Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2007 > December
December 2007
Tax, spend? Sky shouldn’t be the limit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The year of the GREAT tax debate dawns. For me and for the rest of Georgia, it’s a hard sell.
Republicans who consider themselves fiscal conservatives should be exceedingly wary of creating a tax structure that enables the Big Spenders to grow government easily and painlessly. Expanding Georgia’s sales tax to services without planning to eliminate some other revenue source — the corporate and/or individual income tax, for example — is to make Republicans the design team for financing the welfare state.
Georgia should, instead, be applying the cap to state government spending that House Speaker Glenn Richardson, the GREAT plan’s author, proposed initially for city and county governments. Versions of the cap have been floating around the Capitol. One, in fact, has already passed the state Senate. Generally such caps have flexibility built in to account for hard times, but otherwise they attempt to hold state spending to inflation, plus population growth.
A cap is a better idea for state government than for local since the state is more mature. North of Atlanta, for example, a cap would have been a lousy idea because, for a brief spell, locals need to spend out the wazoo to build the roads, parks, fire houses, schools and other infrastructure needed to accommodate rapid growth. But when cities and counties mature, as is the case with Cobb, DeKalb or Fulton, a spending cap is desirable. It alerts residents to the growth of government.
Swapping a portion of the property tax for higher taxes on consumption may be good politics, but it’s not good policy. Except for medical services and services provided to businesses, virtually everything else Georgians buy would be taxed at 4 percent: real estate transactions, banking, memberships, personal services, travel, moving and storage, real property and others. In return, homeowners would get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for the school portion of their property, and motor vehicle owners would get a tax credit for both schools and local government. The tax exemption on groceries would be eliminated.
It’s not clear that the reduction in property taxes would be of net benefit to many homeowners, since they’d lose a deduction on federal income taxes while paying a greater sum in sales taxes. Now one or the other can be deducted, but not both.
Under the proposed GREAT plan, with some limited exceptions, all property owners could be freed of the obligation to support schools, depending on revenues.
Another tax of at least $10 per vehicle — this to finance a statewide trauma network with a starting cost of $100 million — would be levied back on vehicles under another bill being proposed.
Looking at it from a Big Government financing perspective, Georgia would eliminate neither the property tax on real estate — which I’m not advocating — nor on motor vehicles. And for the first time, Republicans propose to levy a tax on services, an idea that has been floated by Democrats for years with no takers.
If you’re the least bit skeptical that elected officials have the discipline to exercise spending restraint, this particular swap should raise red flags. The old property-tax structure for real estate and vehicles is still in place, but now sales taxes will be extended to new territory. A barrier is down. A wall is coming down, the wall between goods and services for tax purposes.
That’s a major leap. Reality is, as we’ve seen in Congress, spending restraint is not a characteristic of either party. On that, Republicans can’t be trusted any more than Democrats. They need walls. They need ceilings. They need barriers that at least cause the public to notice when government is expanding.
Tax reforms should favor simplicity. This one would make tax collectors of all service providers. And, to have a notion of how much they’re paying in taxes, consumers would have to keep track of every purchase they make. Property taxes may be reprehensible to some, but at least they’re simple.
Fiscal conservatives should cut taxes. This one shifts.
Tax policies should stimulate economic activity. This one’s stimulative potential eludes me.
Richardson’s GREAT plan will attract support from those who believe they’ll save more on property taxes than they spend on consumption. But in this instance good politics and good tax policy are not the same.
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New Year’s tradition, Nunn’s plans
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Happy New Year.
Since I’ve taken a personal interest in the well-being of most of the regulars who post here, it’s my solemn duty to advise you not to let tomorrow pass without dining on greens — turnips, collards, mustard, or even kale or spinach will do — black-eyed peas and hog jowl. Even the national supermarkets have begun stocking hog jowls, so there’s no reason for anybody in Georgia to risk entering 2008 facing the prospect of being broke, with bad luck and in poor health.
Feel free to discuss New Year’s Day traditions as you see fit but naysaying on the proper New Year’s Day meal will not be persuasive, no matter how intelligently argued. I am entirely certain that as an eight-month-old on my first New Year’s Day, my diet consisted of strained turnips, mashed black-eyes and Essence of Hog Jowl Soup. And the tradition has served me well.
I’ll warn you up-front. I cannot be responsible for anybody here who chooses to ignore this Southern tradition tomorrow, regardless of your place of birth or immigration status.
Since we’re all looking forward to 2008, I’ll draw your attention today to the lead story in the morning paper. It focuses on former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn’s effort “to push Republican and Democratic presidential candidates to spell out their plans for a government of national unity — an effort that also could lay the groundwork for an independent White House bid,” writes the AJC’s Jim Galloway.
Nunn and former U.S. Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma, another Democrat, will convene 17 political figures who regard themselves as middle-of-the-road. The group includes billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican of sorts. They’ll attempt to develop a “consensus agenda” on issues the two parties should be addressing.
Among the issues are the federal debt, national service, the U.S. in the world, and the lack of a comprehensive energy policy.
Ross Perot got us Bill Clinton. End of story for me on third-party movements. Crusading billionaires can pull in 15-20 percent of the electorate. They’re spoilers. So no thanks on Bloomberg.
It would be useful, however, if the effort can be separated from a threat to play spoiler. Nunn and others could raise issues, such as the obligation to perform national service, that have been introduced largely by those with a hidden agenda — rallying opposition to the war, for example.
The opportunity’s there to have a serious national discussion. But not if the outcome is that we get another billionaire on an ego trip running for President.
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Unlike Murphy, speaker putting House in peril
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
During a chance encounter on the day former House Speaker Tom Murphy died, current Speaker Glenn Richardson talked about the case for state assistance to Grady Memorial Hospital, where he’d once been treated following an auto accident.
Associating the need to assist Grady with an emotional personal experience is vintage Murphy. One such account was related during the week of the late speaker’s funeral. Years ago, after seeing some of the babies at Grady’s neonatal critical care unit, Murphy is said to have turned to state Rep. Eleanor Richardson of Decatur and said: “I don’t care what we have to do or how we have to do it, but we will do what it takes to make sure these babies have a chance to live. Just get me out of here so I do not have to see another one.”
The similarities in the two House speakers — the one then and the one now — are striking. Personal experience prompted both of them to see a public policy question in human terms, leading them to overcome prior opposition, while revealing a gentler side of leaders also thought to be stern and autocratic.
It infuriates many Democrats to suggest similarities, though they exist. Both men came to Atlanta as unpolished frontiersmen ill at ease with a disliked and distrusted media and unflattered by the camera’s eye. TV’s not Richardson’s medium, nor was it Murphy’s.
Like Murphy, Richardson has a temper and can be goaded into overreacting. Richardson’s critics say Murphy’s tantrums were calculated and controlled and Richardson’s aren’t. In small doses, a speaker’s wrath can be an effective management tool.
But leading the House requires far more media savvy, sophistication and political skill now than any Georgia politician needed in 1974 when Murphy came to power. The House is different. Georgia is different. And the majority party, composed of a dozen different brands of Republicans, has no history in power, nor any road maps.
Richardson tried to offer his own guide. In his earliest conversations with the House, he promised bills would be judged on four points: whether they reduce the size of government, strengthen the traditional family, lower the tax burden or increase personal responsibility. The markers were essential in corralling the Republicans into a cohesive governing party.
Fast-forward now to Speaker Richardson’s GREAT plan (Georgia’s Repeal of Every Ad Valorem Tax), which will be a topic of early debate in the coming session. Whatever its value to him personally, it’s a leadership mistake for the speaker of the House to make such a strategic miscalculation.
Murphy drew lightning and frequent media opposition, but he rarely did it in a way that subjected House members to risk. He routinely performed a valuable role for his colleagues by sidetracking bills that many of them didn’t want. That tactic allows members to parse their positions as they see fit, knowing they will not have to actually vote on something.
Had a major tax revision been proposed for the upcoming session — and there’s no argument that it is needed — it should have come from House members. The chamber is amply supplied with capable Democrats and Republican on its tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, starting with Chairman Larry O’Neal of Warner Robins and former chairman Richard Royal of Camilla, a Democrat turned Republican. It also includes fiscal conservatives like Tom Graves of Ranger, Burke Day of Tybee Island, Martin Scott of Rossville.
