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October 2007
Bush or Ahmadinejad: Who’s worse?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The endless string of presidential candidate Q&A sessions, I’ve believed from the start, offers the nation a clear sense of the differences between the two parties. Commentators and much of the Democratic field conclude before the first ballot is cast that Hillary has her party’s nomination in the bag — so last night’s performance was an occasion to gang up on her.
Most of the first hour was devoted to Iran and how a Democrat in the White House would deal with its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The simple answer is that they’d all be smarter at negotiating with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than the Republicans are or could be. Dennis Kucinich would even talk him out of nuclear power.
Most striking about their responses, however, is that this field of prominent Americans, all of whom are asking the nation’s voters to entrust them with our lives and fortunes, fear and loath George W. Bush more than Ahmadinejad or the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. When asked to take a pledge that Iran would not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons on their watch, the field weaseled. Joe Biden would pledge to keep us safe. Chris Dodd would pledge to “do everything we can.” Bill Richardson pledged to stop them through diplomacy. Kucinich would talk them out of both weapons and nuclear energy. Hillary pledged to “do everything I can.” John Edwards would take all “responsible” steps. Barack Obama? My notes don’t reflect that he said anything.
With the possible exception of Hillary, these are not people you want in the White House in a time of war. That’s especially true of John Edwards. Watching him take on Hillary reveals a trial lawyer with a style that brought him riches in the courtroom but would be a disaster in the White House. Edwards has the ability — or so he projects — to suddenly believe that his adversary, whether a big corporation or a political rival, is the embodiment of evil. He then twists words and actions to reflect his reality. He’d be a seriously dangerous man in the White House, especially leading a nation at war.
Kucinich is an “impeach Bush” wacko who serves as a reminder of how far left his party reaches. Obama has never seemed presidential and still doesn’t. In a decade or two,maybe. Right now he’s at home in the Senate as a junior Joe Biden. It’s easy to imagine him, too, as president of a national or international non-profit. Biden should be in the classroom or in one of the foreign-policy think-tanks where he can preach — and explode on que. Richardson is running to be Hillary’s vice president and, compared to the field, seems relatively harmless.
Dodd is part of the wallpaper. He did make a relevant point, however, and it is that Republicans would prefer to run against Hillary because of her high negatives. Few would actually choose to listen to her voice for four years. And, of course, it’s hard to know what she’d do in the White House, since she comes from that hide-the-ball bloc of liberals who think the electorate wouldn’t choose them if they knew what they’d actually do in office. Social Security is an example. She’d tax the rich to benefit the deserving.
In the first round of joint appearances by the candidates, Hillary came across as the only one tough enough among the Democrats to lead a nation at war. She has her flaws but in this lot I’d certainly prefer having her, rather than Obama, Biden, Edwards or Kucinich, across the negotiating table from Ahmadinejad.
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Reform state retirement system because it’s right action
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A quarter-century ago, faced with the reality of a corrupted state retirement system, legislators took responsible action.
They closed the corrupt system and created a new one for employees hired after July 1, 1982 — promising all the while that the corruptions and the manipulations that riddled the first would never taint the second. And, indeed, for about 10 years — or until a critical mass of the new hires started thinking of their retirement — the promise held.
Over time, though, the manipulations crept back in: an unnoticed formula change, credit for service rendered elsewhere, and the sweetheart provisions politicians insert for themselves and their friends.
The plain truth is that politicians, sometimes devious, sometimes in ignorance, simply cannot resist the temptation to play games with public retirement systems. They routinely twist the benefit structure of systems serving as few as seven and as many as 280,000 employees and retirees to serve the financial interests of a handful or fewer.
The problem always has been and always will be that beneficiaries make decisions for beneficiaries. Scratch my back …
Michael Nehf, the executive director of four of the state’s retirement systems, spoke to legislators last week about the largest of those he administers, the Employees’ Retirement System of Georgia, with a 2006 membership of 77,000 state employees and almost 33,000 retirees. He warned that unless legislators take action to deal with a rising projected gap between assets and liabilities, the expected shortfall of $781 million on June 30, 2009, will increase to $16.7 billion in 2039 — driven largely by the practice of adding 3 percent cost-of-living increases yearly. This year’s increase is 2 percent, which angers some retirees.
The fund now expects to have 94.5 percent of the assets needed to pay liabilities. Because the retiree population increases, the price of the COLA will rise from $236 million to $528 million in 2039, said Nehf, boosting the unfunded liability to almost $17 billion — at which point the asset shortfall will increase from 4.5 percent to 50.83 percent.
The funding problem has one set of solutions, including lower COLAs, higher employer and/or employee contributions and a rate of return higher than the current 7.5 percent, all combined with a commitment not to make the problem worse by adding new benefits.
Gov. Sonny Perdue proposes an entirely new retirement plan for new hires after July 1 of next year. All current employees will remain in their existing plan and get all the benefits promised.
The three options, put forth as Senate Bills 327, 328 and 329 and House Bills 837, 841 and 843, are these:
• The state would contribute up to 9 percent of salary into a 401(k) or a 457-section plan. It’s employee money immediately. When the employee leaves, all the money goes with him or her.
• A hybrid plan. New hires would participate in ERS, but at what amounts to half benefits, and would also participate in a retirement plan they’d own, just as with those in option 1.
• Enrollment in the existing ERS defined-benefit plan, but with benefits based on a different formula. The difference would be about $300 per month less for an employee who worked 20 years at a maximum salary of $36,000.
The General Assembly should approve Senate Bill 327 and House Bill 837, the purest defined-contribution plan.
Under the current system, state employees are paid less than the average of top 20 employers while working, but they make it up in retirement. On the whole, though, as Perdue’s chief financial officer, Tommy Hills noted to legislators, state employees are compensated as well as those who work for the federal government and for other large employers in Georgia. Young employees want the money up front and they want retirement benefits to be portable. The money “saved” by moving from a defined-benefit to a defined-contribution plan would be paid out up-front in the form of higher salaries.
The real advantage for taxpayers is not “savings.” It’s that a defined-contribution plan would remove the temptation of politicians to corrupt retirement systems with sweetheart benefits for the undeserving.
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Required national service?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Political science professor Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia includes among his 23 proposals to “revitalize our Constitution and make America a fairer nation” a requirement that all young people perform national service.
Sabato, in an interview published in Sunday’s AJC, proposes that a Bill of Responsibilities be added as a new clause in the Constitution. It would declare that “all citizens of the United States, who are of sound mind and body, shall be required to give two years of service to their country, in a manner prescribed by law.” The clause is needed, he said, because “there’s too much emphasis on rights, and not enough on responsibilities.”
Without question, he’s right in the observation about rights over responsibilities. This is a national discussion we should have. The military barely made its recruiting goal of 80,000 for the year ended Sept. 30. There’s some indication that to make the goal, the military is taking men and women it would previously reject. The Army, for example, allowed 1,620 enlistees with felony arrests and convictions this year, up from 459 in 2003, according to the Army Recruiting Command. The number granted “moral character” waivers reached 18 percent in the last fiscal year, highest in five years. Twice as many of those with “moral character” waivers wash out. Age limits have been raised, too, and education requirements lowered.
Unfortunately, however, the nation has just about lost its ability to have a rational, sane and civil discussion about a national service requirement in general and a military draft in particular. We’ll try today. Is it possible to discuss the value of a draft, or national service in general, without making either a proxy for arguing our views on Iraq or George W. Bush?
Certainly to my mind there is no higher national service calling than military service. A requirement, therefore, should be tiered, with military service rewarded far more generously with pay and education benefits than any other kind. In general, I’m not a fan of the paid volunteerism that would send some young people to advocacy organizations. Sabato lists organizations he’d staff (with a sub-minimum wage) as Meals on Wheels, the Humane Society, Habitat for Humanity, Big Brothers/Big Sisters and others.
It’s an idea worth debating nationally. We have become a nation of people who consider it a right to have every law and institution shaped to our personal preferences and situation, while our responsibilities are limited to a Saturday walk in support of some charity or cause.
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Court ruling is legislating from the bench
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Judicial activism?
No need to quibble about definitions. All of Georgia has before it the definitive example of judicial activism in last week’s decision by four members of the Georgia Supreme Court to legislate from the bench in the Genarlow Wilson case. Mark it down: Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, justices Carol Hunstein, Robert Benham and Hugh Thompson are guilty of judicial activism.
Of those, Hunstein and Thompson are five years removed from the voters, having just been re-elected. Sears is three years removed. Benham faces the voters next year.
