What Do We Want Right Now?
Shull, Leon & Santiestevan, Stina
LEGISLATION AS A WAY to the Good Society is in bad repute, a passage beset with pitfalls and infested with outlaws. Jefferson once said, "No good measure was ever proposed which if duly...
...There are many steps to be taken that do not involve legislation...
...There is widespread agreement that only through a system of national health insurance can we approach a solution...
...each year we discard 48 billion cans, 26 billion bottles, 30 million tons of paper, 4 million tons of plastics, and 100 million rubber tires...
...Herbert Gans, professor of sociology at MIT, lucidly presented this idea before the Senate Finance Committee during its 1970 hearings on welfare reform...
...citizens living abroad get preferential income tax treatment...
...We let the conservatives, the businessmen, and the influence peddlers deal with the administrative bodies that take over after legislation is passed—and then we may cease even to think of it as good legislation...
...U.S...
...Whether a combination of national health insurance, group practice, and Garfield's multiphasic screening, or some other organization of medical resources is to provide the answer the nation and the medical community will have to determine...
...housing is a sick industry...
...It should: (1) Establish a national planning-anddevelopment agency, with authority and funds to articulate development policy and to acquire and develop land in any area where needs are not being met by either private enterprise or local public bodies...
...Granted their inadequacies, these laws have had enormous effects on our society...
...it should be raised to $2.50 and in creased regularly thereafter, in response to both cost-of-living increases and the principle of equitable income, which we discussed above...
...Congress should set effective standards for the water-aging properties, biodegradability, toxicity, and health effects of detergents, and the government should guarantee sufficient capital for construction of water treatment plants—not only full funding for currently authorized programs but a significant increase in federal funds, to the tune of an estimated $40 billion over the next six years...
...agreement to limit nuclear forces, permitting further defense reductions...
...It is time we considered a further step...
...It should provide that no one be displaced unless relocation housing is available at a cost within 20 percent of his income and in a location of his choice...
...Because our problems are monstrous, it is understandably easy to forget the progress that has been made...
...The commission would administer the nation's economic conversion program...
...We cannot afford to throw away used houses as we throw away old washing machines and auto tires...
...And if the industrialized nations were to abandon growth it would be at the expense of the underdeveloped nations, as well as their own poor...
...Legislation phasing ownership of rental units to tenants and to the community should be introduced, to begin a national dialogue through which the nation can examine housing problems and proposals...
...The strength of the military-industrial complex is rooted in the nation's economic dependence on defense work...
...We may be forced to make some changes in the way we live if we are to survive, but a more cheerful viewpoint holds that technology can get us out of the mess it has gotten us into if we use it properly, and that we now have the technology necessary to eliminate very nearly all of our major pollutants, if we are willing to pay the bill, estimated by U.S...
...To some extent the existing comprehensive group plans offering prepaid care—CHA in Detroit, GHA in Washington, HIP in New York, Kaiser on the West Coast—provide models, combining relative economy and high quality care...
...Whole lakes and rivers are dead, and the margins of the oceans are dying, in various parts of the world, of industrial wastes, oil spills, pesticides, fertilizers, sewage, detergents...
...Here, too, the Administration should be able to get its proposals to the floor...
...From 1960 to 1965 their buying power went up 9 percent...
...Take water...
...Congress especially should discourage suburban barriers to lowand moderate-income housing...
...Our cities are close to uninhabitable...
...We declared that we wanted a strong labor movement and would support it...
...Yet each represented something new and somewhat better in American life...
...The bill proposes the establishment of a Health Security Trust Fund, with 40 percent coming from general revenues, 35 percent coming from a 3.5 percent payroll tax, and 25 percent coming from a 2.1 percent tax on income up to $15,000 a year...
...but they would bring justice and equity to this important part of our national system, and that would be no mean accomplishment...
...We can create a participatory democracy by using the only instrument a complex, huge nation can use—the ballot box...
...And so, despite textbook mythology, the American tax system is sadly regressive, falling with a fine display of impartiality on the poor and on the rich...
...A period of inflation began...
...Congress should establish a valid national air and water quality policy and require cities and industries to use the most advanced and efficient methods to reduce pollution...
...enacted by Congress in 1970, and vetoed by President Nixon: a program under which the federal government would provide most of the money LEON SHULL AND ST11VA SANTIESTEVAN to enable public agencies to hire extra workers in health, housing, education, neighborhood improvement, consumer protection, rural development, mass transit, etc...
...Pollution levels must be set by the federal government, and standards—based on what the WHAT DO WE WANT RIGHT NOW...
...Beyond family assistance, which is aimed at making most families independent, there is need for programs to assist those who truly cannot work and who will therefore always be at the bottom of the income ladder: legal LEON SHULL AND STINA SANTIESTEVAN service centers, federally financed...
...communicable disease control...