While Murphy had flaws aplenty, I never knew him to put himself in a position of competing with the “will” of the House, or of forcing members into perilous political positions, as Richardson’s advocacy of the GREAT plan does. What’s more, it’s not clear which of his four principles it advances.
Murphy had his quirks and, frankly, did a disservice to his loyal lieutenants by hanging around too long. But there was no doubt that he reflected and personified the institution of the House. He never got ahead of it or staked out his own direction.
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Mortgage fraud; FEMA; and Beltline
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Five things I have no need to be told in the new year: Details of Jane Fonda’s private life — or, for that matter, anything else about the bedroom activities of any other celebrity, including the gender of their mates. When fish get sick — unless it’s caused by pollution or is one I’m about to eat. What Al Sharpton thinks, Rosie O’Donnell says or Britney Spears reveals.
• If DeKalb County wants owners of commercial buildings and of 160,000 homes built before 1993 to switch-out commodes and shower heads when they’re sold, it should pay the tab. Rebates and lowered rates would compensate. The intent is to save water. But surely we cannot stop here. There has to be some penalty for the flush-happy who abuse their flushing privileges by flushing twice, thereby defeating the design intent of the new toilets.
• Quote of the Week: “If we are not going to use the Senate floor to do the business of the American people, can we set up a flea market or something, so that something positive is happening?” asked U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.). Congress is a flea market. The problem is that half the population wants merchandise for free — and cannot fathom why owners might object.
• “Fraud goes a long way toward explaining why mortgage defaults and foreclosures” are skyrocketing, reports The Wall Street Journal. White-collar criminals in Atlanta got $6.8 million in mortgages from Bear Stearns Co. One borrower being prosecuted by the feds here got a $1.8 million mortgage after claiming monthly income of $50,000, with assets of $3 million. He was a 23-year-old phone technician with an income of $105,000 per year and $35,000 in assets. The distressing realization is how many professionals are involved.
• Headline: “Home price dip hits Atlanta.” Thinking Right connects the dots: The $1.8 million loan cited above was for a home that later sold out of foreclosure for $1.1 million. Eliminate fraud, speculation and purchases that were beyond the means of borrowers and expect the market to settle, as in “Home price dip …”
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency begins testing trailers still occupied by Hurricane Katrina evacuees following complaints about air quality. Tests should be conducted, too, for those built at the same time and sold in the private sector. Otherwise, some critics won’t believe the findings if trailers are given a clean bill. And if there are air quality problems — formaldehyde is found in some mobile home building materials — critics will argue that Katrina victims were singled out because of their race or class.
• Change the law. DeKalb County purchasing officials authorized 26 payments of just under $50,000 to one company over a five-month period. Anything $50,000 or above would have required competitive bidding. The law should require competitive bids when any service can reasonably be expected to exceed $50,000 a year, except in a legitimate emergency. Offenders should go to jail.
• One man’s sand is another man’s gold. John Woodham, an Atlanta attorney, raises perfectly legitimate questions about the more than two dozen tax allocation districts across Georgia, and for that he is described as a man who “has managed … to throw sand in the gears” of the Atlanta Beltline project. The “sand” quote comes from Terri Montague, president and CEO of Atlanta Beltline Inc. Her sand, our gold. Woodham’s lawsuit questions whether school tax money can be diverted to other purposes. That’s a key question, since every child brought into a tax allocation district anywhere in Georgia has to be educated on somebody else’s dime. The suit is now before the state Supreme Court.
• On New Year’s Day, Texas begins to levy a $5-per customer tax on strip club patrons. Proceeds, estimated at $40 million per year, will be used to fund rape counseling centers. Strip clubs are suing, as they should. Two kinds of taxes should be outlawed: Those unrelated to the expenditure for which it is levied and those where the people to be taxed are not present to object — people who rent cars, for example.
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The courage of a martyr
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From the moment she returned to Pakistan in October from an eight-year exile, the danger to Benazir Bhutto was evident. She narrowly escaped injury when her homecoming parade was targeted by a suicide bomber, killing more than 140 people in Karachi.
Bhutto and at least 20 others were killed Thursday by a gunman who later blew himself up as she was leaving a campaign rally in Rawalpindi near the capital of Islamabad. She was shot in the neck and chest as she entered a vehicle to leave the rally.
Supporters at the hospital where she was pronounced dead reacted angrily, chanting “Dog, Musharraf, dog.” Bhutto, who served twice as prime minister between 1988 and 1996, was campaigning for the Pakistan People’s Party in opposition to President Pervez Musharraf in Jan. 8 parliamentary elections.
Musharraf would have been a fool to sanction in any way whatsoever any attempt to cause harm to Bhutto. More likely the assassination will be traced to extremists, probably connected to al-Qaida, determined to topple Musharraf. It is possible, too, that it is the work of crazies who couldn’t abide the prospect that Bhutto might return to power.
It is, in any event, a tragic day for Pakistan, for democracy and for the region.
Occasionally we stand in awe at the courage of leaders in other lands. Bhutto knew full well that this day could very well come, and probably would. And yet she came. That is the courage of a martyr.
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Take the money now
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
During a campaign year in 2003, Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street vetoed a pay-raise bill that would have given the mayor a salary of $165,000 per year, up from $146,000. City Council overrode. The mayor, however, announced that he wouldn’t take the increase.
He leaves office next month, taking with him more than $111,000 — the pay raise he rejected. The sum includes proceeds from a Philadelphia pension provision called DROP — or Deferred Retirement Option Program. It allows retirement-eligible city workers to pick a retirement date up to four years away and then to amass pension payments while working. It exists supposedly to encourage potential retirees to stay on the job and allow the city to plan for their replacements.
The mayor wanted to discontinue the DROP program in 2003, contending that it was too expensive. The Pension Board continued it. A year later, he enrolled. A longtime city councilman before he was elected mayor, Street is eligible to draw $115,700 in annual pension from the city.
Stories like this feed public cynicism. They add to the view that politicians say one thing and do another — and that they’re in it for the money.
One goal for reformers in the new year should be isolate politicians from public employee pension systems. For one thing, taxpayers shouldn’t be paying pensions to part-time officials who are expected to earn their livings elsewhere — legislators, county commissioners and city councilmen, for example. For another, politicians shouldn’t be tempted to expand or create provisions in public plans — and they are when they are beneficiaries.
The Georgia General Assembly has before it proposed new retirement plans for state employees hired after July 1, 2008. Not teachers, who are under a different plan.
One proposal would be a pure defined contribution plan, a 401(k) or something like it. That’s the direction state and local governments should go. Nobody, neither politicians nor influential staffers, should have incentive to game the system for unwarranted future payouts.
Cure cynicism. Eliminate temptation.
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Publisher loved to help others succeed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Family-owned newspapers, this one among them, are the love of my professional life.
It is an affection seeded in happenstance — and, indirectly at least, in the promise of a West Macon boy whose potential opened a door to others. I was among them.
It is the season for gifts and thanksgiving, for remembering those whose presence in our lives made a lasting difference.
For me, and for the boy of promise who preceded me at our hometown newspaper, the man was Peyton T. Anderson Jr., owner of The Macon Telegraph and News. Almost two decades after his 1988 death at the age of 80, Peyton Anderson’s gifts continue to make a difference to the communities that his paper served.
“Jim: You should consider doing a column one day on what Peyton did for you, me and others. Just a thought. Tom”
“Remember ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’?” I asked. “How would we have been different had he not been born — or disposed to help Macon’s children?”
“Had Peyton not provided me with financial aid, I could not have attended college,” replies Tom Johnson. And without that, none of the other opportunities that came his way, says Johnson, an assistant in LBJ’s White House who later became president of The Los Angeles Times and chairman and CEO of CNN before retiring in 2001.
Had Johnson, who started at the morning Telegraph as a ninth grader reporting on his school’s sports teams, not succeeded early, Anderson might not have been inspired to continue funding the college educations of those who passed through his newsroom.
