as with commutes, clean air, sprawl and economic justice — the buzz-words employed to drive public policies preferred by liberals, those who profit from high-density development or more government borrowing — campaigns such as “affordable housing” invite government intervention in ways that may not be warranted.
“Affordable” housing is a mom-and-apple-pie appeal to take on two mortgages — yours and the mortgage of a stranger selected by government, or one of its designated nonprofits, for a housing windfall. That’s one way housing is made “affordable.” Government borrows money — a great bonanza, incidentally, to bond lawyers and others who profit from the transaction — and lend it to individuals who are lucky or have connections.
The taxpayer who is providing the subsidy — who may, incidentally, be a renter saving to buy a home — is the only “loser” in the lot. Everybody else is making money taken to transfer wealth, in the form of a housing subsidy, to a happenstance or connected borrower who may or may not be most deserving of the windfall. The taxpayer never recovers the wealth given, no matter how much the property appreciates.
The second way housing is made “affordable” is to hide the cost in a development and spread the financial burden to other home buyers.
When governments give higher-density zoning or permits in return for the developer setting aside some units to be sold at below-market rates to satisfy politicians or advocacy groups, two undesirable trade-offs occur. One is that other buyers in the complex are paying too much so that some preferred buyers can get more house than they can afford. In that instance, other buyers pay the social costs politicians have imposed.
The second consequence of the trade-off may well be that roads and schools are overburdened by the unwarranted density, spreading the social cost still further.
Sharon Gay, an Atlanta lawyer, offered an op-ed opinion in Monday’s AJC, declaring that with recent developments in the housing market, “it is actually getting harder to find an affordable home in anything like a convenient location.”
The trend always has been that free-market buyers in crowded markets go to places where land and housing is cheaper. Affordable housing exists but now government’s additional imperative, we are told, is to offer it in “a convenient location.” Is “a convenient location” such a compelling public concern that money should be transferred from the accounts of renters and people paying their own mortgages to strangers chosen for a housing bonanza by bureaucrats or their designees? Decidedly not.
Some local government may choose to offer a direct housing subsidy to junior firemen, starting teachers, janitors or some other lower-wage public employees.
But it should be up-front, drawn from the general treasury. Then we’d know who the beneficiaries are, whether the public policy objective is being achieved, and what the costs are. Voters could decide at the ballot box whether they wanted to continue housing subsidies to certain employees and how much.
Now it’s hidden. Either let the free market work, so that people live in the houses they can afford where they exist. Or pay the subsidies openly and directly, and require them to live where government wants.
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A war for oil?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a new book scheduled for release this week, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan contends the Iraqi phase of the war on terrorism is “largely about oil.”
“Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy,” Greenspan wrote in “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.”
“I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil,” said Greenspan, who retired in January 2006 after 18 years as chairman of the nation’s central bank.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” disputed Greenspan’s opinion. “I have a lot of respect for Mr. Greenspan.” But, he said, “I think that it’s really about stability in the Gulf. It’s about rogue regimes trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. It’s about aggressive dictators.”
Saddam Hussein “launched wars against several of his neighbors,” Gates said, and was “trying to develop weapons of mass destruction, certainly when we went in, in 1991.”
My oft-stated believe is, of course, that the war was launched for the reasons President Bush stated in response to the attack on this country. But that is a debate pundits and historians will have for decades to come. It won’t be resolved here today.
While the Iraqi phase of the war was not about oil, there’s no question that oil is, as Greenspan observed, a “resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy.” Military action to prevent evil regimes from destroying or severely crippling industrial economies around the world would be a legitimate use of force. The U.S. , and other industrial nations as well, certainly have a vested interest in preserving stability in the region and in preventing rogue regimes from using oil as a weapon.
On another Iraqi front, Gates said he would urge Bush to veto legislation proposed by U.S. Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) to prevent the military from deploying troops back to Iraq until they have spent as much time at home as they spent on their last tour in Iraq. It’s a veto Bush should issue if the proposal passes. It’s clearly intended as a way for Congress to micromanage the war and to tie the administration’s hands in prosecuting it.
On another Greenspan front, the former Fed chairman is right in observing that the Republican Party is losing its small-government principles. When Republicans controlled Congress they “swapped principle for power” and “ended up with neither,” he wrote. “They deserved to lose.” No argument here. That same temptation is before Republicans who have come to power in Georgia. They, too, will deserve to lose if they follow in the footsteps of those on the national level who “swapped principle for power.”
For security’s sake, America won’t betray Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hop aboard. The John McCain campaign bus rolling through Iowa expresses what should be the sentiment of this entire nation: “No Surrender.”
As President Bush made clear in a 17-minute address to the nation Thursday night, surrender may be an option for the next President — but it won’t be for this one.