...The funds would be used (1) to finance the implementation of conversion plans and (2) to pay benefits to workers adversely affected by declining defense production...
...While he sees his plan working well with the prepaid groups, he believes it can work with private physicians as well, and suggests that local medical societies sponsor health testing and health care services for patients of the private practitioners...
...These reforms and changes would not solve the fiscal problems of the nation—far from it...
...Under normal LEON SHULL AND STINA SANTIESTEVAN full-employment conditions and assuming an annual 2 percent price inflation, Charles Schultze estimates that the money value of the nation's income will grow by 6-7 percent annually, an increase of $55 to $65 billion a year during the next decade...
...The record is stored permanently by the computer as part of a growing health profile of every individual...
...Thus, one possible explanation for the fact that the pathology associated with poverty has not declined is that the number of people whose income places them so far below everyone else has not declined...
...Liberals who favor an economic growth policy to provide full employment and end poverty appear to be on a collision course with at least some of the environmentalists who blame runaway technology for our ecological problems...
...John Kenneth Galbraith THE NATIONAL BUDGET and the government's way of raising and spending money express the real national purpose...
...ranks 13th in infant mortality, 7th in maternal mortality, 18th in life expectancy for men, 8th in physicians per population, and so on and on...
...regional heart, cancer, stroke, and kidney programs...
...But the fee must be eliminated, for it discourages preventive care, and with its elimination Garfield predicts an uncontrolled flood of all kinds of patients at the point of entry: the doctor's office...
...Five percent of the total would be put into a Resources Development Fund...
...training...
...too much emphasis is placed on expensive hospital-based treatment and not enough on preventive and ambulatory care...
...News and World Report as over $70 billion for the next five years...
...no one anywhere should work at less than the minimum wage, and disability pay, unemployment compensation, and retirement pay likewise should not fall below the minimum wage...
...help for migrant workers...
...For many years, unfair as we have known the tax system to be, we have supposed, nevertheless, that the system was at least based on the ability-to-pay principle...
...How is our society to find the leadership and provide the money—the bare-bone essentials for social problem-solving...
...There is also need to express the national purpose in institutional reform in Congress itself...
...The congressional seniority system tends to retain in power those least interested in reform...
...women—are denied equal rights and justice before the law...
...Two further arguments can be produced to support a policy of controlled growth instead of no growth...
...Writing in the Scientific American, Sidney R. Garfield, director of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, has proposed that the medical industry take several further steps...
...No one could deny that it is cruel to expect the poor to pay taxes at the same rate as the rich...
...The Nixon administration's family assistance program represents a historic breakthrough in concept, despite inadequacies: acceptance of a guaranteed income, federal standards and federal responsibility, and the incorporation of financial incentives to work...
...Subsidies to high-income families who buy homes should be ended...
...We push for programs in ecology, some of which are inconsistent with others, because we do not as yet understand the ecology of our planet...
...It should provide funds to rebuild and rehabilitate inner cities...
...hospitals, schools, neighborhoods would benefit from the services these workers would perform— services desperately needed...
...The right to bring class action suits in court would be a long step, too, toward justice for consumers...
...During certain periods in American history legislation has flowered profusely—the early New Deal years were such a time...
...Now, it is true that it is easier to reduce than to increase taxes, and certainly money is not the entire answer...
...Workers are consumers, and all consumers —rich and poor—suffer from unsafe products, badly made products, poor repair work, deceptive labeling and packaging, power shortages, and the like...
...But of the $1.46 billion authorized by the 91st Congress to carry out these basic health programs, the Nixon administration has requested only $620 million, or 42 percent, in actual appropriations...
...Liberals and conservatives alike buy these conventional wisdoms...
...The agency should be given the task of developing long-range plans to meet the nation's power needs, taking into consideration such factors as air and water pollution, disposal of spent fuels, and location of plants, dams, and transmission lines...
...Senator George McGovern (D.–S.D...
...Public expenditures, therefore, can also rise—from $16 to $20 billion a year...
...Fully 13 million persons are not covered by the law—including many state and local government employees, workers in small retail trades, domestic workers, and most farm workers...
...We must leave in the hands of people, organized in their own communities, some decision-making about their own lives...
...Homeowners get deductions for property taxes and interest on mortgages—a credit not allowed renters...
...Those of us who are incapable of accepting doom and reject revolution are challenged to produce alternatives...
...food cooperatives, to return middleman profits to consumers...
...Would the neighborhood of Blushing Heights prefer its shaggy trees and lessthanideal dwellings to the disruptive grandeur of urban renewal...
...a shortage of hospital beds, physicians, nurses and other health personnel is exacerbated by our failure to make proper use of the resources we have...
...U.S...
...To have clean air we must first stop mixing it with garbage—and then we must be sure that enough green plants remain on the surface of the earth to preserve the balance between red and green life...
...It is not only a question of increasing taxes, although taxes should be increased...
...The entire tax system should be made equitable...