In 1963, I graduated from high school and Johnson graduated from the University of Georgia. “Tommy, what is it you want to do with your life?” Anderson is quoted as asking in Jaclyn Weldon White’s “Bestest: The Life of Peyton Tooke Anderson Jr.” Replied Johnson: “I want to be a publisher, just like you.”
Anderson offered to pay his way through Harvard Business School if he could gain entrance. He did, afterwards applying for a White House Fellowship.
As a Mercer University freshman, my summer’s cotton mill earnings were exhausted when I heard of a weekend opening at the afternoon News. I got it. Out of money again the next quarter at school, I took a full-time job assembling school buses at Blue Bird Body Co. in Fort Valley, while continuing to work weekends at the paper.
At the end of the summer, I too met Peyton Anderson. If I’d continue at the paper, he’d pay the bulk of my college expenses.
I had seen life in public housing. I had tasted the fiber-filled air of a cotton mill spinning room. I had bucked rivets with an old man proud to show me his unfinished Jim Walter Home, the first he’d ever owned.
And I had felt the awesome power of a free press to make the world a better place, starting from our front door.
It was an easy decision.
Maybe it was Johnson’s early success, maybe just Anderson’s devotion to the community. Whatever it was, he made the same offer every year to a high school or college student working at his newspaper.
Had he not sold the paper to Knight-Ridder while I was away in Vietnam, there was no question that I’d return to his service. It wasn’t a contract. It wasn’t a condition of his gift.
But there’s never been a day of my life that I dreaded coming to work, or failed to marvel at a newspaper’s potential to uplift the communities, and the state, it serves. For that gift, I am always in his debt.
At his death, Peyton Anderson left the bulk of his estate, $26.6 million, to a foundation ably led by Juanita T. Jordan, an aide he helped teach how to manage his post-sale investments. That foundation now contains $101 million and has given $58 million to the good works of Macon and Middle Georgia. “Throughout his life,” the book jacket reads, “he performed numerous private acts of kindness, but it wasn’t until his death that his hometown learned the full extent of his generosity.”
Tom Johnson, a poor boy from West Macon whose father was disabled and whose mother worked long days at Foy Grocery Store, well knew of those private acts of kindness. And so, too, did a lad from the projects of South Macon.
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Five who made a difference
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s the mellow season of the year, a time to reflect on our blessings of family, friends and people who have made a difference in our lives.
I’ll not take the bait from the morning paper’s front-page feature on Cynthia McKinney’s bid to become the Green Party’s presidential nominee. But one quote in it is priceless. It’s from Joe Beasley, Southeast Regional Director of the Rainbow/PUSh Coalition. “She says things nobody else is saying.” Yes — and there’s a reason. But it’s Christmas.
There’s a front-page warning, too, that Americans are falling behind on credit card payments at an alarming rate and that the worst may be yet to come. Hey, man, it’s Christmas. Lighten up. Preach to me about carelessness with credit before I make the extravagant Christmas purchases — and after we’ve experienced the joy of opening our presents.
The season does invite us to remember those who are or were important in our lives. That’s today’s assignment.
Identify for us here five people — not necessarily by name — who have made a real difference in your life. Mothers, fathers, spouses and children are a given. So identify others. My list:
• Fred Tucker, a newspaper carrier supervisor in South Macon and a father figure through most of my high-school years. During the long hours I rode with him as he checked on carriers and responded to customer complaints, he talked me through some of the most difficult questions of a teenager’s formative years.
• Betty Lou O’Keefe, a high school English teacher, who decided I shouldn’t wait to go to college, as I’d planned, and got me in Mercer University on a Saturday morning in the spring of my senior year.
• Otho Pirkle, a guidance counselor, always upbeat and positive, who provided sound fatherly advice and many kindnesses throughout high school.
• Durwood McAlister, former editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal, who hired me twice. He, like Fred Tucker, is the kind of person you’d want at your side in trouble, good fortune or a long journey through space.
• There is another, but since I’m writing about him tomorrow, I’ll keep that surprise wrapped.
Merry Christmas. And thanks for the pleasures, the laughs and enlightenment, your contributions have brought us this year.
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Tom Murphy, an institution with the power
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There is a majesty to the rituals of government, from the sanctity of the oaths neighbors swear to serve their fellow citizens according to the rule of law, to assemblages like the one Friday to pay tribute to former House Speaker Tom Murphy, a man described by the current speaker as “a giant of Georgia politics.”
Combine eloquence and sincerity with the grandeur on the institution that is the Georgia House of Representatives and, whether political friend or adversary, and the farewell is a tribute that honors him the politics of the state he served.
One moment, in particular, stands out.
Both House Speaker Glenn Richardson and his predecessor, Terry Coleman, the lieutenant who served Murphy loyally and patiently before getting a brief opportunity to be speaker, spoke. Below the podium, Murphy’s flag-draped coffin, carried into and out of the chamber by 10 resplendent Georgia State Troopers.
The speaker’s chair directly behind the podium sat empty, draped in black ribbon.
Neither he nor Coleman would occupy it while Murphy was in the chamber, said Richardson.
But the most touching moment came at the end, after both had delivered their eulogies.
Coleman offered prayer “that his legacy of service will forever remain an example and an inspiration to all who serve in public office.”
And then, joined by Richardson, he declared: “I adjourn this service, Sine Die.”
The “Sine Die,” declaration means literally that the proceeding is adjourned without a fixed day to gather again. On the final day of every session, the speaker pronounces it and then rushes from the chamber, pausing for farewell bows, before leaving the floor. It’s a signal that the business of state is over; the business of ordinary life resumes.
It is an old and treasured tradition of the House.
Another Tom Murphy may exist one day. It won’t be in our lifetimes. Coming along now, Tom Murphy couldn’t be Tom Murphy.
When he came to power in 1974, rural white males ruled. The system, like that of Congress, honored seniority. Intelligent and ambitious men willingly accepted long apprenticeships, recognizing that once in power they could enrich their communities with state grants, employees and facilities. It was an orderly world with clear rules and roles: bring Atlanta money home, just as the role of Georgia’s senators and congressmen was to get in positions of power so money from the Northeast could be transferred South.
Murphy adapted when women and blacks came. He did it by ignoring ardent feminists and vocal black activists while drawing in those inclined to work within the system. He had well-publicized road-to-Damacus conversions, often stemming from personal experiences, that caused him to champion aid to Atlanta.
The reality is, however, that even before Murphy left office in 2002, the old rules had changed. His party’s power base had shifted from rural Georgia and had given it a nearly unmanageable coalition of rural whites, blacks and intown liberals. While rural white generally conservative men still dominated, had the Legislature not addressed the concerns of key constituencies, including Atlanta and DeKalb County, he could not have survived.
Murphy became an institution because he became the power in a homogenous institution fighting for independence where rules were clear and legislators were inclined to wait their turn. That House no longer exists. Neither does the Georgia that saw, through the camera’s eye, a rough-hewn autocratic figure who defined its politics. Georgia is a microcosm of the nation. It can’t be led by brute force — or by leaders who effect that style.
At the service for Murphy, the old and the new gathered. Most every living politician of historical significance, men and women whose contributions created the modern Georgia, was there. His life and his service touched them all — from, as Coleman noted, an era of ” post-war turbulence through the dot-com boom — then bust; from spittoons under the desks to lap tops on top of the desks.” No rigid man could have survived to become the longest-serving speaker in the nation’s history. Sine Die.
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Vouchers, ethanol, Fulton sheriff
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Flush with endowment cash and recognizing that top-tiered private schools are becoming accessible only to the rich and the poor, Harvard University opens itself to the middle class. Families earning between $60,000 and $120,000 will pay tuition of up to 10 percent of family income. Families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 will pay the full 10 percent. The University of Pennsylvania gives free room, board and tuition to students with family incomes of less than $60,000. It’ll gradually up that to $100,000.
• Nevermind my recent assertion that you’ll never be rich if the job requires your actual presence to make money. Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees, having walked out of a 10-year $252 million contract signed originally with the Texas Rangers, signs a new deal for $275 million over 10 years. It’ll pay him $32 million in 2009 and 2010. That’s rich.
