LETTERS
LETTERS Ignoring the enigma I enjoyed Steven Waldman's article, "The Man Who Would Be Speaker," in March and feel that if the article was circulated in the House, maybe the young,...
...If you want to fund un-manned interplanetary probes, fine—that's my way of wasting money...
...It would be relatively equitable...
...The Shuttle was sold by its proponents as guaranteed to put cargo into space for $100 per pound...
...I can't believe, however, that such a well-thoughtout piece fails to mention Ted Kennedy as a, or "the," Democratic leader...
...In the article, I attempted to show how government actions contributed to both trends...
...You object to Social Security being paid to "rich and poor alike," and propose that "only those who become needy would collect ." As a practical matter, this is dubious public policy, destroying as it does one more strand in our common experience...
...then he goes on to say that he doesn't know what these expenses are because no one would ever tell him what "administrative overhead" was...
...That material used up, and the literary world indifferent to my current enthusiasms, I write non-fiction...
...As I noted on p. 16 of the article, during the 1970s, financing costs rose faster than any other component in the cost of new housing, including the cost of land...
...My government made me a promise, and I expect it to fulfill it...
...At least we get something for it...
...Universities pay the salaries of people who safeguard the rights of human subjects, who monitor the care and use of animals in research, who maintain adequate health and safety procedures and practices, and who ensure that staff hired to assist in the research are hired fairly and treated equitably on the job...
...And the chief sufferers in the period of adjustment would be first-time home buyers...
...Try imagining what this administration would already have done to the poor if your concept of Social Security had been in effect...
...That strained the entire housing supply system...
...From 1971 through 1980 (it stopped after that), house prices rose an average of 3 percent a year above the inflation rate...
...We have proved, also, the feasibility of satellites beaming power down from orbit...
...Since 1972, for example, the real after-tax income of households headed by a person 25-34 has dropped by approximately 20 percent...
...More than that, if ever translated into action, this idea has a poor chance of helping the people you may want to help...
...In 1985 the price of an average new singlefamily house was 2.6 times the average household income—$95,600 vs...
...DARCY O'BR IEN Tulsa, Oklahoma...
...And in 1955 a median-priced smaller house was 3.1 times the median family income, $13,700 vs...
...I recall eight years ago—nearly to this month— standing in a blocks-long line in late winter for the opportunity to buy two precious tickets to a rare Sunday concert in Washington by Vladimir Horowitz...
...Overpriced overhead Charles Peters, of all people, shouldn't believe everything he reads ("Tilting at Windmills," March...
...In 1965 the same house had a 2.7 multiple, $24,000 vs...
...Meanwhile, as Mr...
...Stopping its proliferation would prevent a spectrum of problems...
...I applaud "those 200 freezing souls" who waited for the opening of The Treasure Houses of Britain, and I care not a whit about their aesthetic credentials...
...This will probably be put to a real test in the near future as the price of oil finally pays reverence to the laws of gravity...
...I would add to his picture of the current American literary situation the role of reviewers for the principal literary reviews...
...They also pay the salaries of people who are in place primarily to satisfy the government's own demands for endless, and often meaningless, reports of how the money is spent, what equipment is where, or how many hours the faculty spent doing research last year...
...This means that, to make a profit on manufacturing in space, you have to charge $7,000 per pound of product just to cover the cost of getting the raw materials into orbit—although you will of course have to pay the same $7,000 per pound of manufacturing equipment and processing materials...
...By comparison, our space program has been aimless and poorly managed since Apollo...
...Both the research and the writing have been exciting and rewarding, and the reviews and the sales are fine...
...He writes, "Government policies aimed at providing affordable housing instead bid up the price of existing houses...
...I believe that when asked, "Who espouses the Democratic party's ideals...
...The value of space for manufacturing, to the extent that it has any such value, depends critically on the cost and reliability of putting the factories into space...
...The cost today is about $5,000 a pound on the Shuttle...