History — assuming it is written by free men and women not intimidated into silence by the fear of attracting the terrorists’ notice — will be exceedingly kind to this president. With pressure on all sides to abandon to their fate friends who have put their lives in our hands, on our promise, the president declined. Declined emphatically.
Speaking directly to the people of Iraq, Bush promised “that America does not abandon our friends, and we will not abandon you.” It’s a promise we should honor.
How long should the United States remain in Iraq? Until al-Qaida and the Jihadist know they’re defeated. Until it’s clear to the entire world that America’s word is its bond. Until terrorists the world over are never again tempted to fly planes into landmark buildings or to plot the mass murder of American citizens. That clearly won’t happen by next March, May or July. It won’t happen by next November’s presidential election. And it likely won’t happen on the watch of the next president.
That’s not to say, however, that retreat won’t occur on the next president’s watch. The failure of the field of Democrats to confront its loony left over the despicable ad in The New York Times, identifying Gen. David Petraeus as “General Betray Us,” and their insistence on finding a quick, face-saving reason to diddy-bop to the exit door, oblivious to consequences, renders the whole lot suspect on national security.
If you believe, as I do, that for the foreseeable future — a decade, maybe two, maybe more, depending on whether we succeed or fail in Iraq — the world is inherently less safe and that evil people will kill us en masse, as they did on that infamous Sept. 11, you can’t have confidence in leaders antsy to run. And the Democrats are, damn the consequences.
Describe it in any terms you like, but this is a party under the control of the ’60s generation of leftists. General Betray Us. The betrayal, if we follow the advice of the Democratic field, won’t be just of the American patriots putting their lives on the line, as Gen. Petraeus is doing, but of every friend of America, especially those in Iraq, who walk through minefields based on our promises.
This is about us, a moment that reveals our character, a moment when, as Bush said Thursday night, “our moral and strategic imperatives are one.” This is not a mission driven by adventurism or revenge or the imposition an alien idea — democracy — on inhospitable soil. It’s about us. Our freedom. Our security. Our ability to go to work in tall buildings or to gather in large crowds or to board airplanes without weighing, however fleetingly, the odds that madmen will choose this day to make a statement with our deaths.
The president got it right: “If we were driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened. Al-Qaida could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. Extremists could control a key part of the global energy supply. Iraq could face a humanitarian nightmare. Democracy movements would be violently reversed. We would leave our children to face a more dangerous world.”
While testifying before Congress last week, Petraeus drew flak for declining to speculate on whether the war in Iraq has made America safer. “Sir,” he replied, “I don’t know, actually.” Despite the criticism, it was precisely the right answer. Bush, not Petraeus, is the appropriate leader to address that question — as he emphatically did Thursday.
When Bush appears to be reeling, under siege from public opinion polls, unified Democrats and defections among Republican allies, he has the remarkable leadership ability to plant his feet, define his principled ground, and stand fast. Never betray people who believe in you. Bush won’t.
History, indeed, will be kind to this wartime leader.
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MARTA’s GM; Mexico trucks; the Clintons
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• A cop who arrests a McDonald’s clerk for delivering a too-salty burger, as one did in Union City, is in the wrong line of work. And employees who deliver a burger accidently over-salted because the business has been wasting too much meat needs a manager.
• MARTA hires a new general manager. A year to learn and schmooze, followed by a year to “shake things up” and then one to find another job before the realization sets in that the broken pieces don’t fit back together. Steps one and two may be reversed. In year four, the board finds a marvelous new prospect employed somewhere else. The cycle begins anew. Ho hum.
• Any old person who attends a sponsored “free lunch” thinking it’s free probably should have a conservator managing their money. The feds are cracking down on investment firms for luring well-to-do old folks to “free lunch” educational seminars where they’re pushed to open new accounts or make investments. The old people who need protecting are those victimized by con artists such as the one who bilked an 83-year-old north Fulton woman out of $97,000 for a driveway paving. He’d been arrested 40 times in the past 17 years for similar crimes. Lock ‘em up, toss the key in an asphalt truck.
• The young people who need protecting are those being victimized by shooters and drug-dealers, not those tempted to buy a knock-off pair of Nikes on the street corner.
• The problem with all stories about foreclosures is that it’s impossible to know, from the information given, who’s at fault: borrower, broker, lender or somebody else. All appear to have grown equally careless. But carelessness on a grand enough scale invites politicians to “do-something.” In Georgia, income rose 60 percent between 1990 and 2006. But housing values rose 122 percent. Lenders and borrowers were taking greater and greater risk.
• Redeveloping Fort McPherson is a boon, a winner every which way. But wait. The good news is bad. Taking the neighborhood upscale could mean that some renters might choose to relocate to places with cheaper rents. This is bad. But on the bright side, it’s another chance for a government remedy. How about a rent freeze?