• There’s hope. Hope that all Georgia restaurants will routinely stock sweet tea. And the reason for hope? Ritz-Carlton Buckhead has discovered, and serves, fried pies. OK, they gussy ‘em up and charge nine bucks for two. But at least they’re there.
• Shocking, yes, the news that almost one in four — 24 percent — of the out-of-state college students improperly classified as in-state for tuition purposes are also collecting HOPE. A state audit sampled students enrolled from out of state and found that 28 percent had been reclassified as residents between the spring of 2004 and spring of 2006. Each improperly classified student cost taxpayers about $7,300 per year.
• A Princeton student who claimed to have been beaten by two men because he’s a conservative admits he made it up. His injuries were self-inflicted. So common are “hate” hoaxes, especially those involving graffiti, that the first question to ask is whether “victims” have agendas.
• Quote on ethanol from an executive with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association: “We think there will be a day when people ask ‘Why in the world did we do this?’” Congress has just passed an energy bill mandating production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, up from 6 billion now. The technology doesn’t exist to get cellulosic ethanol from switch grass and wood chips, though Congress is counting on 21 billion gallons of it after 2015. Meanwhile, corn in the tank is pushing up food prices, by $47 per person in a year, according to one study. Why in the world did we do this?
• Thinking Right connects the dots, so you don’t have to. Headline Sunday: “Cocaine terms may be reduced” for 700 Georgians in federal prison for crack cocaine offenses. The first wave hitting the streets starting March 3. Headline Monday: “Freed offenders repeat crimes.”
• Headline: “Vouchers popular, limited.” OK. Expand them. The next headline should be: “Vouchers popular, sufficient.”
• Vouchers or not, however, school choice is inevitable. Parents want it. Henry Ford Institute, Ford Motor Company Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have joined to launch a national network of small high schools modeled after the Henry Ford Academy in Dearborn, Mich. That’s a 10-year-old charter with a 95 percent graduation rate, 99 percent of whom go on to college. The first of the new schools comes in Chicago, but Atlanta is a candidate too, reports the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, which helped start the successful Tech High charter in Atlanta.
• The Marietta Conference Center and Resort is to Marietta what commuter rail will be to Georgia: A public investment that keeps on needing and never quite seems to nail the market.
• Headline on ajc.com: “77 Fulton teachers overpaid.” Just 77? I’d say all being paid for advanced degrees unrelated to their teaching field are being overpaid.
• Fulton needs a sheriff to. … Nope, can’t think of any good way to finish that sentence.
• New Jersey’s in the process of ending capital punishment. If you agree, see the movie “No Country for Old Men.” Or read the trial transcripts of those on death row.
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In and out, up and down
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney finds that Democrats and Republicans are just alike — both “eat out of the hands of corrupt lobbyists and feed at the same corporate trough” — so she’s abandoning the Dems to run for the Green Party’s presidential nomination.
In recent weeks, she’s campaigned in Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Green Party will choose its nominee from among a field that includes McKinney and six others at a national convention in Chicago next July.
McKinney’s in — and it appears that Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a five-term Congressman from Colorado who had based his campaign on opposition to illegal immigration, is out. His withdrawal announcement is expected today in Iowa. He may be opting, instead, to run for the U.S. Senate to replace Republican Wayne Allard, who is retiring. Tancredo was never among those likely to get the nomination.
Meanwhile, on the campaign front, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday finds that Rudy Giuliani has dropped 13 points nationally since November and is tied with Mitt Romney at 20 percent among Republican primary voters. Mike Huckabee’s third at 17. A brokered convention? Ask again after Feb. 5, which should be a big day for Giuliani.
McKinney, if she gets the Green Party nomination, could siphon off a few Democrats. But a nominee who can’t get reelected in an overwhelmingly Demcratic district is not much of a threat to either party. Like Jane Fonda, she strikes me as no more than a footnote from the past, a figure who once fired the passions but who’s now no more than an occasional curiosity.
In, out, up, down. The question really, though, is whether anybody is engaged in politics now. We may declare here a Christmas Cease Fire, giving ‘em all a rest until the new year. Tuned in or tuned out?
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Charities in the marketplace
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A top Atlanta story of the day is the revelation that the top executive of United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, who retired in July with a pension payout of $106,000 per year, was given a lump sum award of $1.6 million.
The Board of Directors did not vote on his pay or the additional $1.6 million payment, which were decided by a compensation committee. The executive, Mark O’Connell, was paid $250,000 in 1999, compensation that rose to $446,729 this year.
The revelation will most assuredly affect the willingness of individuals to contribute through United Way. It’s a bit difficult for workers making $30,000 per year to pay a middleman sums they’d consider outrageous for processing their financial gifts to the needy.
The question is whether your future contributions to this or to other organizations are affected by stories like the one today?
My view of this is the same as my view of campaign finance and lobbyist disclosure. Put the information quickly on the record and open for inspection — and the marketplace, whether that’s voters or contributors, will regulate the practices in question. United Way donors will send a strong message with their checkbooks to the board and to its compensation committee.
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Conservatives must reshape government for better
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For conservatives who want to make a difference, who come to government with an idea of reshaping it so that it is better positioned to serve a new Georgia, four items from last week’s news are markers:
• Technology. A well-run government is one that has the capabilities to amass the expertise needed in an emergency — Katrina, for example, or Okefenokee wildfires or Sept. 11 — and to be on the cutting edge of rapidly changing technology. Hiring and assembling that staff is nearly impossible and entirely unaffordable.
Gov. Sonny Perdue announced last week that 11 state departments and agencies representing two-thirds of the information technology in the executive branch, spending $617 million per year, will farm out those tasks to the private sector.
This is exactly what a well-run state should be doing: Setting standards, hiring expertise when and as needed, managing performance and holding private-sector vendors and contractors accountable. Yesterday’s government brought them on staff. Tomorrow’s manages. Hire and “fire,” as the situation warrants.
• Compensation. Georgia and most governments have a back-loaded employee compensation system: Lower wages up front, a gold-plated pension system at the end. Worse, still, is that the gold-plated pension system has a design corruption: Beneficiaries set benefits, with little regard to taxpayers. It’s done surreptitiously with formulas and rule-changes that attract no notice.
Perdue has proposed a new compensation system for employees hired after next July 1. The three options the General Assembly is considering, explained at a meeting last week of the House and Senate Retirement Committees, would move some of the back-loaded compensation to up-front cash.
The state will hire 66,000 new workers over the next five years. New hires want cash up front; younger workers nowadays don’t intend to stay with one employer forever. Give them the money in 401(k) plans. Two benefits accrue. One is that workers get better salaries and can take their retirement money with them. But the most important benefit, by far, is that politicians will be less tempted to corrupt retirement systems.
Bonuses, such as those given to Georgia Lottery employees, can be good for rewarding workers — but not if they trigger wildly excessive delayed compensation.
A well-run government pays well upfront and offers employees and politicians no temptation to rip-off the system when nobody’s looking.
• Health. In 1974, in a futile attempt to control health care inflation, the federal government required states to control hospital beds and equipment, with something called a Certificate of Need. President Ronald Reagan recognized it as ineffective and anti-competitive. In 1987, it was repealed at the federal level.
Georgia still has it. It’s restrictive. It’s bureaucratic. It’s anti-competitive. It’s something no conservative should ever allow to stand. Modern-day Republicans, at least in Georgia, are not there yet. They’re still trying to manage health care markets by bureaucratic rule. Hospital lobbyists, powerful and generous, use it to keep out competition.
The state should get rid of it as a prelude to bringing information and competition to bear on health care costs. But nobody’s there yet. Last week, more tinkering by the Georgia Board of Community Health.
• Transportation. In line with technology, the Georgia Department of Transportation is in transition. The DOT board and the new commissioner, Gena Abraham, are doing with transportation what Perdue is doing on water: Gathering facts so that when they attempt to turn the Queen Mary, it’s in the proper direction.
Transportation once required a huge staff of engineers and road-builders. Now it requires managers, and the ability to grow and contract quickly.