Hunstein’s legislate-from-the-bench decision is most surprising. As the able strict constructionist Justice George H. Carley noted in dissent from the 4-3 opinion written by the chief justice, Hunstein now crosses a line she chose to honor prior to her re-election last year.
Wrote Carley:
“When Wilson applied unsuccessfully for a writ of certiorari to review the Court of Appeals’ affirmance of his conviction, Presiding Justice Hunstein concurred and took that occasion to note for the benefit of the bench and bar that … ‘this Court is bound by the Legislature’s determination that young persons in Wilson’s situation are not entitled to the misdemeanor treatment’ ” set forth in a 2006 law.
This was not an oversight by the General Assembly. More from Carley:
“When Wilson engaged in the very public act of oral sodomy with a 15-year-old child, he committed the crime of aggravated child molestation and, as a result, he received the felony sentence mandated for that offense.”
Some 18 months later, the General Assembly revisited the law, writing a new one that took effect July 1, 2006. In writing that law, the Legislature could not have been clearer. “Provisions of this Act shall not affect or abate the status as a crime of any such act or omission which occurred prior to the effective date of the Act repealing, repealing and re-enacting, or amending” the law under which Wilson was sentenced.
Plain and clear. “Obviously,” wrote Carley, “the effect of this clear and unambiguous provision is to preclude giving retroactive effect to the 2006 amendment so as to ‘affect or abate’ the status of Wilson’s crime as felony aggravated child molestation punishable in accordance with the sentence authorized at the time the crime was committed.”
Hunstein acknowledged as much before the election. She lamented Wilson’s situation, but noted that a clear separation of powers prevented the Supreme Court from substituting its judgment for that of 236 elected officials.
That was then, though, and this is now.
The four judges in the majority “simply ignores that express legislative intent” and has no sound basis for concluding that “a felony sentence which was authorized when Wilson committed the offense of aggravated child molestation became cruel and unusual punishment when, more than a year later, the General Assembly lessened the penalty for that offense and mandated only a prospective application for that change.”
The General Assembly knew what it was doing and acted with full awareness of the facts in the Wilson case — and chose not to apply the new law retroactively, as was its right.
Make a note, here and now. This is a results-oriented Supreme Court that reacts to the 6 o’clock news.
It concluded that Wilson had served sufficient time for the offense, as they weighed it, and overriding the Legislature, they wrote the law they wanted. Part of its reasoning, as expressed in Sears’ opinion, is that “a review of other jurisdictions reveals that most states either would not punish Wilson’s conduct at all or would, like Georgia now, punish it as a misdemeanor.” The relevance?
That’s a line no conservative jurist would write. But then this is a cross-the-line decision no conservative court would have issued.
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Global warming, Thrashers, tuition
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Woodstock voters will decide Nov. 6 whether to limit homeowner tax exemptions for the over-62 crowd with homes valued at $250,000 or less. It’s now unlimited. Old does not equal poor. Ban age-pegged tax exemptions.
• Every unusual occurrence in nature, including the wildfires in California, is now blamed on global warming — and whatever the problem, it could have been solved but for the war in Iraq. So sayeth those on the left, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming,” opined the esteemed scientist Reid.
• One of the dumbest of the many dumb laws the Legislature has passed over the years is one requiring the five members of the state’s Public Service Commission to live in districts. PSC Commissioner Bobby Baker is forced to live in Athens, though his wife owns a home in DeKalb County. He’s a homeowner in Athens, pays taxes there, registers vehicles there, votes there, served on a jury there, has an Athens cellphone and is a member of a church there. How utterly silly to question whether he “lives” there or in DeKalb, as a previous primary opponent has done. There’s no reason for utility regulators to live in districts — except that Democrats under the old power regime thought it gave them some edge. Repeal this silly law.
• Headline: “Hispanic leaders disavow organizer of today’s march.” Why is it, when minorities are involved, it’s assumed that they have “leaders” and, therefore, are accorded the authority to anoint others? “Nobody knows where he came from,” said one “leader” of the march organizer. “As far as I know, he’s working on his own,” said another.
• The Thrashers should not have called attention to the team and its dismal record by firing the coach. Before that hardly anybody knew how lousy the team is.
• Tuition and fees at a four-year public college rose 6.6 percent last year to $6,185 per year. At private colleges, they rose 6.3 percent to $23,712. Inflation, as reflected by the consumer price index, rose 2.8 percent. A modest suggestion: Test ‘em going in and test ‘em coming out, and tell parents — and taxpayers — what we’re getting for the money.
• Question of the Day: With a Democrat in the White House, would the hoopla have been the same had the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s testimony emphasizing abstinence-only sex education been edited? No credit for the right answer, students. Everybody knows it.
• The touch screens that KFC and other fast-food outlets are experimenting with shows us the future of touch-screen voting: Nobody’ll need to be literate or to know anything about the candidates. They can just touch an icon of a donkey or an elephant. Or a candidate’s photo. Which means Alec Baldwin wins and Abraham Lincoln loses.
• Having stirred a 90-year-old pot of Armenian genocide with Turkey, House Democrats now move on to Hawaii, with a 261-153 vote to restore some self-governing powers native islanders lost more than a century ago when their queen was overthrown. President Bush promises another veto. The bill “raises significant constitutional concerns that arise any time legislation seeks to separate American citizens into race-related classifications rather than according to their own merits and essential qualities,” said the president’s spokesman.
• Yes. Build more reservoirs. And never concede that individuals own or have property rights to water-withdrawal permits issued by the state.
• Free speech on campus? Of a sort. For lefties, anyway. Activists at Emory University refused to allow the scholarly David Horowitz to speak on academic freedom and radical Islam during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. He had to be escorted from the stage by campus police. “This is exactly what the fascists did in Germany in the 1930s,” said Horowitz, who spoke at the invitation of Emory’s College Republicans. Boos and chants of “Heil Hitler,” most from off-campus radicals, greeted his introduction, said chapter president Ben Clark of Norcross. It went downhill from there.
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Disasters, by race and class
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
News organizations are sometimes accused of stirring the pot on race and class, producing divisiveness. Oddly, it had not occurred to me to draw conclusions from race and class differences in people affected by two natural disasters of different types — Hurricane Katrina and the wildfires in Southern California.
And yet, we are informed, some believe the coordinated efforts to fight the fires and the volunteer-heavy efforts to aid victims in the current disaster, compared to the debacle in New Orleans, “has something to do with poverty, politics and race.” As noted in an AJC article:
“California is relatively rich and has proportionately fewer black residents than most other states, while Louisiana is among the poorest and blackest states.”
That observation, whatever it reveals about hurricanes and fires, is supported by charts comparing the difference in home prices in San Diego and in New Orleans, in income, the percentage of families living in poverty, the racial breakdown and — admittedly, this may be useful to know — the percentage of households without a vehicle.
In New Orleans, in addition to the breakdown of state and local leadership — which, incidentally, cost Gov. Kathleen Blanco a second term — meant that buses remained parked that could have been used to shuttle people without vehicles out of the city before the hurricane hit.
Must, God forbid, we forever in America measure response to disasters by race and class? Or will that end when George W. Bush leaves office?
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CDC director edited. So what?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Voters elect governors and the President on the basis of their values, pledges and agendas. In carrying out those promises and in pursuit of those agendas, they should be able to hire and fire at will — and to determine which issues their subordinates are to emphasize in public appearances and in congressional testimony.
The flap of the day is the revelation that White House officials “severely edited” proposed congressional testimony by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Julie Gerberding.
The Administration is said to have removed “specific references to potential health risks” of global warming.
She told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that it’s “anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans,” but confined her prepared testimony to CDC’s preparation. During questioning, she did cite specific diseases that she thought would be affected.
An unnamed CDC official who was the basis of the Associated Press account said the proposed testimony was “eviscerated” during a customary review by the White House Office of Management and Budget, with the proposed testimony reduced to six pages from 14.
A spokesman for the OMB said reviews of proposed testimony by subordinates consider “whether they…line up well with the national priorities of the administration.”
So Gerberding’s testimony has been edited to reflect the administration’s priorities. And U.S. attorneys are fired for the same reason. Where’s the offense?
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SCHIP is another ‘polite fiction’ of entitlement
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The first beneficiary of the Social Security “Trust Fund,” Ida May Fuller, filed on Nov. 4, 1939.
She had paid $44 in “insurance premiums” and for that “investment,” she collected $22,888.92 over the remainder of her life.