• Too bad our children aren’t pandas. We could rent them out (the Atlanta Zoo pays China $1.1 million per year for Lun Lun and Yang Yang) to a family that supports them in country-club lifestyle. All they’d have to do is sit and look cute.
• White House aid Frances Fragos Townsend talking about Osama bin Laden sounds like Steve Spurrier critiquing the performance of my beloved Georgia Bulldogs: “This is about the best he can do,” said Townsend after viewing the Osama tape. “This is a man on a run, from a cave, who’s virtually impotent other than on these tapes.”
• Moveon.org’s full-page ad in The New York Times headlined “General Petraeus Or General Betray Us?” subtitled “Cooking the Books for the White House” demonstrates yet again an eternal truth about America’s loony Left: Unassisted, it will always marginalize itself.
• Resistance to allowing Mexican trucks to deliver throughout the United States is driven by pure protectionism, not safety concerns. The administration opts to allow a one-year test. Congress, pushed by the Teamsters and the Sierra Club, balks. Mexico is opening its doors to U.S. truckers.
• The length or time of “commutes” within metro Atlanta, an obsession in these parts, is as irrelevant as the number of blondes driving Chevrolets. The commutes start here and end there — with neither here nor there being anyplace in particular. Hard to draw conclusions from that, except the one offered by Alan Pisarski, author of “Commuting in America” — metro Atlanta continues to grow.
• Just days after the release of Bill Clinton’s book, “Giving,” wife Hillary lives the sequel, “Giving Back,” returning $850,000 raised by Democratic fund-raiser Norman Hsu. He’s under federal investigation for allegedly paying straw donors to contribute to Hillary and other candidates. When it serves their interests, the Clintons — and especially Hillary — seem to find the company of shady players.
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Should Georgia end property tax?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Republicans, I’ve long argued, don’t handle the media very well — in large part because they assume a liberal bias. Believing their message will be distorted or misunderstood, they choose to try to work around it. That’s not particularly smart, but most get by with it until they come up with a really novel idea that requires a great deal of explanation and selling.
A good example is House Speaker Glenn Richardson’s proposal to eliminate property taxes while expanding the sales tax to services such as haircuts and laundry. The property tax is the most hated government levy and everybody would be glad to be rid of it. The question is how to make up the lost revenues. That’s where the sales job comes in. In addition to the tax on services, which will be a hard sell, the other problem for Richardson to deal with is that the state would collect all taxes and remit local governments’ shares back to them. The exception would be a local option sales tax, collected and kept locally.
It’s a big idea with some merit. Richardson argues that capping state collections, as has been proposed, is pointless if locals are able to raise taxes. That would invite tax-shifting rather than spending discipline, he said. Locals hate the idea and are quietly but aggressively working the state to get Richardson’s proposal killed.
Gov. Sonny Perdue, one of those Republicans who has a more formal relationship with the media, warmed up Wednesday, inviting a number of State Capitol reporters to breakfast at a midtown diner, to talk about issues of the day and about the upcoming session.
He’s cool — as in not particularly receptive — to Richardson’s proposal. He thinks it would encroach on local authority, as it would. That’s intentional. “The first thing you’ve got to keep in mind when you want to do good is not to do harm,” said the governor.
This tax shift, if it happens at all, is a long time off. It won’t happen in the coming session. People don’t understand it well enough. Details are still in flux. And it requires a lot more communication — and selling — than one state official can do alone or with a few allies addressing civic clubs.
The question here, though, is whether people do hate the property tax enough to consider a shift and, if so, how? A higher sales tax? A lower, but expanded, sales tax that would include services? A higher state income tax? The maximum rate now is 6 percent. Or leave the system untouched?
No, Oprah. No politics.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dang. Oprah’s going political. The entertainment superstar endorsed Barack Obama in May, but now she’s considering a larger role in his campaign that may include speaking for him at campaign events. She’s also hosted a fund-raiser for him over the weekend at her 42-acre estate in Montecito, Calif. — her first for a political candidate.
“My money isn’t going to make any difference” to a presidential candidate, said Oprah in a television interview with Larry King. “My value to him — my support of him — is probably worth more than any other check that I could write.”
As an Oprah admirer, the news that she’s venturing prominently into the partisan arena is tremendously disappointing. Her advocacy for Obama will do less to help him win the White House than it will to raise questions about future causes and issues she decides to take on. The refreshing thing about Oprah is, or was, that you could watch her program — something I rarely do because it’s not my particular taste and, besides, I’m on the job when it airs — without having to guard against hidden agendas. Now, who knows? It’s hard to be a political operative one day and avoid seeing the world from the perspective of the liberal candidate when the campaign ends. I don’t think you switch in and out.