...Why...
...Our environment is polluted, but despite a river of rhetoric, little is being done...
...Each of our programs is oversold, each raises impossible expectations, and so we build into them disappointment and cynicism...
...Other nations should help Brazil pay for the preservation of the Matto Grosso...
...Each new law that strikes with any degree of success at a fundamental flaws in society raises vast new problems we had not foreseen...
...In gas and oil mining it was $7,296...
...The amount of phantom farm tax losses which any corporation or individual can apply against other income should be severely limited, to approximately $10,000 a year...
...Few people have to pay taxes on estates or gifts, so that more than 75 percent of this wealth escapes taxation...
...The Nation's Health HEALTH CARE AS A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT is a comparatively new idea, only now becoming widely accepted...
...Wealthy gentlemen farmers are permitted to use paper losses from farming sideline operations to shelter farm income from other sources...
...It should be structured so as to increase the productivity of highly skilled physicians, dentists, et al., encouraging teamwork, organized patient care, and preventive medicine through regular checkups, mental health resources, child care, and the like...
...The Economy THE STABILITY THAT CHARACTERIZED the period from 1961 to 1965 was ended by the expansion of the Vietnam war...
...has estimated a future job loss—stemming from all causes—of over 5 million, on top of the 5-6 percent of the population already out of work...
...Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Council of Economic Advisers, and business and labor...
...But our crisis is more than a matter of pollution...
...At the same time we can make our political system more sensitive and responsive to the needs of the people...
...they do not own extraction industries, make investments, enjoy dividends, or own homes...
...Congress, through a joint committee, before which representatives of both the Justice Department and the public would be heard, should review these huge corporations to determine their social, political, and economic roles...
...aid to medical libraries...
...That law included a goal of 26 million new or rehabilitated units in 10 years, 6 million of them for low- and middle-income families...
...And if we seriously doubt their significance, let us imagine what our lives would be like today without these laws...
...Almost no one had insurance against dental expenses...
...But it can be accomplished...
...During the transition period the contractor could borrow back his impounded profits to finance his new ventures...
...we cannot go back to 19th-century ways...
...By environment we mean here the total environment in which people live, and so we consider housing, streets and neighborhoods, transportation, land use, and planning as components of the problem, as well as more familiar concerns: air and water, big and little parks and recreation areas, forest, wildlife, wilderness, wild rivers, shorelines, wetlands...
...We must bring the leaders of Congress closer to the political movements they pretend today to represent...
...Conclusion "We've tried everything else, now let's try money...
...Environment: The Highest Priority THE DOOMSAYERS PREDICT WE can't do it, and the optimists say we can if we want to, but both agree that the struggle to save the environment is the struggle to save mankind itself...
...the Matto Grosso in Brazil, virgin forest, presently being destroyed to provide grazing...
...The laws of the New Deal and the Great Society did not accomplish all that we should have liked to achieve...
...The latter in their anger and impatience want society to pay a terrible price—greater than any supposed benefits they might bring...
...The McGovern bill would require that 12.5 percent of each contractor's profits from defense and space work be put into a conversion reserve and held in trust by the commission...
...Like consumer problems, housing problems and education problems beset the just and the unjust, the rich and the poor, but their impact is always greater for the poor— because their options are curtailed...
...grants to schools of public health...
...The most important gain we could make in the seventies would be a willingness among politicians to propose and approve the tax programs necessary to achieve a just society...
...In fact, their posiiton has not really changed in the last generation, even though for many people those years brought about the greatest increase in affluence in American history...
...States has a history of good housing laws, however, beginning with laws to stimulate mortgage credit and provide public housing designed in the thirties and including the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, which provided comprehensive legislation to meet the housing crisis...
...The law should be amended to cover all workers...
...These workers and their families live on the edge of poverty, though not counted among the poor...
...It should promote uniform and realistic building codes that permit technological innovations...
...Many of our public schools—some would say most—have all the flexibility and compassion of a crowded prison...
...This fact in itself, as demonstrated by the last so-called tax reform law, represents a hazard...
...These groups operate on the premise that it is cheaper to keep people well than to cure them when sick...
...Amounts of gifts or estates which can be passed tax-free between the generations should be reduced by setting an individual lifetime limit of perhaps $50,000 which may be received through gifts or estates without taxation...
...a national housing-loan bank, to insure housing loans during tight money periods, to provide low interest loans, and to lend money to help establish cooperatives among the poor...
...Deescalation and withdrawal from Vietnam will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs—civilian and military—within government and the private sector as well...
...One reason is the weakness of the American party system as an instrument of political purpose...
...Public Health Service tells us that the nation faces shortage of health personnel with 481,000 spots unfilled, including 48,000 doctors, 17,000 dentists, 150,000 nurses, 105,000 environmental health specialists, and 161,000 others...
...In 1947, 19 percent of Americans earned less than half the median income...