The agenda for conservatives should be to change the structure of government, recognizing that the era is virtually passed where the state should be toting shovels or programming computers. Instead, it should be managing the private sector so that the work gets done better, while assuring that we’re not getting ripped off. Set up a system, too, where they can be paid well — without enabling the connected to retire to Sea Island.
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Do endorsements matter?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We’ve discussed this before, and most contributors here insist political endorsements carry little or no weight with them. But surely they matter with some voters — or else candidates wouldn’t continue to solicit them.
In recent weeks the big endorsement was Oprah of Obama, at least to the extent that it translates into crowd appeal on the stump, as it did in Iowa and South Carolina. Over the weekend, John McCain drew favorable press from the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest newspaper.
In an endorsement that may do him little good in the Republican primary, the newspaper reminded voters that he’d opposed President George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and supported him on comprehensive immigration reform. Wrote the Register:
“The force of John McCain’s moral authority could go a long way toward restoring Americans’ trust in government and inspiring new generations to believe in the goodness and greatness of America.”
McCain picks up the endorsement today of U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats. He also was endorsed over the weekend by The New Hampshire Union Leader, that state’s largest newspaper, and from The Boston Globe, which circulates in New Hampshire’s southern population centers. McCain has virtually conceded Iowa to Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, but is mounting a full-court press in New Hampshire, where he defeated George W. Bush in 2000.
The Globe said in its endorsement that “the iconoclastic senator from Arizona has earned his reputation for straight talk by actually leveling with voters, even at significant political expense.”
Do endorsements matter in highly-publicized races? Probably not — except to the extent that they reinforce decisions voters have already made. They really tell us more about the values and agendas of the individuals and organizations making the endorsements than they do about the candidates.
Today’s question is not really about whether you’re influenced by endorsements. We’ve previously established that most of you are not. It’s to identify voters, or voting blocs, who are influenced, if any. Oprah, I’m convinced, is one who matters. If she can convince viewers to buy specific books and read, she can convince viewers who may pay little attention to politics to follow her recommendation.
Lieberman matters somewhat with middle-of-the-road and with wavering Independents, to the extent they exist. A Lieberman adviser said the endorsement is because McCain “has the best chance of uniting the country in its fight against Islamic terrorism.” I wish that were true — but I’m afraid no such person exists. So what we’re looking for now is one who will persist, despite the polls, and do what’s best for America’s present and future security.
DOT spinning its wheels, needs culture overhaul
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the state’s best natural storytellers, Court of Appeals Judge John J. Ellington of Soperton, recounts the hat-in-hand visit by Jasper County’s three commissioners to state highway Commissioner “Mr. Jim” Gillis.
The street that runs in front of the courthouse had become heavily congested, the three told Mr. Jim.
We don't have the money, he replied. Streets around courthouses are congested all over Georgia.
But it’s congested to the point of causing accidents, they persisted.
No money, he countered. Besides, accidents are up everywhere.
They rose to depart. If we don’t get this problem fixed, all three of us are going to be defeated in the next election, the commissioners told the legendary highway chief.
Well, why didn’t you tell me that in the first place, Mr. Jim is said to have declared.
The road got fixed.
Mr. Jim, who died in 1975, was a former Treutlen County commissioner who served both houses of the General Assembly and, most important, as director of the state Highway Department (as it was then called) between 1948 and 1955 and again from 1959 to 1970. He lorded over a political universe, the currency of which was jobs and roads, that is completely alien to most living Georgians.
Just-appointed State Transportation Commissioner Gena Abraham began her job by attempting to compile a list of project commitments. Within days, the number went from 1,100 or 1,300 to 1,500, to 2,216, to 5,430, to 9,211 as of Thursday morning, of which 2,470 are active. The first reaction is to be alarmed. They don’t know. The second and the correct reaction is to take it as evidence of the need to change a culture that served a past Georgia.
The culture of the early Jim Gillis era was of a poor agricultural state whose farmers were stuck in the mud. Needs far exceeded revenues — needs such as roads, and jobs for displaced farmers driven from the land by erosion, boll weevils and the Depression.
Politics was everything. The State Merit System was created in 1943 by Georgia’s best reform governor, Ellis Arnall, because the highway department was emptied after every gubernatorial election. Roads and jobs were the spoils of a since-outlawed county unit system of voting that made three rural counties, regardless of population, the equal of Fulton. The system worked for the powerful, but not to address the most urgent needs.
Another fine political storyteller recounts one more Jim Gillis story.
It’s of rural legislators going to him to plead for local road projects.
That would cost $2 million, Mr. Jim told the legislators. We don’t have that kind of money.
They plead further. Finally Mr. Jim capitulates.
We don’t have it, he says. But I tell you what: We’ll take it from “Dee-Kalb” County.
Legislators leave, bouncing off the clouds, convinced that they had succeeded not only in getting their road, but that they had gotten it at the expense of metro Atlanta.
Georgia may have 9,211 projects committed. Most of them are the Georgia equivalent of congressional earmarks. They are sops to powerful legislators and to influential county commissioners. They may be built in decades to come. They may not. But they are in the system.
They are in a system that processed paperwork, on timetables that depended on workload, money and influence. But, despite all of that, it was a professional bureaucracy staffed by extraordinarily competent employees who, for decades, did a superb job of anticipating congestion and fixing it. In the past couple of decades, it’s been an agency battered by an inability to decide precisely what it should be doing. It has lost confidence and tends to do best the easiest stuff, such as maintenance.
The old world has changed. The need now is to have a department with a clear, fixed statewide transportation plan, a plan based on measurable cost-benefit and congestion-relief priorities. No earmarks. It needs to be an agency with the expertise to manage and hold accountable private-sector vendors and contractors. It needs to be able to grow and contract quickly.
The start is to get a fix, as Abraham and the DOT board are doing. Then start to change the culture and the system.
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A grievance museum, energy bill
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• Pssst. Geography doesn’t move. People do. Any comparison of attitudes in Gwinnett County about MARTA today and decades ago is valid only if we assume that places have minds of their own. Since they don’t, it’s not surprising that newcomers hold different views than those residents who died, moved or changed their minds. A poll for the Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District finds that two-thirds of active Gwinnett voters view MARTA favorably.
• Odd tidbits in stories that reveal more about the writer than the issue: Often when it’s a crazed gunman, the tidbit is prior military service, especially in Vietnam. But in one wire service account of the gunman who killed four people at a missionary training school in Colorado Springs, Colo. “was home schooled by his family …” If one believes home schoolers are weird out-of-the-mainstream people — I don’t — the tidbit’s relevant. If not, it’s a relevant as the killer’s favorite fast-food restaurant.
• My sympathies now fall to Michael Vick. A 23-month sentence and a “fine” that could exceed $142 million in loss of earnings is a penalty that I’d consider excessive.
• Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee draw criticism for talking about religion. But when Democrats politick from the pulpit just before elections, especially in black churches, not a peep.
• A hundred and twenty-five million dollars for a Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown Atlanta? Just what the world needs: An All Grievances Past and Present Exhibition Hall.
• I gotta tell you this drought brings some real eccentrics into the news. No thanks, I’ll not take 5-gallon showers with water collected from the roof or dry shave or brush without water.
• Bipartisanship fails. Taxpayers lose. The Senate rejects a proposal by Sens. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) to limit farm payments to $250,000 yearly per married couple, down from the current $360,000 — though loopholes allow them to collect more. It would also have required that farmers be “actively engaged” to receive subsidies. The administration wanted to reduce payments to individuals who earn more than $200,000. The cap now is $2.5 million. Bush threatens a veto of the five-year, $286 billion bill.
• Almost 900 special needs kids are beneficiaries of the state’s new scholarship/voucher program. And it’s not rich white kids, who for the most part already have school choice. Of the 899 children who got scholarships averaging $6,300 to buy services where their parents deemed best, 34 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. Some 494 are white, 359 black; in all, 45 percent are nonwhite. The 899 came from a public school population of 199,509. So much for vouchers being a threat to them.
• Please, send this Congress home and bring on the 2008 elections. Once again Democrats send the president a costly campaign-agenda bill that sharply increases spending on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Once again, as promised, President Bush issues a veto. Give it a few months. It’ll be sent back, essentially unchanged, to another veto certainty.
