A moment of community
COMMENT A moment of community There was a report, perhaps apocryphal, that one grocery chain, stuck with a glut of wilting houseplants, tied yellow ribbons around them, called them "freedom...
...Business would rather rail against health and safety rules and try at every turn to postpone implementation of environmental standards...
...Starting with the 1973 oil crisis, the refinery taxes were much higher because of the rise in the price of oil, and much more money was returned to Hess...
...Until the early 1960s, the islands remained impoverished and undeveloped...
...instead, we have only the simplistic rhetorical flourishes of a Reagan or a Carter...
...Sidney Lens (Sidney Lens is a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...1.5 billion for tax-free "benefits and allowances" to military personnel...
...Such organizations as the Beaufort-Jasper project and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives have enough difficulty doing what they are trying to do without being singled out for lengthy Federal investigations with dubious goals...
...Samuel H. Day Jr., a contributing editor of The Progressive, is a special representative of the Nuclear Weapons Facilities Project...
...Unobserved by the business press, there are other, more effective ways to increase productivity, without people sacrificing their environment and workplace safety, or footing a higher share of taxes...
...U.S...
...The situation recalls the copper-mining consortium in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s, or United Fruit in Central America in the same era...
...Although the battle itself ended in a draw—Sanger and Dickinson compromised, but their joint clinic was denied a license—the medical establishment waged a long and successful legal struggle for monopoly rights to dispense the diaphragm—a monopoly they retained for many years...
...If it accomplishes nothing else, the SWP's suit will be successful if it shows the FBI and its fellow "intelligence" agencies in their true colors: a menace to civil liberties, yes, but also more than a little absurd...
...Since its founding in 1938, the SWP claims, its offices have been the target of bugging and burglary...
...And the Americans held in Iran weren't really heroes, as they themselves swiftly and sensibly acknowledged: They were what hostages usually are— unfortunate victims of circumstance, and fortunate survivors...
...hostages from Iran for all it was worth, just as the Carter Administration had made the most of their seizure fourteen months earlier...
...In fact its growth has taken a nose dive in most non-service industries...
...Various explanations for this slowdown have been offered...
...Then Ralph Paiewonsky, the Presidentially appointed governor, made a deal with a New Jersey oil executive, Leon Hess, who now runs Amerada Hess Corporation...
...A flurry of publicity followed...
...A couple of years ago, the total cost to the Treasury of tax expenditures came to $136 billion...
...The donkeys vanished...
...Our "free enterprise" system would swiftly collapse if it were not for the system of public subsidies, loans, guarantees, gifts, and tax breaks which keep it going—for example, the subsidies to the maritime industry for building and maintaining an American merchant marine...
...And he threatened to shut the refinery if there was no new agreement by October 1. The crisis burst on St...
...The power to harass First in Alabama, now in South Carolina, Federal investigative powers are apparently being used to harass black social service organizations...
...Croix is American territory, and the Virgin Islanders are American citizens who have been dragged willy-nilly into an industrial culture, where their role is to consume and to work, and to be grateful for crumbs from the company table...
...the plight of political prisoners who continue to be deprived of freedom around the world, often with the connivance and collaboration of our Government...
...It is, of course, appropriate and important to remind ourselves of what the coverage in the mass media almost entirely overlooked—the roots of Iranian grievance against the United States...
...There are still compelling reasons for pressing forward with the early signing of a comprehensive test ban treaty, not the least of which are the health and safety "of many Americans (and Russians) exposed to radiation from the continuing underground tests...
...The triumph of the U.S...
...In one camp were feminists, led by birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, who had opened a clinic and was bent on smuggling diaphragms into the United States, distributing them under the supervision of a woman doctor, and monitoring their effectiveness by observing those who received them...
...And certainly the Reagan Administration milked the return of the U.S...
...a month later, the U.S...
...In December 1979, GAO reported it found no reason to conduct the full-scale audit Shelby had requested...
...weapons designers have made no secret of the fact that this has become the principal reason for their interest in the program...