...In theory our tax system has been considered progressive...
...Instead of a no-growth policy, Stanley Johnson proposes the adoption of the Arusha principle—enunciated at the 1961 Arusha Conference, which held that if African wildlife, for example, is a world resource, then the world should help pay for its preservation...
...Mich...
...Both local and national housing goals probably ought to be set and reviewed each year...
...No one can deny that it is unfair that the wage earner must pay his full tax while those who receive their incomes from profits, interest, capital gains, and special investments should manage to avoid paying taxes on large parts of their incomes...
...And, according to Group LEON SHULL AND STINA SANTIESTEVAN Health and Welfare News, in 1968 one-third of the under-65 population had no insurance that paid for in-hospital medical expenses, and one-half had no insurance covering X-ray and laboratory examinations not performed in a hospital...
...To some, these proposals may not seem very exciting...
...in 1957, 20 percent...
...Even a few years earlier these accomplishments would have been impossible...
...Jefferson once said, "No good measure was ever proposed which if duly pursued failed to prevail in the end...
...in 1967, 18.7 percent...
...We also must improve unemployment compensation so that it provides more money for a longer time, and extend its benefits during periods of sharp recession—again, not only to reduce the impact of economic disaster on the individual family but to reduce the impact of personal disaster on the community at large...
...Our present providers of health insurance leave 25 million citizens with no health insurance at all...
...Though the legislative process is the chief expression of national purpose in this country, it can require an age for an idea to ripen into a proposal and a proposal to become law...
...Our programs will not win to the beat of drums, the whine of bullets, or the whirl of rhetoric...
...Congress should reduce the general level of interest rates on indebtedness for publicly assisted housing...
...By 1980 the figure will nearly double...
...Working women are paid some 50 percent of what men are paid for comparable work...
...the Administration's proposal calls for less...
...We may have to learn that to achieve the good life in general we must do without some of the particulars...
...This can give the nation a diversity, healthy competition, and satisfactions missing in a society where those who live in it participate so little in making its decisions...
...A far more serious limitation is the lack of full funding by Congress...
...Oil, gas, and mineral extraction industries get preferential treatment...
...Contractors failing to file conversion plans might have up to 15 percent of any payments owed them withheld by the government...
...And the terrible war in Vietnam goes on...
...Our task now, however, is to set forth the major problems susceptible in some measure to legislative solutions and the laws we ought to pass so as to begin to solve these problems...
...OEO's poverty cut-off point in 1970 was $3,300...
...Beyond an increase in amounts, the program should provide for an upward adjustment in geographical areas of high prices and for automatic adjustments for cost-of-living increases...
...We can assume that the reason so many Americans fail to vote is an understandable lack of faith in the effectiveness of their votes...
...It should guarantee residents of areas slated for urban renewal or development the control of those programs and options to the land...
...But it is equally clear that not a single major problem this nation faces can be solved without money...
...Congress must require the use of reusable or degradable containers as soon as technically feasible...
...Congressional scrutiny of military programs will continue to reduce spending in defense industries...
...Congress must end production and use of the chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, which include DDT, Dieldrin, and Lindane, and the inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus compound fertilizers...
...the use of insecticides, an important element in the Green Revolution's success in feeding people...
...Johnson also asks for basic new research into the Ice Box Effect, the Greenhouse Effect, and other worldwide effects of pollution...
...A much larger share of our wealth could be used for social purposes and the living standards for the affluent could still rise within reasonable limits...
...The New Deal brought about basic changes in national attitudes which we now take for granted...
...As time goes on new problems will arise...
...effort, it is vitally important that the scientists of the world keep in close touch with one another...
...The average daily cost of hospitalization in the U.S...
...the conversion of game reserves into agricultural settlements...
...Income for All—Guaranteed Despite extraordinary national affluence, U.S...
...Our only alternative to totalitarianism is a functioning democracy...
...Government research and development programs must be put to the task of finding ways to neutralize, dispose of, and recycle all wastes...
...It held steady until 1969, but in the past year that buying power has dropped over 1 percent and is still declining...
...It would compensate individual providers of health services directly, on a fee-for-service or other elective basis...
...The Nixon administration's efforts to deal with this inflation then produced what was unmistakably a recession...
...Changes also are needed in the operation of the House Democratic and Republican caucuses, especially in the selection of committee chairmen and members...
...In 1969 this equivalent figure for a four-member nonfarm family would have been $5,659, for example...
...The automobile presently produces up to 92 percent of air pollution in cities...
...Nevertheless, for this "nonsystem" of health care Americans pay more—an average of $300 each in 1969—than the citizens of any other country...
...It covers most of the earth but we will never have more of it than we have now...
...We can no longer afford a situation that makes it almost impossible to pass legislation that is desperately needed...
...In 1970 the Democratic Study Group reported that the 48 million nonsupervisory workers in private, nonfarm employment were suffering for the first time since 1960 a significant loss in buying power...