• Geez, Atlanta, it’s just a coach.
• If Georgia builds a multimodal station to serve metro Atlanta, it should be at the Atlanta airport, not in the downtown railroad gulch. That area’s congested already. State and local governments shouldn’t add traffic to roads that are already congested.
• It’s called a “major victory for coal-dependent utilities in the South, especially Atlanta-based Southern Co.” In reality, it’s a victory for me, a consumer who wants politicians to stop hiding their interest-group agendas in my living costs. The issue here concerns an energy bill working its way through Congress. Senate Democrats dropped the provision requiring power companies to generate 15 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2015. Forcing consumers to pay higher costs for energy that’s not economically viable — windmills, for example — doesn’t hurt Southern Co. It hurts me. They buy and pass the costs along. We pay.
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Don’t ask reporters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee?
Three weeks out from the Jan. 3 caucuses, the two are in a dead heat in Iowa. Romney started running TV this week accusing Huckabee of being soft on illegal immigration for supporting college tuition breaks for illegals who had graduated from high schools in Arkansas. Huckabee, though, prompted the greater stir by asking a New York Times reporter: “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”
Huckabee is an ordained Southern Baptist minister with a theology degree. Posing such a question to a reporter is not a legitimate inquiry or a search for facts . It’s an effort to plant doubt about Romney’s Mormonism. Huckabee acknowledged as much by apologizing to Romney when they met Wednesday in Iowa.
Huckabee’s getting noticed. A Georgia poll of 800 likely Republican voters conducted by Strategic Vision LLC put him at 23 percent, with Fred Thompson at 20, Rudy Giuliani at 17, John McCain at 11 and Mitt Romney at 10. About 12 percent were undecided. In September, Huckabee registered 6 percent in a poll by the same firm.
Huckabee does handle the media well, especially on questions of faith and values. He comes across as authentic and able to hold his own at the national level. He strikes me, though, as a #2 guy — the Southerner that either Romney or Giuliani will need to help carry the South, especially if Obama-Oprah/Bill Richardson is the Democratic ticket.
Romney or Huckabee? You decide.
The dreaded ‘outsourcing’ word
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia will begin privatizing much of its technology services, shifting about 500 state employees to private companies, Gov. Sonny Perdue announced Tuesday. The shift will also mean that about “200 or so” employees will be laid off and other jobs will be consolidated as employees leave.
Former Gov. Roy Barnes proposed to consolidate all of Georgia’s telecommunications, then valued at $1.8 billion, under a single private contractor but he was defeated and the idea never got past the bidding stage. Perdue’s approach will be to break the contract into smaller pieces.
The bidding will be open not only to Georgia companies and to those in the U.S., but to global competitors as well.
My belief is that virtually everything government does, except for decision-making positions affecting our liberty and property, should be privatized. Technology certainly would be at the top of the list. There’s no way government can maintain the edge needed, or amass the expertise required in the event of a large-scale crisis in operating systems. Better to buy those services in the private sector.
The same is true, of course, in traditional functions of government, like transportation. The Georgia DOT should be composed of personnel with the expertise to write and manage contracts, to assess performance, and to hold private-sector companies accountable. All of the expertise needed to design and build roads or operate buses, trains or planes is available in the private sector.
Perdue’s likely to catch flak if winning bidders on technology services are located in Calcutta, thus triggering the dreaded “outsourcing” fear. But if the contracts are properly written and managed, the location of the company providing the service is unimportant.
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Don’t shift taxes, Republicans; be honest with voters
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Republicans who run Georgia need to be honest with us.
If they want to create a new social program — and many of them do — they should make the case, levy the taxes and appropriate the money from the general fund of the state. Simple. Easy. If it’s worth doing and if it’s a higher priority than other compelling needs, legislators should levy the taxes and do it.
Instead, House Speaker Glenn Richardson is proposing a $10 per year tax on vehicles, to go with Gov. Sonny Perdue’s proposed add-on fine for speeders, to fund a statewide trauma network. The vehicle tax would generate about $85 million while the tax on speeders would add another $8 million to $10 million annually. A trauma network would require upward of $100 million per year.
Newt Gingrich once described former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole as “tax collector for the welfare state.” With the proposals Richardson is advancing — expansion of the sales tax to services in exchange for a reduction in property taxes, and auto taxes dressed up as user fees — he is helping to create the apparatus that will enable big spenders to more efficiently and more painlessly function as tax collectors for the welfare state.
The great frustration with the new majority under the Gold Dome is that, with rare exception — tort reform and special education vouchers, for example — they are largely indistinguishable from the Democrats who preceded them. The semantics game on taxes is right out of the Democratic playbook.
A user fee is a sum charged a limited group of people for a specific service government provides for their sole benefit. The best example is fees charged golfers at state parks. Providing courses is of public recreational value to a large segment of Georgians. But most of us aren’t golfers and, therefore, those who play the courses should pay full freight. A fee that covers the full cost of maintenance and operation is warranted. And it’s legit. It’s a user fee, not a tax.
A trauma network, though, does not serve a select population — or at least not one that can be identified in advance. It can serve motorists, certainly. But it serves, too, those who fall off ladders, or suffer gunshots, stabbings, heart attacks or other traumas. A genuine user fee would be an emergency room add-on. But since the cost would likely be prohibitive, a user fee is not practical.
The consideration, then, is whether the service is so essential to the general welfare of the state that the cost should be borne by all taxpayers. That obviously is a decision that has been made — though not fully explained.
The reality is that a statewide trauma network that covers all Georgians will be an expensive proposition. If one person is entitled to trauma center access within a reasonable distance, all are.
If all Georgians benefit, all Georgians should pay. That’s a tax.
It’s absurd to consider eliminating ad valorem taxes on vehicles while in the very same session proposing to add back a $10 tax to fund the trauma network. That’s not reform. It’s tax shifting. And if politicians can justify $10 for trauma, they can justify any other sum for any other appealing cause.
What this majority really needs to do is develop an agenda based on the state’s transportation, education, medical and water objectives — and then determine priorities and funding requirements. If a tax increase is warranted — and it may be — Perdue, Richardson and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle should make the case, and explain to Georgians what we’re getting and why the additional money is needed.
Instead, we get tax shifts and new tax targets and tax semantics.
Eliminating the property tax altogether never really had that much appeal here. Property is a form of wealth and, besides, rich Saudis shouldn’t be encouraged to buy land and sit on it for decades while it appreciates with no obligation to support local communities. But if not eliminated altogether, it’ll be back creeping higher and higher.
Creating a tax on services is a monumental step in tax policy. It opens a new vista to those who would grow government. Penny here, penny there, painlessly. No thanks.
Tell me what I’m buying and what it costs. Then levy the taxes, straight-up.
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Hillary can’t beat Oprah
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama may have The Bomb. And it’s not aboard the Enola Gay. It’s now aboard the Obama Express campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Suddenly Hillary’s not looking invincible.
The secret weapon is, of course, Oprah, the nationally adored talk-show host. She attracted a crowd estimated at almost 30,000 Sunday in Columbia, S.C., after campaigning with him Saturday in Iowa. “There are those who say it’s not his time, that he should wait his turn,” she told the crowd in Columbia. “Think about where you’d be in your life if you’d waited when people told you to.”
She added, too, a line that could build some fire under his campaign and attract disgruntled Independents, and perhaps even some Republican women: “I’m sick of politics as usual.” Much of the nation is. But it’s quite a feat to get from that declaration to mobilizing the turned-off segment and delivering them to a specific candidate. But I’m not one to underestimate Oprah. Clinton and Obama are neck-and-neck in Iowa, and she’s up in the 5-10 percentage point range in New Hampshire and South Carolina. That’s within the Oprah impact zone.
The nomination’s still Hillary’s to lose. She can beat Obama. But she can’t beat Oprah.
Single women could usher in big government
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Two trends bedevil America. One is taxes. The second, more important, is marriage.
Those who pay no taxes have no check on their appetite for services. If somebody else is paying, nothing’s unaffordable.