Too bad. The woman is amazing. Her book club routinely took titles that would have a hard time selling 20,000 and boosted their sales to more than a million. Her decision to avoid the “who’s the baby’s daddy?” sleaze that has become the staple of her small-time competitors raised the bar for daytime television.
It was a mistake for Walter Cronkite to lend is voice to the anti-war movement by offering his personal opinion on the news following the 1968 Tet Offensive and it’s a mistake for Oprah Winfrey to become openly and actively involved in a political campaign. The mistake for Cronkite is that every newscaster after him is assumed to have an opinion about the news that sometimes is reflected in the stories they report. The non-political Oprah was in a class by herself. Why join Rosie and the Dixie Chicks?
On SCHIP, Bush should use veto power
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Demonstrating that life and fight remains, a Bush administration hounded and besieged by a spendthrift Congress, demonstrates that even when surrounded and overwhelmed, there are ways to fight back.
Less than three weeks before the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the federal funding source for PeachCare, is set to expire, neither the House nor the Senate has moved to reconcile wildly expensive legislation passed in August to extend the program another five years. Under existing spending levels, that cost would be $25 billion.
The House would raise that to about $75 billion and the Senate, $60 billion. The president has proposed $30 billion and has promised to veto the higher spending.
After the two higher versions were passed allowing coverage of “children” up to the age of 25, whether they are in this country legally or not, and after New York sought to expand eligibility for families earning as much as $82,000 per year, the administration acted. It imposed new standards requiring states to enroll “at least 95 percent of children in the state below 200 percent of the federal poverty level” before they can expand eligibility. New York would expand eligibility to 400 percent of poverty, highest in the nation. Georgia is at 235 percent.
In effect, states are ordered to fulfill the original promise of programs such as PeachCare to fully serve the poor before moving to provide taxpayer-subsidized coverage to the children of the middle class. Who could argue?
Lots of Democrats, for one. On Friday, the administration rejected New York’s application because it has not yet enrolled at least 95 percent of the state’s poor children. “New York has not demonstrated that its program operates in an effective and efficient manner with respect to the core population of targeted low-income children,” said the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Kerry Weems.
U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), who slipped a $2 million taxpayer-financed earmark into a labor and health appropriations bill in July to create a “Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service” at the City College of New York, found the federal decision to serve the poor first “unconscionable.”
“It’s clear,” said Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, “the administration is spoiling for a fight and it’s unfortunate he has chosen children’s health care.”
Weems noted, too, that children of the middle class should not be enrolled in the program for the poor until they have been uninsured for a year. A Congressional Budget Office study found that up to half of the children enrolled in state programs such as PeachCare came from families where parents had either dropped or elected not to purchase available private insurance because the taxpayer offering is better and cheaper. You can’t blame the parents, but you can apply rules to discourage the dumping of middle class children onto the backs of taxpayers, as the administration did.
In addition to the unwarranted expansion of SCHIP, The New York Times reported last month that its analysis of the House bill reveals hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for specific hospitals. One hospital, Bay Area Medical Center, straddles the border between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the Times reported. Yet, in the House bill it’s “moved” 200 miles to Chicago, where Medicare reimbursements are higher.
In all, millions of dollars a year are directed to about 40 favored hospitals, the Times found. Two hospitals in Kingston, N.Y., are “moved” 80 miles to New York City. Admittedly, Democrats didn’t invent the practice of “moving” favored hospitals. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a Republican, “moved” a hospital from rural Dixon, Ill., to Chicago 95 miles away in 1999.
Democrats vowed when they took control of Congress that they’d reform earmarks, but there’s little evidence anything has changed.
The president has the veto pen, and he should use it on either version of SCHIP. He should, too, take up the crusade on earmarks. In the meantime, however, his administration is demonstrating life and a willingness to use the bureaucracy to fight back on the unnecessary expansion of government.
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Stick with Petraeus
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Based on a letter to his troops before engaging Congress on progress in the Iraqi phase of the war on terrorism, Gen. David Petraeus reported that violence in the country has diminished in eight of the last 11 weeks. But he expressed disappointment in progress toward political reconciliation.
Indications are, too, that he is agreeable to some slight reduction in troops, by perhaps 5,000 by next spring. “This is a delicate balance to be struck,” said one unnamed senior administration official. “If you do it too quickly, you endanger the gains you have made.”
U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Az.), meanwhile, says Democrats have lost momentum in their attempt to set an arbitrary withdrawal timeline. “They’ve lost the momentum, otherwise they wouldn’t want to sit down with Republicans and negotiate a solution,” said McCain. “The facts on the ground contradict the assertions of those who want to set a timetable for withdrawal.”