...As a writer and part-time professor of literature, I am in an especially good position to sense the truth of what he says about the unreality (in his sense) of current American fiction...
...Maybe if he knew, he wouldn't be outraged...
...GEORGE' GIBSON Upper Montclair, N.J...
...In the 12 months preceding the 1977 statistic, the average mortgage rate was 7.375 percent...
...Reckon they'll get up to Japanese standards in orbit...
...Therefore, the novelist who practices the kind of art for which Lemann longs finds himself/herself faced with complete critical indifference...
...In the 1970s, when the baby boom came of age, we had to provide housing for 171/2 million households, almost as many as in the two previous decades combined...
...8,930...
...You may say (without any supporting evidence or argument) that the space industry has no future, and Congress may agree with you...
...Nor is this mere rhetoric...
...ALICE OLIVER New Haven, Connecticut Ms...
...The performance record is not good of many—perhaps most— programs designed solely to help the poor, whether here or in Europe: Programs of general society-wide application have a much better chance of operating well for everybody when the middle class has a personal stake in them...
...Those dollars pay for costs universities incur because they do research—many of them for the public good, or because the government demands that universities monitor the expenditure of tax dollars so closely...
...He mentions a report by the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) which accuses universities of siphoning off "hundreds of millions of dollars awarded for scientific research" for "unrelated expenses...
...The estimated cost of a new shuttle is $2.5 billion...
...Notice the results of our last three launches of Shuttle, Titan, and Delta—boom, boom, boom...
...To the extent there is an affordability problem apart from mortgage rates, it will fade out unassisted in a few years as the demographic trends that brought it on wind down...
...When I started paying Social Security tax in the thirties, a ride on the New York subway cost five cents, a first-class letter could be mailed for two cents, a good quality cotton man's shirt cost about $1.50, a suit of clothes cost about $20, a good frankfurter was five cents, but I could get a frank at Max's Busy Bee for two cents if I didn't mind a bit of grease, and so on...
...True, the article deals with House issues, but at one point Waldman mentions that when the Democrats were cornered into control of only the House in 1980, the Speaker became "the leader of the Democratic party...
...I have never heard of a fighter plane or social program that didn't promise to cost virtually nothing...
...Bureaucratic blunders are largely responsible for shortcomings in the conception and design of the shuttle...
...but the USSR is on the point of establishing a permanently manned space station considerably more ambitious than the one we are still tentatively planning, and one of their stated aims is to develop materials processing in orbit...
...But I had no choice...
...Conceivably this would, over time, drive down existing-home prices from the 1985 ratio of 90 percent of new to the 84 percent that prevailed in 1968...
...If we are willing to accept that transcendence, then we should hold as irrelevant the motives or attitudes of those who are thrust (or thrust themselves) before it...
...Offering $50,000, or even double that, to a 45-yearold woman who has opted to have only one child might be a bargain and dramatically improve lives in the process...
...But the cause was another of the factors not mentioned in Longman's pages—the demographic trend...
...Shiefman notes, house prices have been outpacing the general rate of inflation...
...Longman's prescription for making housing more affordable is to direct the federally sponsored mortgage conduits like Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae to place all, or at least more, of their investment in new rather than existing homes...
...for 15 years, the USSR has followed a coordinated, consistent space-development program whose aims are primarily practical rather than being mere propaganda...
...But high interest rates weren't the only problem...
...the general public would answer, "Ted Kennedy...
...It was easy to qualify for a mortgage in those earlier years, as it wasn't in 1985, because the mortgage rate in 1955 was only 5 percent and in 1965 5.75 percent...
...in the comparable period for 1983 it was 14.75 percent...
...Some time ago I did a computation of what my entitlement would be had put my social security deposits into a reasonably aggressive investment portfolio...