...As we learn more, we may find it necessary to change our techniques and perhaps even our goals, but until we do possess more information, there are many things we can do legislatively...
...deductions of interest and property taxes should be limited...
...In the Senate only 51 members should be required to end a filibuster...
...and so forth...
...Furthermore, those who devise good legis lation and push for its passage—liberals especially— do not know how to deal with the arthritic bureaucracies that set in...
...The poor, however, do not make any capital gains or receive any profits...
...Congress must involve itself with these difficult problems...
...We adopt Medicare without really understanding what is entailed in providing health services to 20 million aged persons...
...Johnson cites a substantial list of current conflicts between environmentalists and economists: the proposed hydroelectric scheme at the Murchison Falls in Uganda, a project that will have far-reaching effects on the wildlife of the area—and possibly on Uganda's tourist industry...
...Senator McGovern and others are proposing the creation of a National Economic Conversion Commission, to include representatives from the Cabinet, NASA, AEC, the WHAT DO WE WANT RIGHT NOW...
...As late as World War II the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 would have been unthinkable...
...Crime—whimsical, petty, terrorist, organized—is a growing part of the American way...
...Close to two-thirds had no insurance against the cost of prescribed drugs...
...We also must face the growing danger inherent in increased centralization of economic power—the conglomerates...
...With significant bipartisan support, Congress has extended 10 basic health programs enacted during the Kennedy–Johnson years: hospital construction and modernization...
...Other measures have been enacted to cool overheated and support sagging economies...
...A construction worker who worked 42 weeks took home $6,940, a worker in wholesale or retail goods $4,940...
...We would urge further that this nation begin to give serious consideration to a limitation on inherited wealth...
...The 5,200 towns and cities where military projects are presently concentrated will feel the impact—in economic depression, declining business opportunity, declining tax bases, and unemployment...
...Even if the Administration were to request and receive full appropriations for the programs Congress has approved, we would not have solved our basic health care problems...
...Those earning over $50,000 pay approximately 45 percent of their income into taxes...
...Increasingly we suffer lung cancer, heart disease, respiratory ailments...
...A plan to upgrade the skills of unskilled workers would be included, with the government providing perhaps 90 percent of education and training costs to employers who participate...
...We devised social security, unemployment insurance, workmen's compensation—all measures designed to soften the impact of disaster, and we accepted deficit financing as a way of controlling the economy...
...Gans said that although incomes had risen for everyone, including the poor, the poor were as far behind the average American family as ever...
...After a contractor has converted to civilian production, he would be permitted to reclaim all his remaining funds —with interest and free of taxes...
...All other gifts and estates should be taxed, including the appreciation of assets whether realized or not upon date of transfer...
...the poorest 20 percent of the population still receive only 5 percent of the wealth...
...Women constitute a large part of the labor force, and of these working women, a large and significant number are heads of families...
...It was, alas, never implemented...
...Finally, we must devise and apply economic conversion plans for defense and aerospace industries...
...collected in federal taxes, not counting what might be wrung out of estate and gift taxes...
...WHAT DO WE WANT RIGHT NOW...
...To control inflation, we must increase productivity and the supply of goods and services, through manpower training, housing stimulators, sales of government stockpiles, adjusted government purchases, a suspension of tariffs and quotas in areas of rapid price increases, reduced military spending, wage and price guidelines—and selective wage and price controls if they prove to be necessary...
...Recently the newspapers have carried stories about millionaires who manage through tax loopholes to escape the tax bite entirely...
...The commercial maritime vessel industry gets a 100 percent investment tax credit...
...In the U.S...
...National health insurance should be made a part of the national social insurance system, meeting the total health needs of all U.S...
...This idea has been growing for nearly 30 years—ever since Congressman John Dingell, Sr., introduced the first national health insurance bill in Congress in 1943...
...Some have prophesized doom, and some have sought revolution—the school of thought that holds that it-has-to-get-worsebeforeit-can-get-better...
...The quality of our air should not be determined by what the inherently polluting internal combustion engine can or cannot do...
...Supporters of the idea say it would motivate defense contractors to develop conversion plans...
...they do not have rich, aged relatives...
...Those who earn between $2,000 and $50,000 pay out about 30 percent of their incomes in taxes...
...Our finite quantity of air is daily polluted with gases and solids, from cars and trucks, factories, incinerators, power companies, furnaces...
...All important votes should be record votes...
...Great loopholes remain to assist the affluent, loopholes effectively denied the poor: • Capital gains and profits are taxed at rates lower than income from wages...
...Schultze estimates that by 1974 the annual fiscal dividend, over and above what we are spending today, can amount to some $40 billion, and if in fact the power of the military-industrial complex is reduced this can be even greater...
...The inability of our political parties to exercise any form of discipline prevents them from playing a role in the development of programmatic legislation...