The question whether the report by General Petraeus will change any minds — in Congress or in the country? In Congress, no. But there’s hope for the country. Most of us are inclined to reject Osama bin Laden’s instructions to leave Iraq and convert to Islam. And we’re not willing to embrace defeat. So we’ll stick with the commander in the field.
The picture is still clear, simple: Voters need IDs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgians possessed of common sense are scratching their heads today in utter amazement that it took so long for sanity to prevail on the requirement that potential voters establish their identities at the polls.
The decision Thursday by U.S. District Court Judge Harold Murphy of Rome brings “closure” to one of the goofiest legal tantrums witnessed since the no-underlying-crime Scooter Libby case. In the voter ID case, complaining organizations scoured the state, searching high and low from the tidewaters of Glenn to the outskirts of Chattanooga, for a single victim aggrieved by the requirement to produce valid photo identification. A single victim. One. One from among 5,079,588 registered voters in Georgia. They could not.
“Although plaintiffs claim to know of people who claim that they lack photo ID, plaintiffs have failed to identify those individuals,” wrote Murphy in his order upholding the law. “The failure to identify those individuals ‘is particularly acute’ in light of plaintiffs’ contention that a large number of Georgia voters lack acceptable photo ID.”
Had they existed, surely the League of Women Voters of Georgia, Common Cause, the NAACP and the organizations of black elected officials and clergy could have produced one in two years of searching. And they didn’t. Oh, they’ll continue to try and will eventually produce a “victim,” but search as they did, it’s telling that despite the hype and rhetoric and the predictions of doom, the facts in evidence amounted to nothing. No harm. No foul.
There are two lessons here. One is that voter ID was never so much about establishing identification at the polls as it was about the shift in power under the Gold Dome. Democratic activists and their media allies kept insisting that Republicans had some sinister motive and that the real problem the Legislature should be addressing was absentee ballot fraud.
Quoting from an Indiana case where the League of Women Voters had also challenged voter identification law, unsuccessfully, Murphy noted that “the legislature has wide latitude in determining the problems it wishes to address and the manner in which it desires to address them.”
The Legislature is free — hallelujah the acknowledgment — to assess voter fraud and attack it in whatever order it sees fit, “addressing itself to the phase of the problem which seems most acute to the legislative mind,” a quote from an 8-0 decision by the Earl Warren court in 1955. “The legislature may select one phase of one field and apply a remedy there, neglecting others.”
That’s the heart of the matter and the key to understanding the bloviated complaints that have been bandied about for the past two years.
The plain fact is that power shifted, and the heel-diggers refused to acknowledge that the likes of state Sen. Cecil Staton (R-Macon) and state Rep. Barry Fleming (R-Harlem) were driving the train on voter fraud, not the old crew. That’s painful for some partisan interest groups to acknowledge and they sought, unsuccessfully, to use state and federal courts to roll back the clock.
Murphy wisely deferred, finding as well that “the photo ID requirement is rationally related” to the state’s interest in further preventing fraudulent voting.
For the state, it was a blow-out. Secretary of State Karen Handel has gone to great lengths to inform potential voters of the photo ID requirement, sending out 250,000 letters, buying hundreds of radio spots, setting up a hotline and Web site, and training election officials and poll workers in the 23 counties with elections on Sept. 18. “We don’t ever want to be in a place where a citizen who is legitimately eligible to cast a vote is not able to do it,” she said. Photo IDs are free and readily available in every county.
Comes now the second lesson of this protracted and overblown political snit. The lesson is that any change conservatives or Republicans might bring requires a legislative strategy, a public relations strategy, and a team of skilled and dedicated lawyers determined to fight in the Legislature, in the media and in the courts.
Accused of using photo ID as a subterfuge to keep blacks from voting, a baseless and absurd allegation — it would have been easy to back down and to abandon efforts to write a voter ID law — state leaders stuck by their beliefs.
And now they have won on all counts.
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Same-sex marriage; foreclosures
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• One day before Hurricane Dean hit Mexico, Texans were being urged to prepare for possible evacuation. We’re now up to Felix and from one day to the next, scientists cannot speak with certainty on the path of a hurricane. But the computer models that predicts global warming’s catastrophic future are taken by many as the gospel. But of course mass starvation was to be our future too before the Green Revolution.
• In a world where doing nothing is not an option, doing a little is the next best thing. President Bush proposed a modest federal program to aid credit-worthy homeowners — not investors — with adjustable-rate mortgages to refinance. “It’s not the government’s job to bail out speculators or those who made the decision to buy a home they knew they could never afford,” said the president. True. But Congress is back in session. Methinks the Dems will see it differently.