...But there is a positive aspect, too, for the reception accorded to the hostages suggested a potential source of creative energy—a national reservoir of emotion that could generate, and that yearns to generate, a genuine commitment to community, to freedom, to peace...
...The SWP has invested more than $1 million and seven years in this suit to curb Government intrusion in its affairs...
...But now there is growing suspicion that they may have prepared a new line of defense to keep the arms race going if tests should be banned...
...Dickinson used a time-honored ploy to undermine Sanger's plans: He organized a project of his own, composed of medical professionals, to conduct the first "objective" study of contraceptive safety and effectiveness in the United States...
...Some tax expenditures are, of course, justifiable in terms of policy...
...1.5 billion for depletion allowances, and more...
...The target in Alabama is the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a regional group of more than 130 farming, marketing, housing, health care, and credit co-ops...
...But in the perverse logic of capitalism, the experiments are too successful...
...The hostage crisis brought us together to a degree unknown since World War II...
...One of those present was the district's Democratic Representative, Richard Shelby, who asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to find out whether the Federation was misusing Federal funds by participating in local politics...
...What was deeply troubling about the welcome home accorded to the freed hostages was how readily Americans were mobilized to an emotional display that could, in only slightly different circumstances, celebrate not the return of some prisoners but the beginning of a U. S.military adventure somewhere in the world—an act of aggression that would, in its own way, provide the same kind of release that the hostage festival did...
...A former elected governor, Dr...
...If Congress and the President fail to "cool" the economy through budget cuts, the Federal Reserve is expected to do the job by imposing high interest rates and tight money...
...But in June, Governor Luis rejected the pact his committee had drafted on the grounds that it was not a good enough deal for the government...
...The solution to the productivity problem must also go beyond the workplace to the larger society...
...Each year, the list of tax expenditures grows longer as Congress adds more and more "tax incentives"—loopholes, that is—to the law...
...Those are the poles between which a competent morality would balance and mediate: the doorstep and the planet...
...Duncan Harp (Duncan Harp is an editorial intern at The Nation...
...The most meaningful dependence of my house is not on the U.S...
...Write Smit and Boskma in The Bulletin: "It is even possible that the apparent willingness to agree on a ban now is partly because, with laser fusion research, such a treaty will have a very limited effect in halting the technological nuclear arms race...
...According to Najarian, what NIOSH did was come up with so many categories of death that there were, in a sense, no meaningful categories at all...
...Second only to reducing military spending, judicious trimming of tax expenditures would be the best way for Reagan to live up to his balanced-budget promise...
...What price productivity...
...What was it...
...laser fusion research budget rose from $2 million in 1970 to $145 million in 1979...
...the provocations that led to the seizure of the hostages...
...Today, laser fusion's promise as an economical energy source is as dubious as ever, but the process is apparently paying off handsomely as a way of simulating the effects of nuclear explosions...
...An American colony Herbert Hoover called the Virgin Islands, strategically placed at the Caribbean's northeast corner, a "poorhouse...
...Government, but on the world, the earth...
...For the fifty-two freed hostages, the turn lasted longer than most, and the lights were brighter...
...David R. Treadwell Jr., of Baltimore, caught much of the public mood in a letter to The Washington Post: "Yellow ribbons around trees...
...Because the return of the hostages supplied, however fleetingly and, perhaps, inappropriately, something that has been increasingly and acutely absent from our lives—a sense of national community, of shared concern, of mutual enthusiasm and pride, of competence, of control over our own destiny...
...These are terribly difficult times for Americans nurtured on the traditional myths about their nation—its virtue, its valor, its omnipotence...
...Sometimes prompted by Government regulation, but most frequently by the cost-cutting motive, firms may seek new technology which minimizes the energy bill rather than enhancing labor productivity...
...Polaroid scrapped its self-management program when it became clear that workers did not need managers to tell them what to do...
...Without doubt there were the usual hustles and scams, instant memorabilia, hypes and rip-offs of every conceivable variety...
...Instead, companies have been sinking billions of dollars into acquiring existing operations, stressing immediate payoffs rather than long-term productivity and profits...
...Negotiations for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (ending all nuclear testing) have been under way since the mid-1960s...
