LETTERS
LETTERS Get Me Rewrite In December's "Tilting at Windmills:' there is the statement that the first film version of The Front Page starred Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Uhuh! That was the...
...I wonder what the result would be if the FAA or, better still, a private insuring agency, took out ads in all the media to the effect that: ABC Airline Does Not Use Safe Maintenance Procedures...
...Kaus does not suggest that either of these crashes was linked to economic deregulation of the airlines...
...JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH Cambridge, Massachusetts We included your comments in our publication at the House Republican Conference...
...Doolittle well knows, the competitive pressures that accompanied air deregulation did not magically begin in October 1978 when President Carter signed the deregulation law...
...JERRY DOOLITTLE West Cornwall, Connecticut Jerry Doolittle was assistant administrator for public affairs at the FAA during the Carter administration...
...O'CONNOR Brooklyn, New York...
...I have been an effective volunteer, but in two attempts to involve myself in highly organized illiteracy programs, I was met with unbending bureaucracy, though I am now forever on one of their mailing lists...
...One was in Mexico City (73 dead), where a Western Airlines pilot landed his plane on a closed runway...
...What was a factor was that the plane had less power than its instruments showed, due to ice in a sensing device...
...Unfortunately for his thesis, this was a month before deregulation became law...
...Surely there is a limit on the supply of funds...
...If he has, then he needs some public-policy tutoring...
...Doolittle's letter is itself evidence of this second point...
...In this context, the book attempts to make at least these two points: —Economic regulation need not necessarily involve an overhead public agency, and I give a number of examples in support of this argument, one of them being the recent agreement among players and owners to "regulate" the National Basketball Association...
...however if only 1 percent of that number (40,000) were involved in lobbying local, state, and federal governments for substantial new funding, the benefits to illiterate adults would far exceed the gains achieved by those 40,000 volunteer adults tutoring illiterate students...
...all should be part of one system that protects people against true need!' The great unknown truth of the federal budget crisis is that non-means-tested entitlement programs make up well over half of all non-defense expenditures and are escalating rapidly, while programs targeted to the truly needy are a small and shrinking portion of the budget...
...But it is another matter in the Washington crash of an Air Florida jet (78 dead) and the crash of an American Airlines plane in Chicago (273 killed...
...Many liberals continue to speak of all entitlements as a seamless web of "progressive" programs...
...Just as a few school districts are going back to primers sans illustrations and sans software, it is disappointing and disconcerting to hear a good-hearted person say: "Oh you volunteers, no tutoring today please—let's lobby!' I have been involved in several volunteer groups, including a mediation center, a neighborhood patrol, the March of Dimes, and tenant and homosexual rights efforts...
...A.P.J...
...Travel With Them At Your Own Risk...
...I hate to use the term, but there does seem to be a virtual conspiracy of silence on this most fundamental aspect of federal spending...
...Travel With Them At Your Own Risk...
...I concede, as I tried to in my piece, that it's difficult to read much into current statistics because air disasters are rare and a single big crash can skew casualty figures for years...
...Got That, Boys...
...Since our putative neoliberal candidates for president (Askew, Hart, and Hollings) seem to be going nowhere in the polls, maybe one of them would adopt "getting the rich off welfare" as a campaign slogan...
...Another was in New Orleans, where 153 died when a Pan American plane was downed by windshear—a meteorological phenomenon which is still imperfectly understood...
...How do we come by this information...
...Unfriendly Skies Your December article on the dangers resulting from airline deregulation ["Cheap Seats and White Knuckles:' Robert M. Kaus] reminded me of a story a friend who was employed by the U.S...
...BOB FAUVRE Eugene, Oregon Any author must appreciate a review that is generally favorable, but in his look at my Rebuilding America: The Case for Economic Regulation, Robert M. Kaus grossly misstates my overall position on airline regulation...
...This goal should become one of the founding principles of "neoliberalism:' along with economic productivity and military reform...
...Thayer reminds us, American Airlines decided to save some money in the inspection of the engines on its DC-10s:' This new inspection procedure was indeed a factor in the accident—but American Airlines began using it not in 1979, but in mid-1977...
...Neither fatality figures nor types of accident so far indicate that deregulation has had any effect on air safety at all, one way or another...
...A second point was that while liberals are usually quick to note the negative side effects of unbridled competition, they now have so much invested in deregulation that they react with automatic hostility to anyone who suggests safety might have declined...
...I have indeed "been a somewhat lonely voice over the past decade" in criticizing the movement toward economic deregulation in a number of industries, but one reason is that I have definitely not been "waxing nostalgic about the glory days of CAB-type cartels!' I have argued all along that the CAB regulatory system was indeed wasteful, inefficient, and otherwise faulty, even if it was a little better than what we have now...
...In support of this he points out that air carrier fatalities averaged less than 80 a year during the 1975-77 period and 150 a year for 1978-82...
...XYZ Airline Denies Safety Inspectors Permission To Monitor Their Maintenance Procedures...
...Many thanks for Phillip Keisling's excellent piece on Medicare ["Protection from Catastrophe: The Medicare Reform We Really Need"] in your November issue...
...Art Ellison states in his letter ["Letters;' December 1983]: "Four million volunteers are needed to teach illiterate adults...