At the federal level, 41 percent of the U.S. population is totally outside the income tax system, according to the Washington-based Tax Foundation. Since 2000, the number of filers with no tax liability, zero, has increased from 29 million to 42 million in 2005. Of 132.6 million returns filed in 2005, only 90.6 million paid taxes. The rest got back all they’d paid in — and more.
The second and more important concern, largely because of its impact on children, is the rise of single-parent households. Over the past 25 years, the percentage has grown from a quarter to a third. In Georgia, 35 percent of children live in single-parent homes and 39.2 percent of births in 2004 were to unmarried women, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Almost 70 percent of black children, almost half of Hispanic and a quarter of white children are born to unmarried women.
The liberal polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research singled out unmarried women and their potential impact on future elections. What it found should chill the spines of those who wish to reverse, or even slow, the growth of government — not so much because of its cost, but because Big Government steals the initiative and enterprise and independence of its wards.
“Because of the often stark economic reality of a single-income family, they [unmarried women] support an active government that will give all Americans a chance to get ahead, not just the affluent,” the organization reported.
As the nation discovered decades ago with welfare policies that pushed men out of the lives of poor women, except for procreation, women who previously found security in marriage turned instead to government. As Greenberg Quinlan Rosner find, unmarried women are a rich vein to be mined by Democrats. From its findings:
• “Marital status is playing an increasingly defining role in elections. For the 2006 congressional elections, the ‘marriage gap’ was 32 points, far bigger than the gender gap, which was just 9 points. Among women, the marriage gap was an even bigger 36 points … unmarried women tend to vote like other unmarried women, regardless of other powerful demographic variables such as age, income and education.”
• “Unmarried women are easily the largest segment of the Democratic base — bigger than Hispanics and African Americans combined.” And the second most loyal, second only to blacks. They favor Democrats over Republicans by a 70-24 margin, and Hillary Clinton over Rudy Giuliani by 66-30.
• “From 1960 to 2006, the percentage of the voting age population that was unmarried grew from 27 to 45 percent … If this trend continues, the unmarried will be a majority of the population within 15 years.”
• Their top economic concern is health care. “This group strongly supports fundamental reform to provide universal coverage that can never be taken away.”
• “In total, there are over 53 million unmarried women of voting age, a number that dwarfs the percentage of seniors, people of color and even union members.” Of those who voted in 2006, two-thirds chose Democrats. Some 20 million, however, did not vote. That’s 41 percent of the unmarrieds. Among the married, it was 29 percent. But “2008 could be very different if progressives see the opportunity before them.” Unmarried women “emerge as the largest contributor to the Democratic vote in 2008.”
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner views them as the “Democrats’ evangelicals.” opining that “if progressives turn them out, unmarried women can be as important to Democrats in 2008 as evangelicals were to Republicans in 2004.”
Combine the two: fewer people who pay taxes and a growing bloc of women who rely on government for their financial security and their household’s well-being.
The challenge for the nation is to rebuild the traditional two-parent family — primarily for the sake of children, but also as a balance to more and bigger government.
• Jim Wooten is the associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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These issues will keep you talking
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Quarterback Michael Vick agrees to escrow $928,073 to care for the care and upkeep of 54 pit bulls. When my band of right-wingers take over, the same respect will be applied to children of unmarried adults. The rich — actor Goran Visnjic (Dr. Luka Kovac on ER), for example — will escrow. He’s married and has an adopted son, but has also acknowledged an 8-month-old child. No child should have to wait until entertainers are dead to identify their daddies. Unclaimed or unsupported children of the non-rich will be entitled to DNA samples from any male suspected of causing their creation — and an equal-share claim to their earnings and estates, however small.
• School choice advocate Glenn Delk, an Atlanta lawyer, urges the state to settle a school financing lawsuit brought by 51 local districts. They’d get the option of eliminating property taxes for schools altogether. In return, they’d agree to competition, with the state per-pupil grant following the child. My view is, though, that the state should never agree to settle any lawsuit that attempts to use the courts to make legislative decisions — especially those that urge judges to set executive and legislative branch spending priorities.
• Be all you can be: Join the Army. Or be anybody you want to be: Go to San Francisco. Starting next year, it’ll issue municipal identification cards to all residents, legally here or not. Residents also won’t be required to declare a gender.
• Wow! “Immigrants and their U.S.-born children account for 71 percent of the increase in the uninsured since 1989” and “virtually all of the national increase in public school enrollment over the last two decades,” reports the Center for Immigration Studies, an independent research group in Washington. Of the 953,000 immigrants in Georgia, 53 percent are illegals, the center estimates. We should quit using the uninsured as a measure of slippage in economic conditions.
• Quote of the Week: “We need a way to make [our ideas] public-proof,” says East Point Mayor Joseph Macon, responding to an assertion by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin that local politicians concerned about re-election are reluctant to propose “solutions” that voters won’t like. Two options here: Don’t propose dumb solutions. Or do, but keep voters in the dark.
• My mental health? Superb. As balanced as the Southern diet of beans, greens and cornbread. My colleagues? Hmmm. Let me check. Data from four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls finds that 58 percent of Republicans report their mental health as excellent, compared to 43 percent of independents and 38 percent of Democrats. Conservatism rooted in optimism is healthy.
• In the language of the judicial brotherhood and sisterhood, the Georgia Supreme Court’s rebuke of Judge Hilton Fuller — he’s the presiding judge in the Brian Nichols case — was deft but piercing. His courtroom responsibility, wrote Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, is “to maintain control of the proceedings and to ensure that neither side, whether by design or otherwise, is able to disrupt the prompt and orderly administration of justice.” Translation: Don’t let the defense run up the public’s tab in an effort to force the prosecution to abandon capital punishment. “Far more difficult and complex cases have been tried … without generating the … delay that has plagued this one.”
• Uh, yes, clarification would be beneficial. Such is an appeal from Attorney General Thurbert Baker to the Georgia Supreme Court on its decision preventing the state from taking the property of registered sex offenders by forcing them to move from homes they’ve bought. The AG interprets that to include renters. The ruling appeared to opine otherwise. Give it to us straight up.
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Stationing troops in Africa
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In recent weeks, the U.S. Defense Department created a new unified military command for Africa — presumably in recognition of the strategic importance of the continent and its natural resources. It previously was split among three, none of which had it as top priority.
The first mission was launched in early November when the USS Fort Henry arrived in Senegal’s capital of Dakar to begin a six-month training exercise for African naval forces around the Gulf of Guinea.
Still unresolved, though, is where the military command, called Africom, will be located. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and a top source of American oil, announced on Nov. 19 that it won’t host Africom, which is intended to protect America’s strategic interests and assist African nations with military training and conflict prevention. Some, however, are skeptical and express concern that positioning U.S. forces there could draw the continent deeper into the war against Islamo-fascism.
Given Africa’s history with exploitive colonial powers, the U.S. should be wary of deeper involvement there. Our interests are minimal. If nations there are harboring terrorists who threaten us, we should have the intelligence capacity to know and a regional military presence with surgical-strike capabilities. Otherwise, we should have no sizeable military presence on the continent.
Dirty dancing: Not at school.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The first-year superintendent of the school system in Argyle, Texas, has become something of a national figure for his stand in banning what would strike me as dirty dancing, something known as “grinding” or “freak dancing.”
The superintendent, Jason Ceyanes, 35, is accused by some parents of ruining an October homecoming dance at Argyle’s high school by insisting on a dress code and by banning the hip-hop inspired dance form. “This is not just shaking your booty,” Ceyanes told The Wall Street Journal. “This is pelvis-to-pelvis physical contact in the private areas …and then moving around.”
Ceyanes told The Dallas Morning News that “if you’re simulating sexual acts and you’re touching, you’re not creating an environment that’s conducive to learning… As we are defining who we are, we want to maintain the highest standards possible.”
Some students and parents are angry, attacking Ceyanes while publicizing aspects of his private life — that, for example, he has been divorced and was a father at 17. They insist the problem is a generation gap. After one student declared at a school meeting on the dispute that teens are dancing the only way they know how, Ceyanes appointed a deputy to recruit instructors from local dance studios to demonstrate acceptable dance forms for high school gatherings. Another school dance has been scheduled for this month.
