Scrapbook
Scrapbook What the Kemp Tax Commission Won't Say The final report of the Kemp commission-the tax reform panel appointed by Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole-was supposed to be unveiled in Washington last...
...The Reading List Ah, Petruschka, this week the Reading List goes for a dance in the snow...
...During the meeting, Clinton surprised and delighted the three men by offering to let them work out a transfer of Medicaid to the states that he can sign...
...So what's the commission going to say...
...The result...
...In his annual State of the State speech last week, he proposed a school-voucher program that would pay tuition in public, private, and religious schools for pupils currently enrolled in the state's worst performing schools...
...Stop Me Before I Do Something Good During the balanced-budget stalemate, Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole have often wistfully said they just wish they could get Bill Clinton alone for a few hours because they were sure they could wrap up the whole business among themselves...
...Both are, needless to say, under legal attack from the teachers' unions and the ACLU...
...Wilson argued that "no child should be trapped in these failing schools because their parents can't afford an alternative...
...He should stop...
...Congress to raise the tax rate...
...Middle-class parents who had scraped and saved to move to neighborhoods with good public schools were unwilling to throw everything up for grabs with some sort of across-the-board choice program...
...and samples of your work to: Art Director, The Weekly Standard, 1150 17th St., NW...
...Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton...
...School Choice is Back...
...Now mostly forgotten, London was the most popular American writer in the first two decades of the 20th century...
...Case in point: Dole and Gingrich arranged for a meeting last November about Medicaid between Clinton and three governors-Republicans Engler of Michigan and Leavitt of Utah and Colorado Democrat Roy Romer...
...His first, shortest, and possibly greatest piece of writing, the unforgettable portrait of a "good day" in the Gulag-below zero temperatures, harsh treatment, but a little more bread and soup than usual and some pleasant conversation...
...State aid would simply be transferred from one public school to another if parents wished to have their child switch schools and remain in the public education system...
...TA=targeted appropriation...
...Bob Dole, Take Note An unlikely ally for those who worry that Washington policy wonks make it impossible for ordinary people to understand politics: John Kasich, the chairman of Wonk Central-i.e., the House budget committee...
...With the overwhelming defeat of California's ambitious school-voucher initiative in November 1993, it became clear that progress toward school choice would have to occur incrementally...
...And so an opportunity for meaningful entitlement reform was lost...
...nobody poor would pay at the same rate as, say, Steve Forbes...
...Parents who wished to transfer their children to private nonsectarian or religious schools would be eligible for as much as $4,500 for each pupil...
...But snow stranded Jack Kemp on the ski slopes of Vail, and so the event was held up, maybe until this week...
...Notice The Weekly Standard is looking for an assistant art director, and since we don't have a classified section, we thought we would mention it here...
...Call of the Wild, written from the perspective of an Alaskan sled dog named Rover, is his best novel...
...This exemption would take the form of a floor below which no taxes would be paid...
...Dole and Gingrich wanted to avoid specifics, with both explicitly following the principle that it's foolhardy to put forward a program ripe for attack before the intellectual groundwork has been laid for the general public...
...Please do not call about the job...
...The job requires proficiency with Macintosh computers, the ability to use a scanner, and familiarity with the design programs QuarkXPress, Photoshop, and Freehand...
...Kasich fears that the argot he calls "Washington-ese" turns important political battles into an incomprehensible swamp...
...Wilson's plan would make students eligible if they attend schools that score in the bottom 5 percent of public schools on national standardized tests...
...Scrapbook What the Kemp Tax Commission Won't Say The final report of the Kemp commission-the tax reform panel appointed by Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole-was supposed to be unveiled in Washington last week with all three big shots present...
...The next day, Panetta called Romer and told his fellow Democrat, whoa there: The president didn't mean what he said...
...It's what it won't say that's more interesting...
...Herewith, some works featuring les neiges d'antan: Call of the Wild, by Jack London...
...OMB=Office of Management and Budget...
...rather, send a r?sum...
...This is the way Bob Dole talks when he tries to describe what's going on with the budget...
...He has even come up with what he considers the ultimate Washington-ese sentence: "When the CBO disagrees with the OMB over the BLS estimate of CPI and GDP, then we'll be forced to pass a TA after the reconciliation bill affecting FY '96 by UC...
...This is Wharton's tenderest and most hauntingly gloomy book-set, for once, not in the fashionable drawing rooms of New York and the Continent but in the snows of western Massachusetts...
...Take that, Alan Greenspan...
...The White House doesn't want to let that happen, perhaps because chief of staff Leon Panetta and others think Gingrich and Dole are onto something...
...And the document urges a legislative guarantee long sought by conservative tax protesters: "These changes, once in place, should be sealed with a guarantee of long-term stability requiring a supermajority vote of the U.S...
...Deductibility of payroll taxes is urged as an additional sweetener for working people...
...Dole, who'll have to defend the commission's report on the hustings, was more adamant on the matter than Gingrich...
...That would ensure the tax system would still be progressive...
...Kemp's introduction to the report is called "Setting the Eagle Free," and he uses it as an opportunity to make a wildly heterodox claim about the size and strength of the American economy: "An economic growth rate of 2.5 percent is unacceptable to the American people...
...BLS=Bureau of Labor Statistics...
...A supply-side document that names no specific rates anywhere but insists that the government should "tax income once at a single low rate, with a generous exemption...
...UC=unanimous consent...
...Remember: Every Reading List now contains a deliberate error in search of correction by an alert reader...
...Now we can look forward to the imaginative arguments of the education establishment defending the proposition that parents shouldn't be helped to liberate their kids from schools that are manifestly failing-just because it might inconvenience those whose incompetence and cynicism have made these reforms necessary...
...One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...Now California governor Pete Wilson has joined the parade...
...Kemp wanted to name a specific flat-tax rate that would be a starting point for future discussions and could be thought of as "the Kemp plan...
...The so-called "block-granting" of Medicaid is one of the centerpieces of the Republican budget plan...
...The pay is modest, but you do get to spend quality time with a happy band of right-wing maniacs...
...But the case for choice for parents whose kids are in miserable public schools has always been a winner, and Governors Thompson of Wisconsin and Voinovich of Ohio were able to move ahead with targeted choice programs for low-income students in Milwaukee and Cleveland...
...CBO=Congressional Budget Office...
Vol. 1 • January 1996 • No. 18