The first baby boomer, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling of New Jersey, applied this month. She was the first of the 10,000 people per day who will become eligible for benefits over the next two decades.
By 2017, it’ll pay out more in benefits than it takes in from payroll taxes. Reform was to be a top priority of President Bush’s second term. Congress has refused to take it up. So the march toward insolvency continues. By 2030 fewer than two workers will support one retiree. It’s a trick on illegals; about the time they get settled and made legal, the bill’s coming.
The story never changes. In 1996, the director of health and welfare studies for the libertarian Cato Institute testified before the Senate. Said he then: “Even if Social Security’s financial difficulties can be fixed, the system remains a bad deal for most Americans, a situation that’s growing worse for today’s young workers. Payroll taxes are already so high that even if today’s workers receive the promised benefits, such benefits will amount to a low, below-market return on those taxes.” True then. Truer now.
Various terms at the start of this column are in quotes. There’s a reason.
Whatever you think of Social Security as a foundational element of retirement planning, the fact is that it began on a fiction. “The Social Security Trust Fund is really little more than a polite fiction,” observed Tanner. The fiction that it was an insurance program and that participants paid premiums that were accumulated in their names in a trust fund.
The dishonesty, it can reasonably be argued, was for a higher purpose — to convince determinedly independent Americans to buy into the notion of government dependency. It worked. And as the beneficiaries grew and voted themselves more of another generation’s money, it became a sacred cow that politicians dare not reform.
There’s a lesson here for Democrats and Republicans searching for a compromise on what is euphemistically called the State Children’s Health Insurance program for “the working poor who can’t afford insurance.”
It’s not an entitlement. Not now, anyway. But under the vetoed legislation, it becomes an entitlement, hugely expanded. The cost now is about $5 billion a year. The vetoed bill would have increased the cost by $7 billion annually, creeping into the middle class and inviting parents to drop private insurance coverage in favor of the government entitlement.
To encourage states to provide coverage to the neediest children first, the administration recently imposed a rule requiring them to enroll 95 percent of those already eligible — those in families with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or $41,300 for a family of four — before taking on the middle class.
A reporter for Newhouse News Service, Elizabeth Auster, examined Ohio’s program and why it has signed up only 76 percent of the eligible poor.
“The state faces problems ranging from technical questions about how to count the number of eligible children to sensitive cultural questions about how to enroll children whose parents resist government help,” Auster writes.
Ohio has a large Amish population and the Amish and Mennonites typically avoid government programs because of religious beliefs. Illegals are “leery of enrolling,” because they fear deportation. And other parents “are sometimes too proud to seek help from government or dislike dealing with bureaucratic paperwork requirements, ” she writes.
Auster quotes the director, Cristal Thomas: “I personally know some people who philosophically, just as a matter of pride, wouldn’t enroll in public assistance even though they would technically qualify.”
The Children’s Health Insurance Program is not just about children. In some states, half or more are adults. But just as with the Social Security entitlement, false terms are applied and concerted campaigns are mounted to nudge families into greater and often unnecessary dependency.
People, even the poor, who want to stand on their own should be encouraged. But, then, this program expansion is not about “children of the working poor who can’t afford health insurance.” It’s about creating another Social Security entitlement, this time for health care.
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Limit tax giveaways to poor counties
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
State and local governments should be forbidden by law to offer financial incentives for development north of I-20 and within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. We know that North Georgia and the coast will grow. Development will come. Not a dime of incentives extracted from taxpayers should be used as a lure in either area.
For example, Great Wolf Resort has announced plans to build a 400-room resort and conference center on 20 acres at Lake Lanier’s Mary Alice Park, including a for-guests-only indoor water park. The city of Cumming pledged $10 million in incentives for the project, the state added $6 million for road work and Forsyth County pledged $5.1 million for road improvements, for a total incentive package of $21.1 million.
(The county doesn’t have the money, but will ask for the $5.1 million in a project list for a proposed special-purpose local-option sales-tax referendum in February.)
Those incentives are absolutely unnecessary. Between 2000 and 2005, Georgia ranked third in the nation in population growth. Nationally, the population grew 5.4 percent; Georgia grew by 11.6 percent, outpacing traditional Sun Belt boom states of Texas (10 percent) and Florida (11.2 percent). As the good fiscal conservative, State Sen. Jeff Chapman of Glynn County observes, too, incentives are often given on promises that companies or developers will deliver certain things, but “typically there’s never any follow-through to validate if all those things promised come to fruition.”
Georgia should always remain business-friendly, but we’re no longer a beggar state and should stop acting like one. The emphasis now should be on managing growth and using financial incentives to direct it to areas where growth is sorely needed.
The state already has a tier system of counties ranked on jobs, income and growth potential. Tier 1 counties are the 71 neediest, based on 36 months of unemployment data, per capita income and the percentage of residents living in poverty.
The second tier are those ranking between 72 and 106. Tier 3 comprises the next 35, while Tier 4 counties are the state’s 18 most prosperous counties. For the most part, Tier 4 counties are in Metro Atlanta and points north. Together, tiers 3 and 4 would include most of North Georgia and the coast. Fulton is, however, a Tier 3 county, though the northern parts are well off. Some tweaking of the formula may be necessary so that within Tier 3 and 4 counties, growth incentives could be limited by census tract.
Taxing existing businesses and residents in hopes of luring businesses from somewhere else is, frankly, a practice that governors across the South should agree to abandon. In rare instances where incentives are essential, the incentives should be reserved for Tier 1 and 2 counties where growth is not assured. Tax giveaways are not necessary in either North Georgia or along the state’s coast, and should be ended.
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Justice Thomas landed the right job for himself — and America
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
But for the failure of any law firm in Savannah or Atlanta to offer him a job out of Yale Law School, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas would likely have wound up as a tax lawyer working corporate finance in the bowels of a big Southern law firm.
Praise thee, rejection.
“I didn’t go to law school thinking about living in New York or living in D.C.,” Thomas told The Atlanta Press Club last week. “I wanted to come back to Savannah” to work with the now-dissolved law firm of former state Rep. Bobby Hill. Though memories differ on whether the firm offered him a job upon his graduation from Yale, Thomas remembers rejection there and among the big firms in Atlanta. “That was a time of dashed hope and expectations and frustration,” he said. “To say I was frustrated is an understatement. I was absolutely despondent about it. It was one of those times I got to see just how difficult it was to deal with rejection.”
Critics hear Thomas talk about such memories and hear an angry and bitter man at the top of the world with a chip on his shoulder. That is not, frankly, the man who showed up in Atlanta last week, either at the press club luncheon or later at a book-signing sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, both organizations that would champion the originalist philosophy Thomas brings to the court. At the Federalist-Heritage event, an adoring crowd of 900 people stood in a line that snaked around the walls of a banquet-size room waiting for a signed copy of “My Grandfather’s Son,” a remembrance of his grandparents’ life lessons.
It’s unfortunate that more of the Thomas critics don’t see — or actually hear — the man behind the caricature they have created. Thomas is, in my view, among the most wronged of the honorable public figures in American life. While there’s no value in revisiting his confirmation, the truth is that it was a smear directed at a man who held the “wrong” views for his skin color. He was the collateral damage of the abortion wars. He was asked at both events about the Anita Hill episode and why he’d revisited it in the book. “Well, if I left it out you would be asking me the opposite,” he told the press club.
Listening to a Southerner residing elsewhere talk about place, and the good people who lived there, is to feel an immediate affinity — as Georgians undoubtedly would with Thomas.
“So much written about the South and places like Savannah is written through the prism of what was wrong,” said Thomas. “Of course there was lots that was wrong. I don’t have to go over that. We all know. It was the ’40s and the ’50s and the ’60s. But there’s a lot that was good.
“Out in Liberty County, the family members there out on the farm, these people were good people. There was something about them. There was no sort of vision. There was no notion that they would be doing any more than the sort of hard labor that they had been assigned to, or had been assigned to them. And yet, they endured, they persevered and they stayed positive.
“There was something that needed to be said about them.” Over the years, he said, “I have thought that my grandparents were saying ‘remember us.’ This book is to leave a record of that. …”
“I would hope there is in this book something that would give hope to this young man sitting here or to someone who is going through struggle. Maybe there’s something when they’re sitting down and studying math and it’s hard and they can see that doors will be opened for me, or someone who has a disability, or someone who has a financial challenge, they can say, ‘look, it is going to be OK if I keep at it.’ “
A bitter man? That is, I think, a fantasy of the left, of critics who can never acknowledge that their political basis for trying to destroy his professional life was cheap and frivolous.