...Unmasking the FBI Does the Government have the right to harass citizens engaged in lawful political activity...
...This "small" tax break, given to the rich as an incentive to invest in stocks and other business assets, will cost theGovernment $21.8 billion this year...
...they, in turn, hired 1,000 workers...
...And we hope we are not seeing the emergence of a new pattern of abuse of Federal powers...
...Perhaps the Government hopes that an elaborate barrier of statistics will do what elaborate claddings and casings cannot: shield the public from the dangers of radiation...
...Even the Fed's manipulation of interest rates is subject to stringent long-run limitations...
...Pueblo, seized by North Korea...
...Donkeys were a main means of transport...
...Putting a lid on the cap The year was 1923, and a small battle was being fought in what would become the continuing war over reproductive rights...
...Firms feel the political environment is too unpredictable to justify spending huge sums of money on long-term productive investment...
...In Sumter County, wherelhe Federation is based, the white power elite has never taken kindly to this corps of black activists...
...This bit of history came to mind when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) instituted its new policy on the contraceptive cervical cap not long ago...
...No income tax is levied, for instance, on Social Security earnings, unemployment compensation, workers' compensation, welfare, and other forms of "income security...
...Najarian and several others are now trying to find out...
...And so it appears that for the time being, the cervical cap may go the way of the diaphragm, into the hands of the medical establishment and a Federal agency which has a troubling record of coziness with the pharmaceutical industry...
...If we can begin to share that sort of insight with our fellow citizens, the energy released by the return of the hostages could be channeled into a great movement for a more humane life in our communities and a more rational relationship with the rest of the world...
...One of the four is Beaufort-Jasper ComprehensiveHealth Services Project, a model program highly regarded in the health care field and supported by Republican South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond...
...Late last spring the committee recommended a deal under which the financially pressed Virgin Islands government would get at least $46 million a year in revenues from the refinery, including a minimum annual income tax payment of $20 million...
...Silent prayers...
...Writing in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Wim A. Smit and Peter Boskma of Twente University of Technology in the Netherlands draw attention to the U.S...
...Because we needed it...
...But most tax expenditures are far from equitable...
...The SWP and its youth arm, the Young Socialist Alliance, are suing the Federal Government for $40 million in damages for decades of surveillance and harassment...
...For several years, feminist health centers have imported cervical caps from England...
...Though Volcker plays an important role in our economy, there is no reason to exaggerate the extent of his power or the autonomy of the Federal Reserve System...
...The U.S...
...The longing for it is there...
...The Fed does have considerable freedom from political constraints, since its board members are appointed to fourteen-year terms...
...Recoveries from the current and the 1974-1975 Don't blame the Fed As the problems of the U.S...
...Last summer, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain announced they had reached agreement on a means of verifying compliance with a treaty...
...COMMENT A moment of community There was a report, perhaps apocryphal, that one grocery chain, stuck with a glut of wilting houseplants, tied yellow ribbons around them, called them "freedom flowers," and sold the lot almost instantly...
...Clearly the cheering crowds, the thankful worshippers, the public celebrations in hundreds of American villages and towns and cities signified something more...
...That particular tax expenditure will cost the Federal Government $3 billion in lost revenues this.year...
...William Steif (William Steif is a Washington correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers...
...But on closer inspection the productivity problem is not so easily dismissed...
...The central bank may, for instance, ease the money supply by allowing banks to make more loans—only to find that borrowers are not eager: Corporate expectations of profitable investment opportunities will have much to do with the money supply, whatever the Federal Reserve decrees...
...Tax evasion One thing Ronald Reagan could do, if he were really serious about cutting taxes while balancing the Federal budget, would be to take a hard look at something the Office of Management and Budget calls "tax expenditures...
...When there is great fear of future inflation, interest rates must be pushed up...
...Candles burning...
...Such* a process would involve new energy, wage, and price initiatives that challenge the prerogatives of multinational banking and industrial concerns...
...economy intensify and perplexity about their solution deepens, some of the media seem determined to depict the Federal Reserve System as the cause of all our woes...