...Conservatives prefer to perpetuate the myth that "social spending" mainly benefits lazy welfare bums who buy vodka with change from their food stamps...
...In the deregulated, white-knuckle year of 1980 there was one (yes, one) air carrier fatality...
...My basic point was that there is every reason to expect flying to prove less safe...
...But, let's assume he was just being epigrammatic...
...Ellison said to himself, perhaps, something like this: "Well, we lobbyists here have managed to raise X dollars, so a thousand times us should be able to come up with X,000 dollars...
...Introducing a means test for all entitlements would serve both fiscal responsibility and social justice...
...KEVIN A. JENSEN Atlanta, Georgia Not 1 Cent for Selectrics Now wait a minute...
...HERMAN GORDON Washington, D.C...
...The handwriting had been on the wall for many months, and most airlines had already been looking for ways to cut costs and prepare for the intensified competition that awaited them...
...So it doesn't really matter whether American Airlines began cutting corners in 1977 or 1979...
...The rings were taken off the market...
...In the equally perilous deregulated skies of 1981 there were four...
...nor do they prove anything at all...
...Faster and looser...
...The first one was in 1930 starring Adolph Menjou...
...I did err in saying Air Florida was trying to save on fuel, rather than maintenance...
...As a cause becomes popular, and its adherents increase, politicians rebuff no longer with: "I can't give you funds for Y, because the people don't care about Y," but with: "I can't give you funds because we've already started programs with the Y League, the National Y Guild, Women for Y, and the Urban Y Coalition!' More hunters do not make for more game...
...Airline fatalities, by their nature, come in bunches...
...One big bunch that Kaus throws into the postderegulation (i.e., "white knuckles") period was the San Diego mid-air collision of September 25, 1978, in which 144 persons died...
...Corners were cut, and the DC-10 crash is still an illustration of how cost-competition can be dangerous...
...With respect to public transportation, any headtohead competition is inherently wasteful and inefficient...
...Of the Chicago crash, Mr...
...Public Health Service told me some years ago...
...Inconveniently for the Kaus thesis, once again, this preceded deregulation by more than a year...
...In the years when deregulation actually could have been a factor, there have been four big bunches...
...JACK KEMP Washington, D.C...
...Money Matters Your piece on the monetary aberration ["The Cult of M1',' Jonathan Rowe, November 1983] is excellent...
...But these good years are no more significant, statistically, than the bad years are...
...How can anyone, especially a reader of this magazine, put such vintage 1969 faith in paid governmental efforts...
...Kaus writes, "In 1979...
...Do not relent...
...On pages 65 and 66 of its report, the National Transportation Safety Board says that, since if "full thrust had been added immediately...
...The mass-consumption press appears to be genuinely ignorant of any distinctions in the budget other than "guns" versus "butter'.' As an active Democrat, I find it obscene that most of my party's national leaders (certainly Fritz Mondale, Ted Kennedy, Tip O'Neill, and most of all Claude Pepper) resist any modifications in middle-class entitlement programs, when they must surely realize that the cost of these programs is "squeezing" less popular lowincome programs right out of existence...
...You know:' he said, "there was a manufacturer who intended to market an infant's teething ring that he had painted with radium paint so the infant could see it in the dark...
...In "Cheap Seats and White Knuckles:' Robert M. Kaus argues that economic deregulation of the airlines in 1978 has made flying more dangerous...
...Keisling made his most important point in the very last paragraph: "Ultimately, there should be no distinction between Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and welfare...
...Devising suitable regulatory schemes for many industries, perhaps on a global basis, cannot be an easy task, but "Mussolini-type" schemes are not really necessary...
...These figures prove nothing of the kind...
...Kaus writes that "cost-cutting was...a factor" in the Washington disaster, because Air Florida pilots "had been trained to avoid using full power on takeoff in order to economize on fuel:' If this was a factor, it escaped the attention of the National Transportation Safety Board, which didn't raise the question in its 137-page report on the crash...
...FREDERICK C. THAYER Washington, D.C...
...Has Mr...
...The first step, however, is to acknowledge that the "efficiency" of free markets is a myth that cannot withstand analysis...
...The airline problem all along was too much competition, not too little, so that the decision to greatly increase competition (excessive duplication of service and capacity) only made this problem worse—by vastly increasing the number of empty seats and virtually compelling airlines to cut corners...
...We had absolutely no legal way by which we could prevent him from doing this, so what we did was to take out ads in all the media telling people they were free to buy the rings, but if used, the rings would probably kill their babies...
...That was the second...
...If I may be allowed some vintage 1980 skepticism, wouldn't those substantial new funds increase the benefits to folks who are able to find employment with adult illiteracy projects...
...the aircraft could probably have accelerated to a safe stall margin and continued flying, it believes that the flight crew hesitated in adding thrust because of the concern about exceeding normal engine limitations, which is ingrained throughout flight crew training programs: According to an NTSB spokeman, the crews are trained never to exceed those limitations, even for short periods, in order to avoid maintenance costs...
...I think, too, of all the old Royals and Remingtons I see in the offices of small businesses and large banks, and all the sleek new Selectrics I see in the offices of government, universities, and other non-profit, ungreedy places...
...I've never read one better...
...The author replies: As Mr...
...Doolittle is plain wrong about the Air Florida crash...
Vol. 16 • February 1984 • No. 1