...All special allowances for oil, gas, mineral, and other extraction industries should be ended...
...Perhaps we need a Department of Problem Identification, or a Joint Senate–House Committee on the Identification of National Priorities...
...We must put to use—not waste—the technology, skills, and capital goods, which a decline in defense contracts will free...
...poor are anulled daily...
...It may be, as some have said, that those who worship the growth of the gross national product must eventually confront those determined to restore and preserve the natural environment...
...the rights of the WHAT DO WE WANT RIGHT NOW...
...Further, Congress should make possible open land acquisition and land banking in suburban communities so that land will be available for public purposes...
...Income from state and local government bonds is not taxable...
...About 75 percent of our national income now goes to private consumers and business firms, allowing some 6-7 percent of the government's income to be transferred back to individuals to use as they wish...
...Perhaps we will determine that we can tolerate some pests better than some pesticides...
...Using primarily paraprofessional workers in the intake process in providing health care, and to a considerable extent with those requiring maintenance care, Garfield estimates Kaiser will be able to save 50 percent of the doctor's time and so use his skills more efficiently in the service of a much greater number of patients...
...But if duly pursued, such programs can begin to make the difference between a country that understands and responds to its problems and one that is doomed, at best, to mediocrity and decay...
...We develop civil rights programs without perceiving the true depths of the rage and the desperate needs of our minorities...
...In the same year the average take-home pay for a production or maintenance worker in manufacturing was $6,024...
...The freedom of American candidates from party domination, healthy enough in some respects, means that legislators cannot be pressured by their parties into supporting legislation—in fact, such pressure is often considered bad form in this country...
...The Employment Act of 1946—a landmark in social legislation—had provided directions for achieving and sustaining high levels of employment, income, and production...
...As a nation we declared then that unemployment and its miseries are usually the product not of individual failure but of social failure, and that society has an obligation to its victims...
...A new merger law is needed, applying special legal standards to very large mergers and requiring that before a large merger is permitted, the Federal Trade Commission must find that the proposed corporation would not substantially lessen competition, and that the merger would be generally in the public interest...
...Simply paying working women equitably would take many families out of the poverty category...
...We are a long way from achieving even an approximation of equality for all our citizens...
...We may have to learn to reuse materials rather than turn the entire nation into a vast dump...
...Pollution control standards must be properly drafted, kept up-to-date, vigorously enforced, and supported by sanctions when violated: nonreimbursable fines, suspensions, rechartering of corporations, required disclosure of violations in company promotional materials, and more severe criminal penalties...
...The space program, too, is being cut back, and hopefully the arms limitation talks will produce a U.S.–U.S.S.R...
...all suggest ways to deal with the Nixon administration's recession/inflation...
...The poor simply need money, but beyond this there is another fact: relative deprivation or economic inequality...
...Adoption of the Health Security Program, introduced in 1970 by Senator Edward Kennedy, would be a giant step in that direction...
...Traditionally, he says, it is the patient who decides when he needs care...
...PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE as an economic way of life must end...
...No such willingness has been demonstrated...
...Unfortunately, the facts are otherwise...
...Perhaps we will have to restrict the uses of the automobile...
...There is no economic reason why a larger share of the private sector's 75 percent of national income cannot be made available for social purposes...
...The Brookings Institution tells us that personal and corporate income taxes have been cut five times since the Korean war, in 1954, 1962, 1964, 1969, and 1971— when the President promulgated a $4 billion business tax reduction through liberalized depreciation rules...
...Add to their ranks those temporarily laid off or underemployed, the aged, workers who become seriously injured or ill, most women workers, and most minority workers, and you have a very large and significant segment of the U.S...
...Now 27 states have nuclear energy plants —all emit some radiation...
...The point of entry is an appointment with a doctor and the patient enters by paying a fee...
...3) Establish democratically controlled metropolitan or regional land development agencies, with powers of eminent domain, to undertake major land development in accordance with a metropolitan or regional plan...
...Would the little city of Twiddle prefer to do without the su LEON SHULL AND STINA SANTIES1 VAN perhighway that threatens to impale it...
...cleanest feasible propulsion system is capable of achieving—should be applied...
...During the 1960s, he said, the number of people below the federal poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.8 percent...
...Yet during these same years, there was no equivalent decline in the pathologies associated with poverty, e.g., crime, delinquency, mental illness, alcoholism and drug addition...
...We need a public-service employment program similar to that proposed by Congressman lames O'Hara (D...
...As fast as improvements are made, more efficient techniques and equipment must be put to use...
...population that is presently not sharing in the national affluence...
...The Fair Labor Standards Act is now cruelly inadequate...
...Backers believe that if it approves the bill, Congress will presently be obliged to go further and take in hand the delivery system itself...
...However, since it is clear that so radical a suggestion is not likely to be accepted right now, we had better concentrate on bringing about reforms in our tax system that would make it more equitable: • All capital gains income should be treated as ordinary income for tax purposes...