...The solution must include domestic planning of investment, to avoid the periodic disruptions in investment generated by the instability of a profit-oriented system...
...The conclusion of the Government study: There is no evidence of a rise in the cancer death rate among the nuclear workers at the shipyard...
...But the Administration won't—and can't—go that sensible route...
...Another set of explanations for sagging productivity growth relates to the amount of investment per worker...
...It is money the U.S...
...Current Federal Reserve policy reflects the financial community's insistence that inflation be controlled—and controlled by "managed recessions...
...Christmas tree lights out...
...But the laser fusion ploy should serve as a reminder to us all that while our elected leaders dawdle with solutions, the vested interests are making good use of the time...
...It was argued that this was potentially a source of boundless energy for civilian use...
...In December, Hess aborted the cracking plant contracts, laying off 1,000 workers...
...For instance, workers' self-management in experiments by major firms such as General Motors and Polaroid have consistently shown that productivity increases when workers have a larger say over their lives and feel more satisfied in their work...
...That makes sense...
...On the other side was gynecologist Robert L. Dickinson, who advocated birth control but considered Sanger's methods radical and unscientific...
...But it would be a great mistake to dismiss the intense and almost universal outburst of fervent relief and even exultation over resolution of the hostage crisis as a mere consequence of cynical political exploitation and media manipulation...
...A favorite business-press scapegoat is safety legislation won by workers over the last two decades...
...Samuel H. Day Jr...
...Does the FDA's decision to curtail use of the cap until its safety and effectiveness are proven reflect a sudden burst of concern for women's health...
...Business and political leaders all agree that if we are to restore rapid economic growth in the United States, continue to increase our standard of living, and subdue inflation, we must halt the slide of growth in productivity (which means the amount of products obtained from each unit of input—labor time, raw materials, equipment...
...The sixteen-year tax "holiday" given Hess expires next October 1. More than a year ago Governor Juan Luis named an advisory committee to negotiate a new agreement with Hess...
...Just one of the new weapons systems it has produced—the mobile missile, a response to the problem of more accurate warheads aimed at land-based missiles—may cost U.S...
...With the possible exception of the U.S...
...Negotiations have been stalled since then...
...weapons labs began experimenting with laser fusion twenty years ago in the hope of developing "clean" H-bombs that would not need "dirty" plutonium or uranium triggers to set them off...
...It has forced out of the Government 200,000 pages of records— and the astounding information that the FBI maintained 300 informants in the Party and 1,000 informants out of it between 1960 to 1976, an outlandish number to spy on an organization with a membership ranging, during this period, from a high of 5,000 to a low of 500...
...the alternative is to risk disruption of credit markets and an international flight from the dollar...
...Besides the inability of the United States and other Western nations to continue extracting cheap energy from oil-producing nations, business has experienced challenges at home: runaway shop legislation, environmental controls, equal employment and affirmative action...
...its members have been attacked by Government goons and fired because of Government pressure on employers...
...The new pact also assured that Hess would invest $250 million in a new catalytic cracking plant so that the refinery could process high-sulfur Mexican, Venezuelan, and Alaskan crude oil into gasoline...
...While investment has remained at a steady level relative to gross national product in the past fifteen years, it has fallen relative to the vast expansion of the working population...
...Attorney for northern Alabama initiated a grand jury probe of the Federation...
...The recent shift into short-term investment, for instance, because of the uncertainty of profit in the long run, could be avoided if investment were geared to the projected needs of the country, rather than the likelihood of future profit...
...But the U.S...
...weapons laboratories won their fight for a crucial loophole which permitted the continuation of testing underground, and the testing of new atomic weapons designs has continued unabated...
...Laser fusion is a process by which tiny pellets of tritium and deuterium (the same isotopes that produce thermonuclear energy for hydrogen bombs) are bombarded by laser beams to make explosions...
...Hess hired contractors to work on the new cracking plant...
...So, three years ago, Najarian launched one of the first such studies himself...
...While Najarian's study was taken up by medical schools as a model for epidemiological research, Congress directed the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to come up with its own investigation...