We can return later to the newsworthy observations, to his judicial philosophy, to the accounts of life on the bench.
But for this day, the man before us is a Southerner remembering home and people and place. “It’s home,” he said. “I truly miss home. … I left here, and I was trying when I stopped in Washington, D.C., in 1979, I was trying to get home.”
I am torn. No true Southerner who’s ever lived elsewhere could fail to understanding the yearnings to come back. I do. But he now serves America — and I want him there, on the U.S. Supreme Court, for always.
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Drought; Vick; lottery’s cha-ching
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Clifford Harris Jr., aka T.I., is a reminder of how quickly loose tough-guy talk and false bravado leads to trouble. It does with rednecks and booze and rappers and drugs. Add one nut-job to the mix and somebody’s getting hurt and somebody’s going to prison.
Let the marketplace price water and divide the “profits” equally among all customers. And refresh my memory on ethanol. Cornell ecology professor David Pimentel is quoted in The Wall Street Journal as calculating that when everything’s considered, 1,700 gallons of water are required to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. The manufacturing process alone takes between 3.5 gallons and 5 gallons. And for this taxpayers offer a subsidy.
Jack Alderman murdered his wife in 1974. That’s 33 years ago. Jimmy Carter was an obscure Southern governor. The last U.S. troops were just months out of Vietnam. Richard Nixon resigned. Patty Hearst was kidnapped. The now-common supermarket price code was scanned for the first time. American Idol host Ryan Seacrest was born. Chet Huntley, Jack Benny and Earl Warren died. Almost half the U.S. population wasn’t even born. And Jack Alderman killed his wife. Justice my foot. The sentence should have been carried out decades ago.
Now the Michael Vick case becomes clear, thanks to Louis Farrakhan: “He is young, black and super rich. And all of those white children were wearing his jersey. White people are losing control of their children to black sports and entertainment figures, and they can’t take it.” And that explains fully and completely why “they” chose “to come down on the brother like that.” There are many Americas. It’s frightening to think that one of them believes this stuff.
About 31 percent of the dialysis patients at Grady’s outpatient clinic are “undocumented residents,” aka illegal aliens. Three possible solutions: pay, return to their country of origin for treatment, or agitate for the creation of a pure charity hospital financed by donated money and services.
Faced with party defections, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surely has a fallback to a resolution she’s pushing that could cause Turkey to shut down an airbase vital to resupplying U.S. troops in Iraq. Expect one declaring Salman Rushdie to be the Poet Laureate of American Forces in Iraq. Anything to help …
A bill to make permanent the prohibition on state and local taxes on Internet access had 238 House co-sponsors, more than enough to pass. Yet, House leaders limited consideration to a four-year exemption, which passed. The existing ban expires Nov. 1. Any idea why they’d not allow the vote on a permanent ban? The cynic U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) thinks it’s because they “want to leave the door open to taxing the Internet in the future.”
Demonstrating that he can still work his will, the board of the Georgia Department of Transportation picks Gov. Sonny Perdue’s choice, Gena Abraham, to succeed Harold Linnenkohl as commissioner. She’s a doer and is probably the first commissioner without a background in either roads or politics. Strong management and political skills are in the job description.
Bob Jones III, chancellor of the Greenville, S.C., university that bears his grandfather’s name, delivers a dynamite endorsement to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. “As a Christian I am completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism,” he said. “But I am not voting for a preacher. I’m voting for a president. It boils down to who can best represent conservative American beliefs, not religious beliefs.” And more: “This is all about beating Hillary. And I just believe that this man has the credentials both personally and ideologically in terms of his view about America what American government should be to best represent the rank and file of conservative Americans.” This is a homer for Romney. For some reason Christian conservatives have been holding back. But Jones is right. No other electable candidate is more likely to represent their values, pro-life among them.
Lottery ticket sales are up. Gamblers bet on ponies, the lottery or subprime adjustable-rate mortgages. It’s too early for the Derby and subprime lenders are tanking. But we’ll always have the Georgia Lottery.
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Stop death penalty ploys
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Murderer Jack Alderman, who has escaped his deserved fate for more than three decades, will be executed Friday unless the U.S. Supreme Court further delays the execution. It’s considering whether lethal injections are cruel. The high court did on Wednesday stop a pending execution in Virginia.
As the Brian Nichols case in Atlanta amply demonstrates, capital punishment opponents are determined to eliminate executions as an option. In the Nichols case, the strategy is to raise the costs so high that District Attorney Paul Howard will be forced to abandon his efforts to seek the death penalty against Nichols. Opponents believe if they can demonstrate that a single death penalty case can bankrupt the system, penny-pinching fiscal conservatives will throw in the towel.
Under no circumstances, of course, should Howard concede to a lesser penalty. The bankrupt-the-system strategy in this case cannot be allowed to succeed. Capital punishment critics point to cases where murders deserving of death managed to escape that punishment, either because a DA in one jurisdiction didn’t think he could get it, or because one or two jurors lied about their willingness to consider it, or because the sentence was set aside because of technicalities or for legitimate reasons. Because some deserving of death manage to escape execution, the critics reason, the system is “unfair” and should be abandoned.
It’s almost amusing. They make certain the system doesn’t work — and then offer a “see there” argument to abandon it altogether.
The Alderman execution should take place Friday. And under no circumstances should Howard ever abandon efforts to seek the death penalty for Nichols.
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Pelosi’s on our team, right?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Recognizing that the possibility exists that Hillary Clinton or, worse, somebody else from the Democratic field of presidential candidates could occupy the White House in 2008 — assuming that is, that the electorate has a momentary lapse in its usual good judgment — it’s not too early to take a look at the foreign policy implications.
Hillary’s hard to pin down. She’s a poll-watcher and I suspect that, like Bill, she’d be a missiles-to-mud-huts leader with no stomach for any military engagement that lasts longer than a semester break.
A real concern, however, is her party in Congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a few others in leadership position are pushing a resolution that would label the deaths of about 1.5 million Armenians, who were killed between 1915 and 1923 as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, as genocide. The Turkish government vehemently objects to the “genocide” label and maintains that they died as a result of war.
Pursuing the resolution could have serious consequences for U.S. efforts in Iraq. About 70 percent of the air cargo the U.S. ships to military forces in Iraq passes through Turkey’s Incirlik airbase, and a denial of access would be a major blow to the resupply chain. What’s more, Turkey has always been uneasy about the Kurds, and specifically the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, against which it has launched limited strikes. Kurds occupy portions of three nations — Iraq, Turkey and Iran — and the danger always exists that Turkey and Iran could find reason to cooperate against a rebel force that could one day become a common enemy.
The point is that it’s near mindlessness for House leaders to push a resolution that the military and the administration have warned could severely damage U.S. relations with a key Middle Eastern ally. After the committee vote, Turkey recalled its ambassador for consultations.
Will Pelosi back off? House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that leaders still plan to bring up the resolution before Congress adjourns at the end of the year. At least 17 House members, including Rep. Sanford Bishop, a Democrat whose Southwest Georgia district includes Ft. Benning, have withdrawn their support.
The question has to arise as to why Pelosi and House Democratic leaders would dare go forward with a resolution that could be so harmful to U.S. efforts to win in Iraq? They do want us to win, don’t they?
SCHIP scheme: Don’t use children as pawns
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Milked shamelessly by partisans who see children as a political instrument to regain the White House, Democrats are mounting a last-minute campaign to override President Bush’s veto of a costly new entitlement along the road to HillaryCare.
“We’ll try very hard to override it,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said Sunday of Thursday’s planned vote. “But one thing’s for sure, we won’t rest until those 10 million children have health care.”
They’ll not rest until 10 million children — and the rest of America — have taxpayer-provided health insurance with bureaucrats setting the rates and practicing medicine. We’ve seen already in efforts at the state level to creep coverage upward and outward and to mandate benefits by legislative edict body-part-by-body-part how this drama ends.
If Democrats are successful in using the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to put another Clinton in the White House, the end could be soon.
This program, incidentally, is a measure of how far national government has sunk and how dysfunctional Congress has become. Its 11 percent approval rating is earned.
Democrats don’t have the override votes, something they’ve known from the start. “Having conceded that they will not override the president’s veto,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Roswell), “Democrats should move immediately to work with House Republicans to develop bipartisan legislation that puts our neediest children first and lives up to the original intent of the program.”