...Congress should establish an agency to regulate all kinds of electric power production—including water, atomic energy, and fossil fuel plants...
...The conventional wisdom tells us that it is unwise to increase taxes except in time of war, and it is somehow comforting to say that money alone isn't the answer to our problems anyway...
...This change in attitude will take much hard work by many people...
...Take air...
...Drugs obsess our children...
...Immediate authorization and funding should be provided to enable community institutions, including cooperative and nonprofit or limited dividend companies, to acquire and operate the large numbers of residential structures presently being abandoned by the owners...
...We simply do not know the safe level for such radiation...
...For a nonsupervisory clerical worker in finance, insurance, or real estate, it was $5,100...
...The rights of young people—especially students—all too often are abrogated...
...The days when all wisdom seemed centered in Washington are over...
...And it cannot be denied that the nation's faults remain monstrous...
...The energy, money, and materials still being poured into the Indochina war could be diverted to this vastly more significant challenge...
...What we need is a series of simultaneous actions...
...It is doubtful, first of all, that the nation could be turned around...
...If the private building industry fails to meet the goals Congress has set, then the federal government should act as the builder of last resort and construct the needed housing...
...The United WHAT DO WE WANT RIGHT NOW...
...Consequently a disproportionate share of conservatives control major committees, and these committees, unrepresentative of the ideological outlook of Senate and House Democrats, hold immense power...
...LEGISLATION AS A WAY to the Good Society is in bad repute, a passage beset with pitfalls and infested with outlaws...
...Interest paid on consumer credit loans can be deducted...
...House ownership should be limited to those who live on the premises or to community institutions (probably excluding small owner-occupied multi-family structures), and Congress should take steps to enable everyone to own or share in the ownership of his dwelling...
...A root cause of the ineffectiveness of planning at any level is the influence that private ownership of land and resources exercises over public decision-making...
...Corporations produce commodities and generate a large share of pollution as by-products...
...There is, in fact, only one fair way to tax: income in all forms should be taxed at the same progressive rates...
...Mother's milk contains more DDT than the law permits in cow's milk...
...Certainly a way of stating, relating, and researching the larger problems needs to be found, and a way of translating what is learned into public awareness and then legislation...
...Rather than ask underdeveloped nations to forgo development, he suggests that the developed nations must learn to conserve and recycle, to reduce their own pollution while aiding the less developed countries...
...A system of steep fines for misuse of resources should be enacted...
...The minimum wage is stuck at $1.60 an hour...
...We must raise the income of the poor not only absolutely, but relative to the income of the average American...
...2) Make a deliberate and sustained effort to limit private control over development and use of land and natural resources...
...We can develop a high degree of sophistication on the part of both the leadership and the led, in a relationship that can enrich our political life...
...The poor, in fact, have no options to speak of in the areas of housing and education—yet poor schools and slum housing continue to breed "the many pathologies that stem from poverty...
...Other estimates say $50 billion a year...
...Eventually, up to 1 million new jobs could be provided in this way, but the benefits would touch many more than a million workers and their families...
...Surely its time has come...
...As a nation we spend $60 billion a year on health care, using what the Committee for National Health Insurance calls "a fragmented, wasteful, duplicative inefficient, semifunctional nonsystem" in which costs are skyrocketing...
...Serious gaps in the present nonsystem should be plugged and the system itself reorganized...
...An investor's initial $100 in dividends is not taxable...
...It is fashionable now to talk about setting new national priorities but nothing except talk will come of it unless the power of the military-industrial complex can be reduced, and we shall never reduce it until we can find jobs for all in peacetime industries...
...And yet, in order to make our government responsive, a larger number of citizens will have to participate...
...The enormous growth of the American economic machine makes social problem-solving possible on a scale heretofore unimagined...
...It is up to Congress to provide the money to make the determination possible...
...Kaiser has devised a new point of entry: an intake multiphasic screening or health evaluation process, which combines a detailed computerized medical history with a comprehensive series of physiological tests administered by paramedical personnel...
...The very real danger is that this new heady concern with the environment will be the final nail in the aid coffin," writes Stanley Johnson in VISTA, the magazine of the United Nations Association...
...Herman P. Miller, chief of the Population Division of the Bureau of Census, provides these estimates: people earning less than $2,000 a year pay out nearly 40 percent of their income in taxes of all kinds...
...The results are computerized and the computer "advises" further tests, an immediate appointment with a doctor, or a routine appointment...
...Millions of our minority members—to say nothing of U.S...
...Any new law must be described in superlative terms, yet the results can rarely live up to the language...
...Their struggles for self-determination are met with denials, repression, brutality—sometimes death, often prison...
...But the legislature has the power to be negative as well as affirmative, and anyone who remembers the long and tortuous history of winning federal aid to education or medical care for the aged can testify to the enormity of congressional roadblocks...