• There’s bound to be a dark cloud behind the silver lining good news that the percentage of Georgians living in poverty dropped slightly. Ah, yes, here it is: “We are one of the high-poverty, high-uninsured states,” responded Alan Essig of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, a group that advocates more social spending. “Many are struggling,” he said, while “the economy is supposedly booming.” That old liberal staple. The real story, as Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson reported, is that America is importing poverty. Between 2000 and 2006, the number of poor Hispanics increased from 6 million to 9.2 million. Among whites and blacks, poverty declined.
• Yes, it’s true. Decatur, Ga., is the center of the universe. And occasionally the rubes in Marietta and Stockbridge come to marvel at the restaurants, festivals and other gathering places that exist nowhere else on the face of the Earth — and certainly not in you-know-where. “The ‘burbs are nothing like this” marveled one of the travelers from afar.
• A company that has manufactured utility poles in East Point for more than 80 years is being sued by neighbors, at least some of whom have just moved there, over “noxious odors and dangerous chemicals.” Yet the company, William C. Meredith Co., has no air pollution violations. Once again: You move in on an existing “nuisance”; it’s your problem. The nuisance, an airport for example, moves in on you; it’s theirs. Verdict here is to the company, including legal fees.
• Iowa offers a reminder of why Georgia passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man/one woman. A county judge there declared the state’s one man/one woman law invalid, setting the stage briefly for same-sex unions. It’s stayed pending a hearing before the Iowa Supreme Court. A judge always exists somewhere willing to write the laws he wants from the bench.
• It’s no surprise that Democrats are having “second thoughts on surveillance,” as the headline says. They’ve never liked the Protect America Act provision allowing electronic surveillance of phone calls and e-mails originated from suspected terrorists abroad to American citizens. They passed six-month authority in August because they knew the majority in this country would react badly if they didn’t. But second thoughts? The second thoughts were their first.
• What has this world come to? Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr is praised by House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) for his testimony expressing his “second thoughts” about surveillance authority. Waters praised him for standing up to the White House and, to quote the reporter, “his conservative brethren to oppose the law.” He’s a man of principle, but his “conservative brethren” are Libertarians and it’s unlikely his position is at odds with theirs.
• Sooner or later a responsible General Assembly will step in and provide local governments the guidance they need on rezonings, waivers and other invitations to high-density development that exceed the carrying-capacity of roads. It is insane to continue worsening traffic congestion without plans in place to add capacity. The Sembler Co. is proposing to put 1.5 million square feet of retail space, 300,000 square feet of offices and 3,700 housing units on 100 acres on already-congested North Druid Hills Road in DeKalb. And why in the world would the school board sell schools in an area projected to get 3,700 more units of housing?
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Thompson is in. You care?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Fred Thompson made it official Wednesday night, allowing Jay Leno to assemble his announcement audience just after the rest of the field gathered in New Hampshire for their fifth national debate. The timing and Thompson’s choice of Leno over New Hampshire is pretty clear evidence that he concedes that state to others, probably Mitt Romney.
He starts the campaign about 11 points behind Rudy Giuilaini and 2.6 points ahead of Romney, on average, nationally. He’s appealed so far to Republicans who survey the field and decide their first choice is somebody else. He’s the “other” candidate who polls well, but traditionally begins to fade when the real candidate emerges.
He starts his campaign eight months after the rest of the field, and lags way behind both Romney and Giuliani in organization and fundraising.
He’s attractive, in large part because he blends the entertainment-politics culture. He’s easily most familiar to the nation as district attorney Arthur Branch on ABC’s “Law & Order” crime drama. He’s also had roles in more than a dozen movies.
He also appeals in the Red State South because he’s a former U.S. Senator from Tennessee between 1994 and 2002, where he was mostly conservative. He backed John McCain over George W. Bush in 2000. He also spent a number of years in Washington as a lawyer and lobbyist and those years are likely to give him some trouble in the primaries. One of his lobbying clients was the leftist former President Jean Bertrand-Aristide of Haiti and another was the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which retained his lobbying firm in 1991 to ease a regulation that prevented clinics receiving federal money from providing abortion counseling.
Any Thompson supporters here? Thompson badly needs to win South Carolina, where he’s currently running behind Giuliani, to demonstrate that he can carry the South. Maybe. But I’m betting that while he’s the “other” candidate now, by tomorrow he’s just another mortal in the race.
Social Security a trick on illegals?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, if it’s an election season, some national politician is bound to be pandering to the old folks on Social Security. And, sure enough, one is. Democrat Hillary Clinton promised the American Association of Retired Persons Tuesday that as President she will bring a “renewed national commitment to Social Security” and will neither reduce benefits, raise the retirement age nor “privatize” the system.
“This is the most successful domestic program in the history of the United States,” she said to a legislative conference of the Democratic-leaning gimmee organization. “When I’m president, privatization is off the table because it’s not the answer to anything.” She vowed, instead, to insure solvency through fiscal responsibility.