After failing to override President Bush’s veto, Republicans will offer full reauthorization of the program for children in families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level, or about $41,300 for a family of four. They’ll offer tax credits for families between 200 and 300 percent of poverty, helping those families keep existing coverage or provide them income to buy coverage in the private sector. Another element would encourage states to experiment in helping make policies available to the working poor.
Cooperation may not be in the cards, though, any more than veto override, despite efforts to flip Democrats such as U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Macon). Marshall wisely voted no to a huge expansion of a program that, when the details are made known to mainstream Georgia voters, would have gotten him defeated. Instead, now, the leftists in his Middle Georgia district are in a dither and determined to extract revenge. It’s an empty threat, though.
The threat is just as empty as the promises that a 61-cents-per-pack hike in tobacco taxes will fund the proposed expansion. The Washington-based Heritage Foundation studied that promise and found that 22 million more people would have to take up smoking for the math to work. But, then, the cost-projection numbers are phony.
The Senate bill, the lesser of the two in terms of cost, increases spending from the current $5.6 billion per year to $13.9 billion in 2012 — and then projects the cost to drop 69 percent in 2013 to $7.8 billion and to $4.8 billion the next, Heritage points out. It’s phony.
Of the newly eligible children, 30 percent to 35 percent would be shifted from private insurance, Heritage projects.
Earlier the Congressional Budget Office projected that of 1.2 million children newly eligible, about half would have come as a result of dropping private coverage.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said more than 500,000 low-income children are eligible but not participating in the current program — but 700,000 adults are.
In Minnesota, for example, 87 percent of the beneficiaries of the State Children’s Health Insurance program are adults. That’s 5,243 children and 34,313 adults. In Wisconsin, it’s 66 percent. That’s 56,627 children and 110,298 adults. In New Jersey, it’s 38 percent adults; in Arizona, 53 percent and in Michigan, 46.
SCHIP reauthorization will be a test of whether official Washington is into governing — or is simply too mired in partisan politics to get past dreams of 2008.
This fight is not about children. It’s about how adults vote.
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The deserving aside, should Gore run?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On the Right, at least, the reaction to Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was muted. The best of the lot was a The Wall Street Journal opinion piece that never mentions him. Instead, it touts the deserving candidates the committee by-passed to choose Gore. Here’s a flavor of the piece:
“In Olso Friday, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded to the Burmese monks whose defiance against, and brutalization at the hands of, the country’s military junta in recent weeks captured the attention of the Free World.
“The prize was also not awarded to Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara and other Zimbabwe opposition leaders who were arrested and in some cases beaten by police earlier this year while protesting peacefully against dictator Robert Mugabe.
“Or to Father Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest in Vietnam arrested this year and sentenced to eight years in prison for helping the pro-democracy group Block 8406.
“Or to Wajeha al-Huwaider and Fawzia al-Uyyouni, co-founders of the League of Demanders of Women’s Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia, who are waging a modest struggle with grand ambitions to secure basic rights for women in that Muslim country.
“Or to Colombian President Àlvaro Uribe, who has fought tirelessly to end the violence wrought by left-wing terrorists and drug lords in his country….”
And on it goes.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who’s now thinking about a 2012 presidential race — he’ll be 69 then — said “it’s perfectly appropriate for Gore to win the Nobel Prize because it only goes to very left-wing people who are critical of America.”
When the committee overlooks the deserving to anoint Gore for an alarmist movie, the political nature of the prize does become obvious. Both Gore and Jimmy Carter, the 2002 recipient, should send thank-you notes to George W. Bush. As the New York Times noted,”Gore is the second Democratic Party politician from the United States to win the peace prize this decade.” Both are die-hard Bush critics.
The Times observed, too, that “the prestigious award ignited a new spark of interest in his plans both among Democrats and Republicans.” The AJC headline says the “Nobel win makes Gore a hot political property.”
Maybe. But why should Gore run for president? He can’t beat Hillary and even if he could a nation in the midst of an actual war is not ready for a Don Quxiote president. I’ll leave it to our left of center friends who congregate here to make the case for a Gore presidency. I’d remind them, however, that they’re not the Nobel Committee and while bashing Bush may be sufficient grounds for one prize, it’s not enough for the White House.
Posing questions a start to fixing education woes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While briefing legislators on the work of the task force he heads that’s examining how Georgia funds public schools, former State Rep. Dean Alford of Conyers was asked: “Aren’t there three big problems with schools and if we fixed those, wouldn’t that solve all the ills?”
Yes, replied Alford, and that’s the problem — there are three, but they differ from one school to another.
Public education is Grady Hospital, an institution with an insatiable appetite for money, onion-skin layers of hidden agendas and turf-protecting special interests, and a hell-no-never resistance to actual change hidden in public rhetoric that hints at cooperation and a willingness to embrace it. The reality is that there will always be one more hurdle, one more excuse, one more plea for a new financial savior.
No wonder that, on Grady, the top-ranking member of the Georgia Senate, president pro-tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) said in exasperation: “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it did go under. Maybe the phoenix that would rise in its place would be better than the hospital that’s there now.”
Nobody’s proposing to give up on public education. But one welcomed consequence of the shift in power under the Gold Dome is that on a number of fronts, the inquisitive minds of intelligent people are beginning to examine institutions and ask “what if?” questions.
Alford, incidentally, was a Democrat when he served in the General Assembly and may still be. I’ve never asked, nor does it matter. More important, he’s an engineer and a businessman, a Georgia Tech graduate and a former member of the state school board who’s devoted the past three years to a 23-member commission examining public education and the way we finance it.
Essentially what they’ve found is a model that doesn’t work for children, their parents, taxpayers at the state and local level, and local school boards and administrators. It’s a do-this, do-that compliance model. “The state told you what to do, and what was measured was whether you did it, not performance,” he said. “We found that to be an inefficient and an ineffective model built for a homogeneous population out there that does not exist.”
Nobody was happy. The solution, Alford and others concluded in visiting 106 local systems, was to develop a “partnership based on real clearly defined roles and responsibilities and real covenants.” Local systems, under a model the commission is expected to recommend, would be able to “buy” their way out of mandates by agreeing contractually to achieve specific results. An example is improving graduation rates. The national average is 69.9 percent; Georgia now stands at 56.1, third from the bottom. “At the end of the day, we have to get to a 90-plus percent graduation rate in this state,” Alford said.
“Systems, I am convinced, are not afraid of accountability,” he said. How much control the local boards exercise depends on how much responsibility for doing their jobs they’re willing to take. If they fail, they risk losing authority over nonperforming schools. My preference, but not a part of the commission’s expected recommendations, would be that parents be given the full state funding share to buy the services their children need from any competent and willing provider of education services.
Alford’s panel is also attempting to determine precisely how much a quality education should cost and what portion should be borne by locals and by the state. Now it’s about 55-45, state-local.
The public education and funding model does need to change. As Alford noted, the current system was designed for a homogenous world that no longer exists. Georgia has 180 school systems and three times that many critical problems with them. The solution is statewide standards and local control, with accountability and consequences, even down to the individual school level.
“To spin more money into a system that doesn’t work for both sides is a bad use of money,” Alford said. “We are spending 38.5 percent of the state budget on k-12 education. It is the most important economic development issue facing the state. We have to get it right.”
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Sensible Cobb, silly business lobby
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• It’s not “fair” that some people have 60-inch flat-screen televisions while most of us don’t. While Hillary is giving away thousand-dollar grants to build up 401(k)s, she will surely provide the have-nots either the flat-screens or the money to buy them. Tax the rich.
• Fulton resident John Woodham does have an important issue in an Atlanta Beltline special tax district case now before the Georgia Supreme Court. It’s unconstitutional, he argues, for school taxes to be collected and spent on the Beltline, rather than schools. The problem with special tax districts is that the increased collections go to one project, while the educations of the new children development brings are borne by those property-tax payers outside the district. Special tax districts should be rare.
• America has no appetite for extended sacrifice, like that required for the long war on terrorism. But it loves minor crises, like short-term droughts, that invite silly gestures such as unflushed and brick-in-the-tank toilets and the thousand-year crisises like “global warming” about which we can be passionate.
• Alpharetta and Roswell ticket trucks used as mobile advertising signs. Alpharetta fined one $500. Roswell has one scheduled for Municipal Court on Oct. 18. Just what metro Atlanta needs: another traffic congestion obstacle.
• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should return to Columbia University, where he is loved. Some 100 students shouting “death to the dictator” protested his speech at Tehran University marking the beginning of the school year.