...He engages in indiscriminate government-bashing, lumping together federal mortgage credit agencies, deregulation of savings and loans, tax-shelter handouts, zoning ordinances, building codes, and impact fees— several levels of government acting out of several different motives—as though they were one entity, government...
...Such an incentive would offer the poor what the middle class has always had, an opportunity to improve one's standard of living by delaying childbearing and limiting family size...
...Oliver is associate director of Yale University's Office of Grant and Contract Administration...
...ALVIN HUTCHINSON Baltimore, Maryland Lost in space In your March issue ["Tilting at Windmills"] you support the outlook of columnist Fred Reed, whom you quote as saying, "As for factories in space—often given as a reason for having the shuttle—we'll never see it...
...the line moved imperceptibly...
...New house prices (for the same house) are as affordable as 20 years ago and even more affordable than in the good old days of 30 years ago...
...I would have been disturbed only had there been an empty seat in Constitution Hall on the afternoon of the performance...
...money could be collected as a negative income tax or as a lump sum at the end of the puerperal rainbow, to be given in whole or in part depending on the number of children the recipient has borne...
...I believe that non-fiction is the only outlet for a novelist who does not share the aesthetic, political, and social assumptions of the current literary poohb ahs...
...And please don't tell me that the next Shuttle will fly cargo into space for a dollar a pound...
...If there's an outrage here, it's the government's continuing attempts to pay less than the whole cost of the federally sponsored research being done at universities...
...As for the Russians, they can't make a factory work in Russia...
...If this happens, journalists who expressed uninformed opinions and politicians who lacked any ability to see past the next election will have to share the blame...
...Again, even this figure does not cover the cost of lost payloads...
...B.J...
...He is right about the bidding up, although it applied equally to new houses as-well as existing...
...Not only do these reviewers, most of them academics, lavish praise (probably honestly felt, alas) on these abstract and gratuitously, tediously, adolescently sneering novels and story collections...
...they and their editors along with them also will not recognize an alternative approach or vision of America...
...Which means that it will be much cheaper to find a substitute for it than to try to make it in space...
...He points with justified alarm to a decline in the homeownership rate of households under 35, from 41 percent in 1977 to 34 percent in 1983, but does not add that mortgage rates doubled in the interval...
...When the oil runs out here on Earth, as eventually it must, and supplies of various other resources become depleted, our descendants may well find themselves buying lunar mineral ores from the Soviet Union and kilowatts from the Japanese, because in the 1980s the United States decided there was no future in the exploration of space...
...When you demand "pure" motives be exhibited for one to gain admittance to experiences known, prima facie, to be worthwhile and enriching, you betray a detestable form of elitism...
...To jump to the conclusion that there is no future in manned space exploration, however, is absurd...
...Note the enthusiastic lack of response of industry, which understands money, to the opportunity to put factories into space on the Shuttle...
...The truth is the affordability crisis Longman writes about is almost purely a mortgage payment affordability crisis and its major cause is the extremely high real...
...The middle class knows, among other things, how to complain effectively when things go wrong...
...If these are the "unrelated costs" the DHHS report is talking about, the only costs truly unrelated to research are those imposed on universities by the government itself...
...I doubt that there was...
...Wright...
...It makes one wonder if his entire argument that the older generation is giving a raw deal to the younger is not similarly flawed...
...It would be voluntary...
...LETTERS Ignoring the enigma I enjoyed Steven Waldman's article, "The Man Who Would Be Speaker," in March and feel that if the article was circulated in the House, maybe the young, energetic members that he refers to would seriously consider mounting a challenge to Mr...
...Waldman points out that Texas influences can be harmful on a congressman...
...I saw Horowitz The snobbery you deplore ("Tilting at Windmills," March) seems far less corrosive than the snobbery you embody in the same section of the column...
...Who knows how many of us were motivated by the lure of the name, the panache of being able to say that he "saw" Horowitz...
...If they make a different promise to other people that's okay with me, but let's not go about changing the rules in the middle of the game...