Schools and school-sponsored functions should be places where the adults are in charge — and where they determine and enforce appropriate forms of dress and behavior. On the job, Ceyanes is what every school principal should be. Give him a raise and extend his contract.
Subprime mess: Facing consequences, moving on
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With the full year nearly gone, Congress returns to the serious business of 2008 presidential politics today. Eleven months into the year, Congress has passed one of 11 spending bills while politicking repeatedly with children’s health care, subprime loans and Iraqi withdrawal demands. It’s an unserious body, frivolous even, more determined to make points than policy.
The politicking over Democratic efforts to create and hugely expand a new health care entitlement into the middle class is likely to roll over into the new year, postponed to months where the debate better suits political timing. For now, the Dems who control Congress are satisfied to push the umpteenth unsuccessful effort to set a surrender timetable for Iraq.
On both the war and new entitlements, the Reid-Pelosi Democrats are overplaying their hands — an observation, not an appeal to do otherwise. On some important fronts, the failure of Congress to act is success for America.
A bill the House passed, with Republican support, to deal with subprime lending is an example. The bill, passed 291-127 by the House just before Thanksgiving, guarantees more difficulty for those with weak credit to qualify for mortgages in the future. Lenders would be required to make certain that potential borrowers have a “reasonable ability” to repay. Loan-originators, including lenders and brokers, would be prohibited from directing them to loans that have “predatory characteristics,” whatever that means, or for which they lack “a reasonable ability to repay.”
“It’s an awful bill, a terrible bill,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) before heading back to Washington. “I don’t think the Senate is going to take it up.”
Hope that he’s right. Should it pass, the consequences are clear. Lenders will raise standards to levels that unnecessarily exclude deserving borrowers. Why risk taking on a loan where a borrower has any chance in the world of defaulting — and then claiming it’s the lender’s fault because its agent should have known that a borrower with severe ingrown toenails and migraine headaches could not continue to work.
The result will be that taxpayers will become lenders to those who are not credit-worthy. Government will absorb the risk the marketplace now bears.
The fact is that lenders have already been taught a lesson this generation won’t forget — or repeat. The marketplace has brutalized all who touched subprime mortgages. Citigroup’s paying 11 percent for $7.5 billion the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is putting into this nation’s largest banking company, money it needed because of write-downs on its investments in subprime loans.
The irony here is that the nation’s smartest bankers are paying subprime interest because they couldn’t avoid the marketplace stampede — even though they thought they’d isolated their exposure by taking only the best slice of packaged loans. They’d also bought servicing rights to $45 billion in home loans when subprime lender ACC Capital Holdings closed in August. Now Citigroup’s writing down assets by up to $11 billion this quarter, followed by $6.5 billion.
The point is that the marketplace has dealt brutally and efficiently with an industry that invited fraud and speculation while failing to check borrower income. It should be noted, too, that the so-called teaser interest rates have not yet reset to higher levels — meaning that the foreclosures now are largely loans that were fraudulent or were to speculators looking to make a quick buck or to borrowers who never had the income to justify the mortgages they got.
Prospects are good, too, that within the next couple of weeks, lenders, borrowers and regulators will agree to relief, for some period at least, to credit-worthy borrowers with loans about to reset to higher interest rates.
That, combined with the lessons the marketplace has already taught, are sufficient.
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Should medical care be repaid?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You decide.
Deborah Shank, a Wal-Mart employee in Cape Girardieu, Mo., was seriously injured when the car she was driving was broad-sided by a big-rig truck. She suffered major brain trauma and was hospitalized for months. Her medical bills, paid by Wal-Mart’s health plan, approached half a million dollars.
The trucking company had a $1 million policy. Its insurance carrier paid her husband, Jim, $200,000. After legal fees, he collected $119.000. It paid Mrs. Shank $700,000 — or $417,477 after legal expenses and attorney fees. That sum was directed to a court-created trust for her future care. The accident ruined her life. She’s now in a nursing home with the bulk of her care paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.
All of this information was gathered and reported Nov. 20 by Vanessa Fuhrmans of The Wall Street Journal.
After the settlement, Wal-Mart’s health plan sued the Shanks seeking reimbursement for the $470,000 it had paid for her care. By virtue of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year, it’s clear that employers can recover money paid for medical expenses from settlements and awards when that’s one of the plan’s terms.
The question: Should Wal-Mart recover? As its CEO, what decision would you make in this and other instances — considering that the costs borne would result in higher premiums or less coverage for a worker making near minimum wage? What about Medicaid, the taxpayer-provided health care plan for the nation’s poor? Should it recover (which it’s not proposing to do here) when the person covered collects a large sum? And should the recovery come before or after the lawyers are paid?
My inclination is to support the Wal-Mart health care plan’s effort to seek at least partial recovery, though it should come from the entire $700,000 and not just her portion. The attorney’s claim should not be superior to the health care provider’s.
You decide.
Grady ‘ransom’ merits healthy dose of scorn
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Any doubt that those who run Grady Memorial Hospital exist in la-la land was erased this week with a most astounding document agreeing to avoid suffocating its hostage — itself — if the business community and those who run Georgia pay a recurring ransom.
The governor reacted badly. “I have no intention of signing an unenforceable document that seeks to bind the state to a specific, annual appropriation,” said he.
The Speaker of the House — the state official farthest out on the Grady limb — received the news unsympathetically. “Today’s attempt by the board of Grady Hospital to control the Legislature is simply unacceptable.”
The lieutenant governor looked askance, too, declaring that state government’s Big Three “are not going to be bound by a governmental authority.”
The President Pro Tem of the Georgia State Senate, Eric Johnson of Savannah, upon receiving news of the hostage-holders’ demand that state leaders agree to fork over $30 million annually or it would hold its breath until it flat-out expired, inquired thoughtfully: “They didn’t require us to fund an ice cream cone for every patient?”
Picture this: Except for the brief three-year tenure of Dr. Andrew Agwunobi, who left this year for a private-sector job in California, Grady has been adrift for decades, always on the brink of financial disaster whether providing charity care, Medicare, PeachCare, Medicaid or private-paid.
Its problems, as the board resolution passed this week sees it, are the “result of decreasing public funds, adverse reimbursement policies and other factors beyond the control of the [Fulton-DeKalb Hospital] Authority.” As a consequence, “the Authority has suffered severe financial hardships and deficits in recent years that have threatened the system’s ability to continue to provide high-quality medical services …” to “increasing indigent and charity populations” in Fulton, DeKalb “and surrounding areas” in the face of “decreasing public funds.”
That is really quite an astounding declaration, replete with a heretofore unasserted responsibility to be the “primary provider of health care for the indigent and uninsured” in areas outside Fulton and DeKalb.
Please note that Georgia has not yet approved the medical use of marijuana — and, consequently, nobody in a health care environment should be in fantasyland, as this board clearly was as it resolved that:
• “No later than, and as a condition precedent to [turning day-to-day operations over to a management company], representatives of the business, charitable and philanthropic communities shall provide a written commitment for funds in the amount of not less than $200 million.”
• Before acting to save itself, “certain business and philanthropic leaders of the Atlanta community” will commit in writing to conduct a campaign “on a good faith, best effort basis” to raise an additional $100 million.
• Before this creation of the state agrees to do anything responsible to save itself — i.e., hire management help — “the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives each shall have provided written confirmation of their intent to support, in addition to amounts currently received from the State of Georgia for the benefit of the System,” not less than $30 million annually plus “necessary budgetary measures for the implementation and funding of the Statewide Trauma Network, which would provide additional financial support for the System,” and higher appropriated sums for medical education.
Now, keep in mind the top dog on the Grady board is State Rep. Pam Stephenson (D-Atlanta). Before coming to the General Assembly, she headed the state’s health planning division. In each capacity, as legislator and as agency head, she knows politics and process.
To allow her board to make blindly stupid demands on the top three officials of Georgia government — demands, incidentally, that would require them to usurp the authority of the entire General Assembly — is breathtaking. In more than 30 years of reading public documents, this is the most bizarre.
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