• Cobb County authority figures are having a run of good sense. First, Kell High School principal Trudie Donovan wisely declined to censor an opinion article in the school newspaper, avowing: “My job is the safety and security of the school, not censorship.” And Cobb’s chief magistrate, Judge Frank Cox, noted that it wasn’t smart or appropriate, but not criminal, for a now-departed school system aide in an after-school program to briefly tape a talkative student’s mouth shut. The principal gets an “A.” The judge is on my short list for the next State Court vacancy.
• Three-time Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones voices the most honest apology and expressions of contrition I’ve ever heard from any athlete — or any public figure, for that matter. She’d lied about using steroids. Public figures should study the tape of her public apology to learn how one should be done. No “sorry I got caught” or “sure I stole, but I stole for you” whine. She squared up and took responsibility.
• No stinking flag lapel pin for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. He wore one after Sept. 11, but then decided to take it off because it had become a substitute for “true patriotism.” As every leftist knows, true patriotism is trashing America while opposing any military action the country is pursuing.
• Quote of the week: “The word partnership stops the second you sign the contract,” explains Jack Opiola, a transportation consultant discussing “public-private partnerships.” The trick for public officials always has been to write clear standards, provide arms-length oversight and accountability. Government should not be the least bit adverse to turning functions over to the private sector. But don’t make “partnerships” private reward and public risk.
• Send me back to Conservative Re-education Reform School for six months of reindoctrination. I need a refresher course on why conservatives reflexively support business, though the business lobby — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — joins with the AFL-CIO and the ACLU to entice a Clinton-appointed federal judge to block a reasonable effort to identify illegals on business payrolls using “no-match” Social Security data.
• Why presidential elections matter: National security, judges and the preservation of tax cuts, in that order. All else is secondary.
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Illegals and fake Social Security numbers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A Bill Clinton appointee to the federal court bench in San Franscisco, Charles Breyer, who happens to be the brother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, has blocked the Bush Administration from requiring employers to clear up or discharge employees with questionable Social Security numbers.
“There can be no doubt that the effects of the rule’s implementation will be severe” and cause “irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers,” wrote Breyer in issuing a preliminary injunction to halt the administration’s plan to mail Social Security “no match” letters to 140,000 employers. The letters would have identified workers with phony, or at least questionable, Social Security numbers. Workers would have 90 days to clear up the problem before losing their jobs.
Employers who kept them on after the 90 days could have faced fines or possible prosecution for knowingly employing illegal aliens. The plaintiffs, including the ACLU, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, asked for the injunction, contending the Social Security database contains errors. Using those records as the basis for dismissals could discriminate against legal workers, they argued.
A three-year government audit found widespread fraud by illegals who often presented fake documents and Social Security numbers to obtain jobs.
The administration should, of course, appeal. Border security, yes. But the illegal immigration problem won’t be solved until employers are held accountable for knowingly hiring illegals — or for pretending not to know. Giving them 90 days to clear up questions about a document widely abused and a key to the illegals-to-jobs problem is reasonable. Appeal.
Hillary’s baby bond doesn’t poll out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Queen of the Welfare State, demonstrating that she’s her husband’s wife, rolls with the polls, revealing that the proposal she first announced at a gathering of the Congressional Black Caucus is now toast.
No longer, says Hillary, is she pushing a proposal to force taxpayers to award $5,000 to every child born in America, something she suggested last month. Instead she offers a new entitlement — one that would cost $20-$25 billion a year — to give every citizen a $1,000 annual match for a new 401(k) retirement account. She’d pay for it by taxing the dead — or at least those who inherit estates valued at more than $7 million per couple. “They will begin to bring down this inequality that is eating away at our social contract,” she said of the accounts at a campaign stop in Iowa.
For liberal Democrats, it’s ideal: A way to extract wealth from “the rich” and the dead for an entitlement that will be popular with the masses of voters. Hillary says her proposal would extract enough money from a single estate to give $1,000 gifts to 5,000 individuals. Lose one vote, get 5,000. We are perilously close in this country to a system where half pay on April 15th and and the other half take by the ballot box.
Referring to the govern-by-polls Clinton hallmark, Democratic rival John Edwards’ spokesman, Chris Kofinis, said that “apparently new polling data seems to have pressured the Clinton campaign to throw out the baby bond with the bathwater.” But wait. Any day now, the populist Edwards is likely to pick it up.
The taxpayer gifts would not be seen as replacing any part of the Social Security now or in the future, she said. She’ll have a solution to that, too, though likely not until she’s into her second term.
How education funding should roll is key question
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While the headlines go to House Speaker Glenn Richardson’s long-shot proposal to eliminate property taxes, an equally revolutionary proposal for public education will greet legislators in January.
It’s the work of a 23-member task force that Gov. Sonny Perdue appointed three years ago to explore public school funding. Georgia spends more than half its budget on education, with $7.2 billion, or 38.5 percent, going to k-12.
The work is not yet final, but two points should be made.
One is that the speaker’s tax plan, while revolutionary, has the emotion and impulse of a Boston tea party rebellion. While adherents may come, it’s largely a pocket rebellion skirmishing in Dillard, Lyons, Cairo and other outposts in hopes of gathering converts and steam before hitting the Capitol.
More planned and methodical, but just as revolutionary, is the work of the education finance task force. It should be a painless revolution. There’s nothing unsettling about it. No reason for fright.
The second point to be made here, though, is that the proper place for education debates is in the General Assembly, where the state’s education, transportation, health care and other needs compete.
But activists around the country, including here in Georgia, have drawn judges into the fray. The hope of local school officials who have failed the parents and children in their districts is to entice a judge into giving them more of somebody else’s money. Trial is tentatively scheduled for September 2008 in Fulton Superior Court. There’s no work here for a judge.
The work done by former state representative and school board member Dean Alford and others is groundbreaking. Three efforts are especially striking.
One — important but not all that novel — is to determine precisely how much money is needed to produce an educated child. Final numbers are about a month away, but as a start, the task force concludes that a system should be able to meet the academic needs of an elementary school child for $6,220, plus add-ons for other considerations — special needs, for example. Operation and maintenance of school buildings would add another $600 and transportation another $151.
The second significant contribution goes to the heart of the suits here and elsewhere. That is to identify wealth and tax it appropriately.
“There are probably better ways of measuring wealth than we use now,” said Jeffrey Williams, a consultant to the task force. “We only use property values now.” In the 1950s and early ’60s, he says, some measure of personal income was included. From the ’60s on, it’s been the property tax.
Williams examined 10 local systems spread throughout the state. Some were rich in property and wealth, some poor on both and some low or high on wealth or property.
He found that 1 mill of property tax wealth would produce $414 per student in a high property wealth/low household income wealth system in rural east central Georgia. It’s unnamed (District 1) because later parts of the equation contain some hypotheticals. At the other end, District 10, is a low property/low income rural district in south central Georgia. A mill there generates $47 per student. In a rich metro Atlanta district, it generates $263. Local systems are required under the 22-year-old Quality Basic Education funding formula to tax themselves 5 mills.
In District 1, the locals would raise $2,070 per student, and the state would add $1,948, for a total of $4,018 per student. In District 10, the locals would raise $232, and the state would add $3,687 for a total of $3,919 per student.
The question now — and this is a legislative decision — is whether and how the formula should be changed to take other forms of wealth into account.
It’s the third element, though, that’s most exciting and potentially most revolutionary. Essentially it would allow local systems to enter one of five contract relationships with the state, depending on the degree of confidence they have in their abilities to do their jobs. At one end, they could continue the existing QBE formula that focuses entirely on inputs. Do this, do that. Here’s the check. No risk. No accountability for results.
At the other, local systems could operate virtually free of state direction — take the money and run. They would, however, contractually agree to achieve specified results — graduation rates, for example — within a specific time under a three-year rolling contract. If they failed repeatedly, there would be consequences. Probably not loss of funding and certainly not a state takeover. But they could see the school removed from their control. It’s risk and reward. The burden would be on those who file suit now to perform or to be exposed.
This is not hastily considered. And while it is revolutionary, it’s not radical.
This is local control for real.
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Five things you’d do as governor
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the bright lights on the Thinking Right blog, jbmlaw, reminded us last week that one of the traffic-congestion relief solutions he’d advocate is moving state offices to Macon.