...The first findings of that study, soon to be published in the British medical journal Lancet, have already been circulated in triumph by the nuclear industry...
...taxpayers up to $100 billion over the next decade...
...Meanwhile, as conflict over low-level radiation continues, so does the workers' exposure...
...He's counting on his out-sized economic clout to continue to assure him out-sized profits...
...Spoken hopes...
...Since then, the Federation has been subjected to months of subpoenas, requests for documents, and questioning by FBI agents—without even knowing, officially, just who or what was being investigated...
...The FDA ended all this when it approved study and distribution of the cap by three established groups of medical professionals—and banned its distribution by anyone else...
...But if your $1,000 was earned as interest on municipal bonds, it is tax-free—your reward for lending money to a city government...
...By calling into question top-doWn decision making, these experiments threatened the ability of managers to control the shop floor...
...Since the testing of nuclear weapons plays an essential part in the qualitative competition, critics of the arms race have long looked to an international test-ban agreement as a way of damping down, if not ending, a contest which makes sense only to those who design and manufacture the weapons...
...President Reagan is hardly likely to set such a process in motion, so we can expect continued stagflation—and periodic spurts in interest rates—regardless of who runs the Federal Reserve...
...And if it does not have that right, can citizens recover for damage they have suffered...
...Both the United States and the Soviet Union long ago piled up enough weaponry to destroy each other many times over...
...Oil companies are a glaring example of a general trend...
...distributed them, largely under the supervision of women, and monitored their effectiveness by observing those who received them...
...But as a major cog in our capitalist economy, the Fed is by no means immune to the demands of business...
...economic future: one in which key decisions continue to be made by a handful of profit-motivated business people, versus one in which the working people of this country democratically set their priorities in their workplaces, communities, and society...
...Their release and repatriation was a bigger story than last summer's uproar over "Who Shot J.R...
...recessions have been characterized by unusually low increases in investment in plant and equipment...
...Those questions will come before a New York court this month, when a long-pending damage suit by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) reaches trial stage...
...foundation grants are being withheld, and Federal funds are in jeopardy...
...Business leaders were predictably furious with the governor, who insisted it was "improper" for him to negotiate in the face of the Hess threat...
...Profits earned on a stock portfolio are taxed at a maximum rate of 28 per cent, while earnings in the form of salary are taxable up to 50 per cent and dividends up to 70 per cent...
...Why, then, that great outpouring of genuine emotion...
...Laser fusion to the rescue In the nuclear arms race, it is no longer the quantity of weapons that really matters...
...1.6 billion for corporate research and development...
...They will still be able to offer the cap—but the victories cost them time and money that most grass-roots clinics can't spare...
...But that, too, happened just a few weeks into the crisis...
...But those considerations should not induce us to ignore the significance of the popular reaction here at home to the release of the hostages...
...Luis called for a referendum to decide on what course negotiations should take, then backed off, and finally submitted to a Hess representative a list of items he thinks are negotiable...
...First, energy-intensive technology is becoming much more costly since OPEC and domestic energy producers have maintained high energy prices...
...It would be easier to think so if the FDA's caution were equally applied to the proven contraceptive killers—beginning with the Pill...
...The chief refinery output was heating oil for the northeastern United States...
...Although the treaty to end all testing is still far from signed, the weapons laboratories are plainly in some danger of losing their license to set off atomic blasts at will...
...Their own figures, if analyzed properly, actually support what we originally found," Najarian says...
...Major creditors will always try to insist that the returns on their loans exceed the expected rate of inflation...
...The difference is that St...
...But the story gets worse: Just as Julian Bond and a "national committee in support of community-based organizations" were condemning the Justice Department for allowing the investigation to drag on, word came that a newly elected Republican Representative from South Carolina, Thomas F. Hartnett, had asked GAO to audit four Federally financed health projects—the only ones in South Carolina which have black directors...
...And the world...
...Three years ago, the Senate Committee on the Budget made a study of tax expenditures and found losses to the Treasury of $9 billion for exclusion from taxes of capital gains at death...