...I think isolation in universities is probably, as you say, the principal cause of our current rotten novelistic state...
...I would not be disturbed if all of us were so motivated...
...Eleanor Holmes Norton once wrote that "a primary incubator for ghetto problems is the poor, femaleheaded household...
...4,420...
...I only wish there were a place for me today as a novelist, because I do like to make things up, but there is none...
...Birth control I heartily approve of your idea to offer financial incentives not to have children ["Tilting at Windmills," March...
...See "Tilting at Windmills...
...It would be similar, in degree, to present tax policy which rewards those with dependents...
...37,000...
...Art does transcend the petty mundaneness of our lives—even the motives of both the snobbery you hate and the snobbery you love...
...This is one instance where quantity is the only criterion: the more people who experience it, the better...
...Since people won't take the time to find out what "administrative overhead" really is, it's a moving target for the budget axe—and Charles Peters's pen...
...monies collected by middle-class women would be reclaimed, in part, via taxes...
...In terms of day's worked, in terms of purchasing power, the average recipient does not get back his and his employer's contributions for many years...
...The reason for the quick return is indexing for inflation...
...Manned space capability will be indispensable for achieving these objectives 10 or 20 years from now...
...The wind was brisk and cold...
...J. DENNIS LOWDEN Kansas City, Missouri Novel ideas I very much enjoyed Nicholas Lemann's "Missed Moorings: American Novelists Lose Touch," in the February issue...
...On the contrary, we will indeed see a prototype "factory in space," and in just a few years...
...He spends 11 pages chasing villains of the high cost of housing and never once mentions mortgage rates...
...Even allowing for inflation, it didn't come close...
...CHARLES PLATT New York, New York Fred Reed replies: Oh, twaddle...
...But I object strenuously to changing the system for those of us who have, religiously contributed even' though we thought the whole thing was a lousy idea...
...Shiefman is correct in identifying high financing costs as a large cause of the decline in home ownership rates among the young...
...At the same time his list of government policies that affect the cost of housing does not include the Reagan deficits or the tax-limitation climate exemplified by California's Proposition 13 (which precipitated the trend of revenue-starved municipalities socking impact fees to developers...
...LUBEROFF Summit, New Jersey So: "The average Social Security recipient gets back his contribution plus his employer's plus interest within about three years ." You forget inflation...
...LUCILLE' G. NATKINS Great Neck, New York Is Social Security insurance...
...These problems encompass hunger, housing, education, employment, and crime, areas in which we have spent a small fortune without significantly improving anyone's quality of life...
...interest rates of the Reagan era...
...Ordinarily this would be true but we cannot ignore the enigma in the other chamber...
...I'd have come out a lot better if I had invested the money myself and I don't live too long...
...We have many studies demonstrating the immediate feasibility of obtaining mineral resources from the Moon and from asteroids...
...This figure is highly conservative because it ignores certain costs attendant upon the operation of the Shuttle, such as having one blow up every 25 flights...
...But that would have less effect on affordability than a 1 percent decline in mortgage rates...
...I won the Ernest Hemingway Award eight years ago for a first novel based on my parents...
...I would suggest, though, that such incentives be offered to all women, not just poor teenagers...
...Housing hardships In "The Mortgaged Generation: Why the Young Can't Afford a House" [April], Phillip Longman's analysis of the housing market is, quite simply, cockeyed...
...SAUL SHIEFMAN Detroit, Michigan Phillip Longman replies: Mr...
...The Japanese are still pursuing this plan, even though we dropped it...
...would that there were 2,000...
...Comparative data is not available for earlier years...
...That will run the costs per pound to $7,000...
...WILLIAM M. KERRIGAN Bethesda, Maryland I have no problem with changing the Social Security law for those just entering the system or who have been in it for a reasonably short time...
...Repeated studies have found that 80 percent of them buy existing homes...
Vol. 18 • June 1986 • No. 5