It’s an idea that makes a lot of sense. For one, there’s no real need for all those departments and agencies to be in downtown Atlanta. Their work can be done from anywhere. So with downtown traffic congestion worsening, why not take the opportunity to remove thousands of vehicles from the morning and afternoon rush? Besides, downtown Macon or Columbus or Augusta could use the employment boost. And, of course, if an Atlanta-Macon train made sense at all, it would need more potential riders.
The assignment today though is to imagine that you’re the governor. Sonny Perdue’s gone. You’re there. What five things would you do? Here’s my list:
I’d cause to be created a state transportation plan to relieve congestion, involving both the public and the private sector. Features would include an outer perimeter 20-40 miles beyond I-285 that would have a wide interior corridor for rail.
I’d close existing state pension plans to new employees and offer, instead, 401(k)-like plans that employees would own and manage and could take with them when they leave.
I’d cap state spending based on population growth and the rate of inflation. Anything beyond that would require the approval of three-fourths of both houses.
I’d determine how much it would cost to produce an educated child and I’d make that sum available to parents to be used to purchase education services from any willing and competent provider.
I’d attempt to convince other Southern governors to stop paying financial incentives to companies to locate here. Everybody comes on the promise of low taxes and fair treatment, but they all pay their share.
That’s my platform. What’s yours.
State needs to make concrete transport plans
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A higher tax on gasoline is not inherently objectionable or summarily dismissable.
It is both objectionable and dismissable, however, until Georgia has a statewide transportation plan that clearly spells out what we’re buying — what we’re buying in terms of projects and congestion relief. In my state transportation plan, we don’t have any slow trains to nowhere that people are going or any recreational projects masquerading as alternatives to gridlock solutions. We don’t have hidden agendas to promote “economic justice” or advance some group’s notion of what advocacy groups believe are more desirable lifestyle choices — high-density, for example.
We have measurable congestion-relieving solutions. We have government returning to what the Georgia Department of Transportation once did. Our government measures the flow of traffic, identifies developing and foreseeable bottlenecks, devises solutions and fixes them. That’s all any of us should want: A government that works, a government that takes our money and serves us as we choose to live.
Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and House Speaker Glenn Richardson issued a joint statement just over a week ago pointing out that Georgia has “far too many government agencies debating transportation plans instead of building roads” with the consequence that “the economic future of our entire state hangs in the balance.” Both expressed a frustration that boils down to this: Do something, dangit!
The “do something” involves some process nuts-and-bolts that are likely to be reflected in legislation that will be the outgrowth of a joint House-Senate transportation study committee. But something bolder and broader is needed.
Gov. Sonny Perdue essentially laid out the principles to which a statewide plan should adhere in remarks before the House-Senate transportation study committee. Those should be mobility, safety, reliability, efficiency and responsible stewardship of limited resources. Solutions should cost as little as possible in time and money while quickly and safely moving people from point A to B.
A comprehensive statewide transportation plan should first identify those cost-efficient solutions that move people and goods more speedily through what are now congestion bottlenecks. And, secondarily, they eliminate barriers to economic prosperity where they exist throughout Georgia.
The first task is to define roles for the many government agencies, some of which are tempted into empire-building. Nobody can do that but the governor, though the legislature could — less desirably — write roles into law.
The second task, for which some work has been done already, is to develop the state plan, determine which components can be funded with anticipated public money and which should be farmed out to the private sector as toll roads or special-pricing lanes or other public-private hybrids.
The final task is to determine how to finance the public’s share. Taxpayers need to know precisely what they’re buying and why. The why should be that the proposed solution is the most efficient way to deliver the greatest congestion relief. Or in the event that a statewide plan included something like the now-jettisoned Northern Arc linking I-75 and I-85 across North Georgia, as it should, a full explanation of how it furthers the goal of a prosperous Georgia.
The point is simply that asking taxpayers to make a major financial commitment to solving their mobility problems should be based on honesty and on measurable evidence. It’s what Perdue refers to as “stewardship of resources,” the assurance that time, money and effort are appropriately allocated. A politically popular white elephant project will, for example, consume as much time and money as something that actually solves a real mobility problem. No pork. No local earmarks.
The coming legislative session is not the time to propose a gasoline tax increase. It’s impossible to know now whether one penny or 25 is supportable. Or any. Junk up a state plan with pork and special-interest projects that won’t hold up to marketplace cost-benefit scrutiny and taxpayers will react badly.
One: Develop clear lines of responsibility and authority with a hierarchy. Two: Create the statewide plan that fixes gridlock, with public and private players. Three: Raise the money.
- Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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Thinking Right: Water Gestapo, Aaron, school choice
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Libertarians and some conservatives worry about the potential for Big Brother snooping with national photo IDs and with allowing intelligence agencies to intercept calls into this country from suspected terrorists abroad. My Big Brother fear is the Neighborhood Water-Watch Gestapo mobilized during droughts to track down and punish offenders for some minor perceived rule-breaking offense. Get a life.
• Sandy Springs City Councilwoman Ashley Jenkins offers just the right touch on the drought hysteria sweeping metro Atlanta. “Many of you have called or e-mailed about the new water restrictions,” she wrote constituents. So they don’t try to rat out neighbors for something that’s not a violation, she presented the rules. And added: “If you still feel the need to tattletale on your neighbor, you may call the City of Atlanta Water Department [which provides Sandy Springs water] and wait on hold for 10 minutes to report a violation. You can expect the City of Atlanta Water to promptly do nothing about your complaint. If you do actually get someone on the line, could you please have them fix the water gusher that has been coming out of the ground at Wycombe and Drummen for 2 weeks.” Later she told me: “We would have water in Lake Lanier if they just fixed the gushers in Sandy Springs.”
• You know the service is bad when the real home-run king, Hank Aaron, calls the newspaper in desperation, hoping to shame the city of Atlanta into fixing a neighborhood bridge he considers dangerous and an eyesore. It’s on the list. …
• Twiggs County school officials failed to notify parents that their elementary school had failed academically — thus triggering school choice and tutoring options. An oversight, said school officials. Parents everywhere should be vigilant. School officials hate these provisions of the No Child Left Behind law. They’ll notify parents of the options just as soon as the lawyer who writes the fine print on credit card agreements becomes available — and send it out on election day, or some other where the attention of parents is directed elsewhere. Parents should always protest to the state — and to the feds.
• Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama grandly refused to vote on a Senate resolution condemning Moveon.org for its “General Betray Us” ad in the New York Times. Too frivolous, he claimed from the high road. But not too frivolous was a resolution condemning talk show host Rush Limbaugh for an opinion. In that case, he’s for taking up the Senate’s business with a resolution condemning Limbaugh.
• Professors lament that they age and their students don’t — with the consequence that a huge gap develops in their common knowledge. “You have to remind yourself” said one, “that they won’t know who George H.W. Bush was, or they’ll have vaguely heard of Reagan. Vietnam is a passing reference that people make.” All of which is offered here to explain why Wayne Willams continues to get hearings on his search for the real killer of Atlanta’s missing and murdered. Williams was convicted 25 years ago, after which the killings stopped.
• Headline: “Should smokers pick up tab for children’s health care?” No. The 39-cent per pack tax would go to $1 to partially finance a huge expansion of the federal program that largely funds PeachCare, which the president properly vetoed. The cigarette tax is an effort to drive a legitimate business out of existence — though, in the meantime, the tax burden will fall most heavily on the poor, since they’re the smokers. As with the Georgia Lottery, the poor will be asked to support something that will heavily benefit the middle class.
• Write it in stone — and into law. Georgia state Sen. David Shafer (R-Duluth) and other prominent legislators have gone to court to ask that a secret legal settlement among Emory, Grady and a doctor who sued the hospital of allegedly defrauding the federal government be unsealed. “Lawsuits alleging wrongdoing by public officials or misuse of public funds should never be litigated or settled under seal.” Put that sentence into law and put me down as a co-sponsor.
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To unite GOP, bring on Hillary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday night reveals that 48 percent of Republicans prefer a candidate who takes a “different approach” from that pursued by President Bush. That’s up from 41 percent in April. Back then, 50 percent wanted a candidate with a “similar approach” to the job. That’s now 38 percent.
New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani tops former Sen. Fred Thompson 30 percent to 23 percent in the primary poll, with Sen. John McCain third at 15 percent, followed by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 10 percent. Giuliani’s support is strong among all groups except core conservatives, the pollsters said. He’s especially strong among women.
Democrat Peter Hart who conducted the poll with Republican Neil Newhouse said the advantages Giuliani has are that he’s popular and appealing, has answered the question about how he would handle a crisis, and supporters believe he could beat Hillary.