...Melvin Evans, recalls that in the agreement's early years, the Hess refinery's taxes amounted to $24 million annually, and Hess got about $18 million a year back...
...Department of Energy's burgeoning laser fusion program as a potential substitute for underground testing of nuclear weapons...
...The refinery opened in 1965 and started St...
...When that hope faded, the labs turned to the energy crisis for public justification of expanded laser fusion research...
...Paul Volcker, chairman of the Fed, has been portrayed as a single-minded crusader against inflation whose zeal is responsible for the steep increase in interest rates and the resulting economic decline...
...Suppose, for example, that you earn $1,000 in interest on a savings account: Depending on your tax bracket, you may pay as little as $140 or as much as $700 in income tax on your interest income...
...It was a time to say Take that!' not only to Russia but to Iran...
...Croix, the largest of the three islands, to process Persian Gulf crude oil, which sold for $2 a barrel then and sells for $40 now...
...The struggle for a qualitative edge is what gives the nuclear arms race a life of its own and drives it to new heights of lunacy...
...The items include raising the refinery's real estate tax and getting cut-rate heating oil for the Virgin Islands' ramshackle power plants...
...Popular Economics Research Group (The Popular Economics Research Group is a collective of radical economists based in Amherst, Massachusetts...
...It was a bigger story than Ronald Reagan's Inauguration, with which it shared a split television screen, a bigger story even than the Superbowl...
...Another reason for lagging investment is the uncertainty of a profitable future...
...To his own surprise, he documented a doubling of cancer deaths and an almost six-fold increase in blood cancer deaths among nuclear workers at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Naval Shipyard, where first the Nautilus and now other nuclear submarines have been refueled and repaired over the last two decades—even though the workers' exposure to radiation had apparently been well within Federal limits...
...Lower and more stable interest rates will be achieved only when inflation can be controlled by a more rational process than induced recessions...
...Seeking safety in numbers In 1977, a sixty-three-year-old man was admitted to the Boston Veterans Administration hospital with a case of leukemia and a nagging suspicion that it had been brought on years earlier, when he worked on the Nautilus, the Navy's first nuclear submarine...
...The Kentucky poet Wendell Berry has written, "I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household...
...The competition is as expensive as it is dangerous...
...What makes the difference now is the quality of the weapons—their accuracy, survivability, versatility, and adaptability to a variety of uses...
...Workers scored a victory when the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act was passed in 1969...
...1.5 billion for exporters under the DISC (Domestic International Sales Corporation) program...
...We hope the South Carolina health projects are not, like the Federation, afflicted with more Federal attention than they deserve...
...In America, Andy Warhohl once observed, everyone gets a fifteen-minute turn in the glare of the spotlight...
...In short, the productivity lag exposes the failures of a system in which investment decisions are made privately for profit, rather than democratically for the larger social good...
...Americans had, after all, been held hostage before—in comparable numbers and for comparable periods of time— without occasioning any such festival when they returned: the diplomats held in the People's Republic of China three decades ago, for example, or the crew of the U.S.S...
...Rather than using their windfall profits to improve production, they have bought up other concerns, ranging from the Barnum and Bailey Circus to retail chains and publishing houses...
...11 billion for homeowners' deductions to property taxes and mortgage interest...
...Feminist clinics are used to such obstacles, and some, including the Bread & Roses Women's Health Center in Milwaukee and the New Hampshire Feminist Health Center in Concord, have already won exemptions from the ban...
...McDonald's commercials, prepared in advance, established the link between hamburgers and hostages...
...Each breakthrough by one side—a multiple-warhead missile, an atomic artillery shell, a neutron bomb—calls for a response by the other...
...Seventeen years ago, worldwide outrage over nuclear fallout forced the superpowers to halt their weapons testing in the atmosphere...
...But after several trips to the library, Najarian realized that the studies he was looking for on the long-terms effects of low-level radiation had never been done...
...Hess has said nothing and won't respond to press queries...
...Treasury could be collecting, but isn't...