In 2005, President Bush proposed to introduce personal savings accounts that workers under the age of 55 could own and transfer to their heirs. Democrats railed against the idea and Republicans backed down. The President took Social Security reform off the table.
Hillary’s promise comes without specifics. Without question, though, something has to be done. Baby boomers soon begin retiring and over the next 75 years, the payout is projected to be double-digit higher than the payroll taxes collected. The options: Raise the payroll tax, means-test benefits, index benefits to prices rather than wages (something that already should have been done) or raise the retirement age from 67.
Bush was on the right course two years ago. But Congress did nothing. And now Hillary’s promising that nothing significant will happen on, God forbid, her watch in the White House.
I’ve long been convinced that Social Security is a trick on illegal immigrants. They come here, work, and zap! We hand them the bill for the old folks who are voting themselves more and more benefits to be financed on the backs of workers through the payroll tax.
Young workers, and those illegals too, would have been far better off had they been allowed to put aside at least a portion of those taxes, as Bush wanted, for themselves and their survivors.
Out-of-wedlock births have to be discussed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Analyze this, the first sentence of an account of a Michael Bloomberg speech to the National Press Club last week, and then take the quiz on why notable public opinion leaders are reluctant to weigh in on the sensitive question of fathers, marriage and child poverty:
“New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a divorced, billionaire dad, said Tuesday that unwed fathers increase poverty and the government should take steps to get them back with their families.”
A divorced, billionaire dad. Meaning what? A gratuitous insertion in a wire service account, it’s clearly intended to convey a message. But what? That because Bloomberg is divorced, he lacks moral authority to urge that tax laws be amended to entice the absentee male back into children’s lives? That because Bloomberg is rich, he lacks legitimacy to speak of poverty?
The gratuitous reference to his wealth and marital status — both matters unrelated to the issue he addressed or content of his remarks — are noteworthy in that they are warnings to public figures to avoid topics where they risk being accused of hypocrisy. Topics like the epidemic of births to unmarried women and the disadvantage and poverty that results.
Bloomberg wasn’t approaching the hot-button issue at the heart of the problem he addressed. He was, instead, proposing financial incentives to buy men back into their children’s lives, including “a substantial expansion and reform” of the earned income tax credit.
“Why should we expect young mothers to work and not young fathers?” he asked, a reference to the 1996 welfare reform law that, with the EITC, “led millions of people into the labor market, where they attained the dignity of work and a chance to rise out of poverty.” With that, he said, the welfare caseload in New York City had dropped by a third over the past five years.
“Right now,” he continued, “fathers are missing from our strategy to drive down the poverty rate. The gains that we’ve made over the past 10 years have been fueled by mothers. … If we are going to achieve another round of substantial gains … we have to do more to connect fathers to jobs and to their families. We have to increase the rewards for work. …”
Among the changes he suggested is eliminating the EITC “marriage penalty” for families with and without children. “Marriage increase a family’s chances of rising out of poverty — why would government discourage it? It shouldn’t. … The EITC should be a catalyst for fathers to fulfill their obligations as responsible spouses, parents and citizens.”
No hot-button cultural rhetoric there. Dry. Nuts-and-bolts.
To the extent that influential voices are dissuaded from addressing vital issues, such as the consequences of the missing father, because they themselves aren’t poor or have failed marriages, everybody loses. Imagine the treatment had Bloomberg chosen to talk about the real dynamic driving poverty, the creation of babies without bothering to marry.
Bloomberg started his conversation with the usual pabulum about education as “one of the best ways to fight poverty.” It is of course true. No question. But when 69.3 percent of black children, 46.4 of Hispanic and 24.5 of white children are born to unmarried women, the die is cast long before the first schoolteacher enters their lives. And even then, it’s fantasy land to believe any public school system anywhere in America can backfill the hours of guidance and teaching the walkaway father might have provided.
When the War on Poverty was first launched in 1964, single women headed 30 percent of the poor families with children. Today it’s double that. The Brookings Institution, to which Bloomberg delivered the same speech, noted in 2002 that in 2000, 40 percent of the children in female-headed families were poor, compared to 8 percent of the children in married families. Only 20 percent of children in families with incomes of less than $15.000 a year live with both parents.
Marriage reduces poverty. Now, because we’re reached the tipping point where the crisis of out-of-wedlock births is so deeply rooted, few public figures who wish to cultivate a following dare mention it. So they walk around it and talk around it.
But sooner or later, leaders rich and poor, married and divorced, do have to start the conversation. And we have to encourage them.
• Jim Wooten is associate editor of the editorial page. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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Money, color in college admissions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At select colleges and universities, two chief considerations can be “color and money,” writes Peter Schmidt, a deputy editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education, in a new book on college admissions.