...they cannot afford huge credit loans, hold bonds, live abroad...
...It is entirely appropriate for the nation through its Congress to decide how the income of the country will be divided...
...Right now we need 250,000 more hospital beds—and the same number of existing beds are in facilities that require extensive modernization, while 10 percent of our medical schools are at the point of closing because they lack funds...
...The first need is research, supported through adequate appropriations and directed by scientists who are independent of political considerations...
...Workers and Consumers Serious economic problems are not confined to the long-time unemployed and the unemployable...
...Since the amount of the remaining funds will depend on his ability to employ his former defense workers in civilian production jobs, he will have strong economic reasons for working hard at conversion plans...
...Like the nation's wildlife, we are being poisoned by pesticides used on trees, lawns, crops, even national parks...
...Now 51 percent of the population is female...
...In the House changes are necessary in the committees' operations, particularly the Rules Committee, to safeguard legislation, to permit the committee to function, and to permit the Administration to get its proposals to the floor for consideration, at least...
...According to Gans, the program should be amended to increase benefits annually so that within three years the minimum payment is equivalent to 60 percent of the median income of all families in the U.S...
...Congress should fund the Housing Act of 1968, liberalizing funding for public housing and moderate income housing, eligibility, and rent levels...
...The U.S...
...income distribution has not changed significantly since World War II...
...During the first half of the sixties some of the deep concerns of the American people were again expressed in legislative innovations that spoke to the national need: federal aid to elementary and secondary schools, the war on poverty, a fiscal policy designed to create jobs, health care for the aged, the extension and protection of civil rights...
...These are the economic facts that made passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S...
...The authors of the National Urban Coalition's "Counterbudget" estimate that if all these privileges and exemptions were eliminated, an additional $25 billion would be WHAT DO WE WANT RIGHT NOW...
...The first impulse of the Nixon administration was to give the country tax cuts...
...The Senator says some 2.4 million workers will lose their jobs as a direct result of the end of the Vietnam war...
...residents, financed by contributions from employers, employees, and general tax revenues...
...The U.S...
...The approximately $30 billion they would bring in will not nearly meet the needs of the public sector...
...The same financial and emotional commitments we devoted to the exploration of space, for example, could be turned to saving us from ourselves...
...Whether it be a joint effort by the United Nations or purely a U.S...
...Briefly, the Kennedy proposal would provide comprehensive medical care for all, including preventive and rehabilitative care, hospitalization, some home health care, some nursing home care, some psychiatric care, and, through a series of steps leading to everwider coverage, eventually comprehensive dental care...
...Our transportation policies appear to have been designed by an idiot...
...Garfield says this procedure sorts the entry mix into those needing health care, those needing maintenance care for chronic illnesses, and those needing the care of a doctor for acute illnesses...
...It is the essential, if not sufficient, ingredient...
...community mental health centers...
...In mid-1970 the Labor Department said an urban family of four required $6,900 per year to live on its lower budget (a little over a thousand more than Gans's 60-percent-of median-income figure for 1969) and $10,000 a year to live at what it calls a modest standard of living...
...But mere physical sur vival, Gans said, does not reduce "the many pathologies that stem from poverty...
...That the goal has been attacked as unrealistic does not detract from the constructive features of the Act...
...There is LEON SHULL AND STINA SANTIESTEVAN reason to believe that already we are using oxygen faster than the vegetable kingdom can replenish it, in some parts of the U.S...
...The program would seek to supplement existing programs in health manpower, including the provision of incentives for development of group practice...
...Sometimes we lack knowledge...
...Certainly, too, we must learn how to decentralize...
...Conservationists believe that regulation of atomic energy power production should be taken away from the AEC because of the conflict between advocacy and regulation...
...Garfield says four kinds of patients consult doctors: the well, the worried well, the early sick, and the sick...
...ditto for malaria control...
...Constitution so important an issue, not only to women themselves, long relegated to second-class citizenship, but to the success of any war on poverty...
...Their communities and neighborhoods would find themselves with taxpayers instead of welfare clients...
...Consumers need an independent consumer protection agency to represent their interests in Washington...
...Industry should be required to pay special charges on all packaging that does not degrade or cannot be reused...
...has risen to $75...
...This year these tax cuts represent a loss of $35 billion...
...And we are all infected with Madison Avenue fever...
...It is understood that already there is no more clean air to be breathed in the United States...
...Gans told the senators that the federal poverty line, now about $3750, is based on budgets calculated to keep the family and its members alive...
...and millions of citizens are excluded from all but emergency services, while millions more receive inadequate treatment...
...Additional job losses will come about as a result of the factors discussed above, plus the multiplier effect—the loss of local nondefense business when defense work in a community shuts down...
...The fee tends to regulate somewhat the flow of patients, since most people wait until they are sick to seek care...
Vol. 18 • December 1971 • No. 6