...In return, Hess received a sixteen-year tax "holiday": 75 per cent of his refinery's income tax would be returned to him, along with 100 per cent of his customs duties, excise taxes, and gross receipts taxes, and he would also get a "consideration" on his refinery's real estate tax...
...They say the current slow growth is the consequence of a shift in the composition of industry from manufacturing, with traditionally high and easily measured productivity growth, to services and retail trade, with usually low productivity...
...We hope the Justice Department will tell its over-zealous northern Alabama attorney to cease and desist...
...Although the Federation was not formally involved in the bitter boycott, some who were involved had associations with the Federation...
...Croix shortly before Christmas...
...Fed policy is, therefore, more a symptom than a cause of stagnation in our economy—and in our economic thought...
...The conflict over productivity is a conflict over different priorities and different visions of the U.S...
...Some economists have attempted to write off the statistical slide as a non-problem...
...A total test ban would make work more difficult for the weapons labs...
...It would rather demand tax breaks—which may increase profits but will not ensure that they end up as long-term domestic investments that boost productivity...
...In New York City on the day of the great ticker-tape parade, aggressive button hawkers questioned the patriotism of non-buyers...
...Whether or not the investigation turns up anything (and most Federally funded programs show some irregularities if you look hard enough in the corners), serious damage is being done to one of the region's more important black organizations...
...Instead of counting the number of deaths from all blood cancers together, NIOSH counted the number of deaths from such rare types of blood cancer as Hodgkin's disease, and, not surprisingly, came up with numbers too small to prove anything...
...Productivity was indeed affected...
...The more productive use of capital is not one of the solutions business stresses when it confronts the productivity problem...
...this year, with ninety-one kinds of exemptions on the books, the cost will come to $176 billion—more than enough to balance the budget, cut taxes, and institute a comprehensive program of national health insurance...
...if such benefits were taxed, they would simply have to be increased...
...Among the usual assortment of current buzz words on the economy, "productivity" has grabbed some of the biggest headlines...
...The $176 billion in tax expenditures is part of the elaborate and costly welfare state we maintain for the rich, and no Administration, let alone Ronald Reagan's, would care or dare to tamper with it...
...Investment to boost productivity may fall behind increases in the labor force for a number of reasons...
...Olympic hockey team at Lake Placid came close...
...Croix's transition from a rum-and-cane economy to a kind of industrialization...
...astronauts' first walk on the moon in 1969, no event in recent memory has so dominated the mass media...
...A tax expenditure is a Federal subsidy handed to an individual or corporation in the form of a tax break...
...Hartnett asked for the audit in response, apparently, to a request by a Charleston Medical Society subcommittee, though Beaufort-Jasper and one of the other agencies under fire are not even in the Charleston Medical Society's territory...
...The Federation has spent more than $40,000 in legal fees...
...Hess built what is still the world's largest refinery, 728,000 barrels-a-day capacity, on the South Shore of St...
...There is no national political consciousness that provides for a realistic appraisal of our role in the world, nor are there national leaders who impart a sense of perspective...
...the next year the Federal Occupational Safety and Health Act extended safety regulations to other industries...
...15 billion for tax investment credit...
...Local white hostility toward the Federation came to a head in mid-1979, when more than a hundred whites gathered for a meeting (at the Cotton Patch restaurant) to register their complaints...
...Relations worsened in 1979, when Sumter County blacks boycotted the almost wholly black public schools...
...Supermarkets sprang up...
...If President Reagan's promised "supply-side" tax cuts were to create more business activity—and thus more inflation—the Fed would be pressed to pump interest rates even higher and bring any momentary recovery to a halt...
...Impossible, said his doctor, Thomas Najar-ian, and the young hematologist set out to find the studies that would persuade his patient...
...And this is an area where time grows increasingly precious...
...Measured productivity in mining was particularly hard hit: By one conservative estimate, it fell from an average 5.8 per cent rate of increase per year until 1969, to a 3.2 per cent annual rate for most of the 1970s...
...Is it possible the NIOSH study was affected by the Navy's input or by the eleventh-hour addition of several nuclear industry backers to its supervisory panel...
Vol. 45 • March 1981 • No. 3