In an interview with the AJC’s Maureen Downey, Schmidt said the system is so flawed that children of Vietnamese boat people and West Virginia coal miners are considered advantaged for admissions purposes, while preferences are granted to African-American children of privilege, including the sons and daughters of physicians. That’s the color preference.
The money preference favors the children of legacies and of potential donors. Only about 3 percent of admissions at top-tier universities come from the most disadvantaged 25 percent of the population.
Schmidt estimates that 15 percent of the kids in the nation’s most prestigious schools aren’t there on academic merit. Some are athletes, others have political connections or are the children of donors, or are admitted as the result of other preferences. Others are the sons and daughters of school employees attending as a job benefit accorded the parents.
Are preferences unwarranted? Not inherently. Colleges do have a vested interest in building loyalty, and in attracting certain kinds of students, based on a particular skill. State universities have an interest, too, in creating a student body that reflects the state’s population and its regions.
My view of it is the same as my view of campaign finance: Put everything in the open so parents and the rest of us know the truth. Tell us, for example, how many students at the University of Georgia were admitted on the basis of academic merit alone and what the cut SAT scores were. Then tell us by race how many students were in the secondary pool, the range of SAT scores, and how many students were admitted. Add too, the reasons for preferences.
Preferences, too, should not be fixed. If a college is getting too many girls, some temporary preference may be given to boys. But point it out.
Keep records and keep them open.
Romney offers snapshot of success for GOP
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For conservatives the first seven months of Democratic rule in Congress have been traumatic reminders that eight years is not enough. It’s time enough to expand government, but a fraction of the time needed to alter the expansionist course.
Next year’s presidential election, therefore, is crucial. A White House and Congress controlled by a Clinton-Obama, Pelosi-Reid tandem is a conservative’s worst nightmare.
Lock in a U.S. Supreme Court majority at 5-4, given the near certainty that at least one vacancy will occur over the next four years, and any frivolous thoughts about sitting out the election, opting for a third party or choosing a candidate on any basis other than principles and electability should be discarded now. The stakes are too high to be distracted by matters unlikely to affect a president’s policies and decisions — his personal religious beliefs, for example.
While former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was in Atlanta last week, he and I met. I asked about how a conservative president can be effective with a Congress that may very well be controlled by Democrats.
In Massachusetts, Romney confronted precisely the legislative obstacles he’d face with a Pelosi-Reid Congress. And yet, the tax-cutting policy group, Club for Growth in Washington, concludes that his fiscal record there is “more positive than negative, especially when one considers that average spending increased only 2.22 percent over his four years, well below the population plus inflation benchmark of nearly 3 percent.”
One advantage he had that the president does not is line-item veto authority. “To his credit,” Club for Growth observes, “Romney attempted to cut down on government spending by streamlining many duplicative and wasteful elements” of government, though “some of his more ambitious proposals were rejected by his uber-liberal Legislature.”
“In my state” said Romney, “even though I had the line-item veto, in some respects it was a relative weak tool because my Legislature was 85 percent Democrat. And, therefore, anything I vetoed could routinely be over-ridden.
“I recognized very quickly some lessons that I think are very helpful even in a setting where you have the majority in the Legislature. And that is: Number One, you don’t attack your opposition on a personal basis; you maintain personal respect and build relationships of friendship and trust. Number Two, you look for common ground. …
“In our case, we did that in health care where we all agreed it would be a good thing for everybody to have health insurance. I didn’t want government to provide it and they were willing to accept my plan to get people insured with private insurance. And so we found common ground. And they didn’t advance there.
“On something like taxes, the first year I came in we had almost a $3 billion shortfall, and the Democrats thought they had to raise taxes. I said, ‘No, let me take a whack at it, in effect. Let me show you how we can cut $3 billion without having to raise taxes.’ And they ultimately adopted much of what I proposed. We did not raise taxes.
“And, Number Three, where you can’t [find common ground], don’t get angry about it, but try and go to the people.” An example, he says, is a $250 million retroactive tax on capital gains the Legislature approved. “I know I can’t have my veto upheld easily,” he says. Romney directed his Department of Revenue to send tax bills to those affected. The resulting uproar helped Romney persuade the Legislature to reverse course, leading to a rebate in 2002 of retroactive capital gains collected. “There are ways of working in a setting where you are greatly outnumbered.”
The domestic challenge for the next president are to build a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and to protect President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts while checking a possible Democratic majority’s temptation to expand the reach of the federal government. In Massachusetts, Club for Growth continues, Romney “demonstrated a willingness to take on his Legislature and deserves credit for the many pro-growth measures he advocated and the modest reform he was able to achieve.”
After seven months of this Congress, even “modest reform” is appealing.
• Jim Wooten is associate editor of the editorial page. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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