Giuliani sought to shore up that view, comparing Hillary’s proposal to give a $5,000 savings bond to every U.S.-born baby to 1972 nominee George McGovern’s proposal to send $1,000 to every U.S. resident. “It’s interesting that Hillary is taking something from the George McGovern playbook,” Giuliani said Wednesday. He also criticized her for faking a Southern accent when speaking in Selma.
Two points here. One is that questions like whether Republican voters prefer a candidate similar or dissimilar to Bush, while entertaining, mean nothing to me. Most of the Republicans I know find fault with Bush — but it’s mostly because they think he’s failed to check spending or has failed in some meaningful way to confront Democrats. They grumble but, as with the Democrats’ Iraq withdrawal agenda, will stand with him if it matters.
The other point is that Republicans and Democrats alike will pick a candidate they think best able to defeat the other party’s nominee and take the White House. I’m not yet convinced that is Giuliani, though given the top concern of Republicans — security and the war on terrorism — it’s not surprising that a guy with his profile and visibility after 9/11 would poll well. On this particular issue, any of the top tier of Republicans appeal over any of the likely Democratic contenders. (By the way, any early favorites among those here likely to vote in the Republican primary?)
Republicans are disgruntled — but be assured that if Democrats nominate Hillary — you couldn’t keep one at home on Election Day.
Name Thomas County for Justice
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s not exactly in the vicinity of Pinpoint, Ga., birthplace of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But it’s close.
While we’re in the business or renaming roads, schools, airports and other real estate, my recommendation to the Georgia General Assembly is that Thomas County in Southwest Georgia be renamed for the reknown pioneer Georgian, Clarence Thomas. It’s far too complicated to rename his birthplace, Chatham County. Deeds, contracts, records, etc.
The existing Thomas County is named for Jett Thomas whose claim to fame is that he was an officer in the War of 1812 and later oversaw construction of the State Capitol in Milledgeville and the first building at the University of Georgia. Thousands of later Georgians had similar accomplishments. Thomas, however, is unique. A Georgian of national prominence, he’s an independent-thinking black conservative ridiculed by the left, initially as a cipher in the shadow of Justice Antoine Scalia. The current liberal take is that he’s the perpetually angry man settling old scores. He’s certainly neither and his contribution will stand on its own. He would have made a fine Chief Justice.
Georgia should take two steps to honor Thomas. One is to erect a monument in the Capitol vicinity, even though he never served in state government. The other is to redesignate Thomas County in honor of the life and accomplishments of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In fact, the people of Thomas County should rise up and insist on it.
Let Perdue steer transit; others must stay in own lane
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The point of utter exasperation approaches. The state desperately needs a realistic transportation plan — a statewide transportation plan — a gridlock-relief plan that covers the entire state of Georgia. Not one region. Not one agency. One statewide plan.
There’s one official in Georgia who can make this happen. One. Gov. Sonny Perdue.
The regional players in the metro area can develop their agendas — and propose to expand their mission, as the Atlanta Regional Commission is doing as it considers morphing from a planning agency into one that also builds projects on its regional transportation plan.
Former Department of Transportation board chairman David Doss of Rome can develop a plan, as he did — a fine ambitious plan to relieve congestion and promote economic development. But it’s just scratchings on a legal pad until anointed by the governor and/or the Georgia General Assembly.
And, of course, the Georgia Department of Transportation can pursue its traditional design-and-build approach that amounts to a plan of sorts, but it really needs revitalization — and a larger congestion-relief agenda that will require more money and a variety of private-sector design-fund-and-build players.
Tommie Williams of Lyons, Republican majority leader of the State Senate and a member of joint House-Senate transportation funding study committee, had a revealing exchange last week with Steve Stancil, executive director of the Georgia Regional Transportation Agency. That agency, incidentally, was created by former Gov. Roy Barnes and had he been elected to a second term, might have been a governor’s personal DOT. But Perdue won and GRTA monitors transportation issues and approves, or revises as need be, the ARC’s regional transportation project list.
Stancil was blunt in testifying before the study committee. “We’ve lost our focus when it comes to transportation in Georgia, and it’s time to get it back,” he said. “Funding is tight, and we can only do those projects with the most congestion relief. There is a time to plan and a time to build. It is our season to pull together and get building.” Since cheering aloud was disallowed, mine erupted internally. Yes! Truth. Urgency. Do.
“Who is actually deciding what we’re doing?” asked Williams.
“We’ve got too many people going in too many directions,” replied Stancil.
“How do we solve the problem?”
Real easy, said Stancil. Establish “who has the authority to do what and who has the best ideas.” Now, he said, “everybody who can afford a lobbyist” plays a role.
“I haven’t heard a solution yet on how to bring all these entities under control,” concluded Williams.
Stancil proceeded to list the players and their prescribed roles: GDOT is to implement and build, the ARC is to plan, GRTA has authority to build but should be monitoring and reporting on conditions and progress, in addition to approving the ARC transportation plan.
Then there’s the State Roads and Tollway Authority, which is collecting $20 million a year in Ga. 400 tolls and spending $8 million to improve the tolling infrastructure though the bonds are to be paid off in 2011. And there are other players, too, most on the public payroll.
The solutions, Stancil had told the committee earlier, should recognize that trips cross city and county lines. Therefore:
Projects should focus on reducing congestion and improving mobility, with regional projects favored that are monitored, managed and completed. GDOT, he said, should administer new funds “especially in metro Atlanta,” with projects and funding monitored by GRTA. “When those agencies need to be fixed or improved, let’s do that rather than create new legislative power.”
“We need to be picking on something we can do now — and realistically do,” Stancil said later.
House Speaker Glenn Richardson spoke, too. “I don’t have any answers or words of wisdom,” he said. “I am willing to do anything except to continue to do nothing.” Said Richardson and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle in a joint release later: “There are far too many government agencies debating transportation plans instead of building roads.”
The first order of business: Put everybody back in their box. Define roles and authority. One leader can do that. The governor.
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Is crack worse than powder cocaine?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As the U.S. Supreme Court returns for its fall term one case first up will revive the never-settled dispute about whether crack cocaine users and dealers should be punished more severely than those who use or deal the powder variety.
On Tuesday, the court will hear an appeal of a case involving a Gulf War veteran, Derrick Kimbrough, who was caught by Virginia police in 2004 in a known drug-dealing area. When police approached, he tried to run but was caught carrying bullets and $1,823 in cash. He pleaded guilty to possessing firearms, crack and powder cocaine.
Under sentencing guidelines that equate one gram of crack to 100 grams of the powdered stuff, Kimbrough, who is black, would have drawn a sentence of 19-to-22 years. The judge, U.S.District Court Judge Raymond A. Jackson, called the guidelines “ridiculous.” The case, he said, “is another example of how the crack cocaine guidelines are driving [sentences] to a point higher than necessary to do justice.”
He imposed a 15-year sentence. The government appealed the ruling. Arguments are Tuesday. The case literally is whether judges can draw their own conclusions on the crack-powder matter and set lower sentences. The Supreme Court is not being asked to strike down the 100-to-1 rule for crack and powder.
Congress set the crack-powder differential 21 years ago as part of the Reagan Administration’s war on drugs. The justification at the time was that crack was more commonly associated with gangs and violence. That rationale is dated and Congress, not the courts, should revisit the sentencing rules.
In the past five years, reports Michael Doyle of McClatchy Newspapers, 25,000 dealers and users have been sentenced in federal courts on crack offenses. Their sentences are, on average, about 50 percent longer — or 40 additional months —than those for power cocaine offenses. About 81 percent of those sentenced on crack and 27 percent of those sentenced on powder offenses are black.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said in a speech last week at Howard University that he’ll pursue revision as President. “If you’re convicted of a crime involving drugs, of course you should be punished,” he said. “But let’s not make the punishment for crack cocaine that much more severe than the punishment for powder cocaine when the real difference is where the people are using them or who is using them.”
Congress, not the courts, is the place. U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clements properly argued that the judge in the Kimbrough case should be reversed. “If each sentencing judge is permitted to adopt whatever policy he deems appropriate with regard to individual drugs, defendants with identical real conduct will receive markedly different sentences.”
No perfect system exists. Either judges adhere to sentencing guidelines or some future advocacy group’s computerized statistical analysis will reveal that like conduct — whether murder, drug-dealing or any other crime — results in different sentences. Such is the real world of prosecutors, judges and juries.
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