A Platform for the Seventies
Redburn, Thomas
A Platform For the Seventies by Thomas Redburn Forget Watergate Watergate 1ias become ~merica’s favorite spectator sport. For two years, the daily news about the Nixon gang has been a...
...With the cost of attending a good private college running near $5,000 a year and the price of a day in a hospital bed over $125, these are obviously not unwarranted concerns...
...8. Cut Civil Service Jobs 50% The dangers of the tenure system, examined at greater length elsewhere in this issue, are obviously considerableespecially in the government, where civil servants’ tenure can become a shield for incompetence...
...We DroDose a 5050 balance as a woriable goal...
...This will be expensive, but so will any other kind of government spending necessary to provide an antidote to recession, whether overt (unemployment payments) or indirect (defense spending), and unlike aircraft carriers, the trains are at least useful...
...This will be small consolation to those who happen to live near the plant...
...about world government...
...Doctors’ fees and hospital costs must be rigorously scrutinized by the government and by the press...
...To have an agency like the CIA, which makes it easy to use force in secret, invites the use of force in marginal situations...
...State costs for welfare, which total over $3.5 billion, would also go...
...But one of the reasons for the UN’s failure is the sentimental hypocrisy of its bargaiiing, which assumes that the U. S., Russia, and Mali are going to sit down to hammer out a deal...
...At the same time, the recent showdowns between civil servants in the IRS and President Nixon’s political appointees remind us why we don’t want a government composed entirely of people who owe...
...you want life to be regular and smooth so that your dollars aren’t devaluing before your eyes and there’s no danger that radicals will come out of the woodwork to expropriate your holdings...
...President Nixon assured Congress that there would be guarantees built in to prevent...
...Because it is never prudent to rely totally on one system, there is also an argument for retaining one of the two other wings of our current strategic force-either the manned B-52 bombers or the land-based Minuteman missiles...
...The one absolutely crucial priority is to maintain a secure and efficient fleet of Polaris submarines equipped with nuclear missiles...
...Much of the world is short of people to teach fundamental skills in reading, writing, mathematics, and agri- 4 culture...
...Only against Hitler andperhaps if we had stopped at the 38th parallel-in Korea have we had right on our side in modern times...
...But a family with only one worker who eams $26,400 has to pay only half as much as the family with the same income from two workers and gets the same benefits...
...Social security is not an insurance program or a pension plan...
...By cutting down on waste and needless consumption and learning to use the various small-scale energy sources that can be developed rapidly, we could get by without nuclear power plants...
...With all the federal dollars spent on research, it is frightening that no one has answered this basic question...
...We should abandon the idea of prisons as rehabilitation centers, with their promise of uplifting and improving the inmates through counseling and behavior modification...
...There would be a small fee for medical services, based on income, to discourage hypochondriacs from filling doctors’ offices...
...Our recent sins in Chile only remind one of what has been bad news from Guatemala to the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam-the operations division of the CIA...
...C. D. W. Thornton, former head of the ‘AEC‘s security division, tried to institute tighter safety regulations...
...By modernizing the B-52 and not buying the proposed fleet of 244 Bls, we will save approximately $13 billion over the next several years...
...Working families (of four) would receive the $4,800 plus 50 cents for every dollar they earned up to $9,600...
...At least until the day that disarmament comes, we need the Polaris fleet to provide the heart of our nuclear deterrent...
...Yet social security is so completely misunderstood that if the truth were known, it might not be such a sacred cow...
...One of the truths of life is that you can only make deals between b wpeiothp.l e Inw htoh eh aivnet esronmateiothnianlg taore baa, rgthaaint would include the countries with nuclear weapons or nuclear generators, those with the oil and the other crucial raw materials, and those with the food...
...Another truth of life is that if you have a lot of money, you want things to be like they were during the Fifties...
...We aren’t going to solve any of them until we get our minds off what Haldeman said to Ehrlichman and what Ehrlichman said to Mitchell...
...as more and more people learn how to use them, they will increase in value even more...
...But we should have learned that lesson by now, and there is no reason why an expanded and internationalized Peace Corps, sent not to peddle an ideological line or prop up any regime, but to work on small-scale agricultural and educational projects, could not avoid that danger of alliance, and by its mere presence, help prevent bloodshed...
...So developing an alternativea functioning national railroad system on a par with European linesis an important place to invest our energies...
...One hesitates even to mention these phrases, since the existing international organizations have acquired such well-deserved reputations for soft thought, crazy dreams, and mighty torrents of hot air...
...Given all we know about the imperfectibility of human efforts, this belief that reality is perfectly controllable and every foul-up can be prevented is truly frightening...
...which means a net cost to taxpayers of $1 billion...
...Families and individuals with no earnings would receive the basic guarantee...
...The alternative is to let a hundred flowers bloom...
...A more evenly balanced system would help us take advantage of the strengths of each group-the experience and political independence of the civil servants, and the fresh blood and willingness to take risks of the political appointees...
...But our experience at home hasn’t been particularly reassuring-ouc inter-plant shipment, for example, ended up in Tijuana...
...Each of these ships costs about $1 billion, requires another $2-billion worth of companion vessels, and is, after all that expense, ridiculously vulnerable to attack...
...And it turns out that social security, on balance, tends to transfer income from lo$-income groups...
...7. Legalize Dope, Wake Up the Cops About 28 per cent of all criminal arrests are for drunkenness, narcotics, gambling, or prostitution charges...
...The controversy over the safety of nuclear plants most clearly resembles a shouting match in which each side throws probability statistics at the other...
...Like veteran baseball fans reliving Bobby Thomson’s home run, we endlessly discuss “What did the President know and when did he know it?’’ or “How did Jeb Magruder lose his moral compass...
...Changes in the tax system would also discourage the trend toward increasingly larger corporations...
...Higher corporate taxes would discourage growth for growth’s sake...
...Yet the current plan is to rely on nuclear energy to supply 25 per cent of our power by 1990...
...They should exist because society cannot allow certain infractions to go unpunished without eroding the basis of the rules we have adopted to define acceptable and unacceptable conduct...
...For two years, the daily news about the Nixon gang has been a delicious opiate for us all...
...Beyond that, there is not very much of the current defense establishment which makes a genuine contribution to our security...
...Although this year’s bad harvest will reduce the figure, in recent years the U. s. and Canada have been providing 90 per cent of the world’s exportable food, most of it from the U. S. Those people who are, for the very best reasons, concerned that we be generous with this food at a time when the prospects for world famine are worse than ever, are often tempted to pretend that the food is not a “bargaining chip” because a moral nation should never withhold food from hungry neighbors...
...Within the last year, the three economic issues most on people's minds have also dramatically illustrated the limits of purely national action: a) the rise in fuel prices, which had less to do with physical shortages than with a world situation in which the sellers could whipsaw the buyers...
...4. Keep the Doctors from Robbing Us A new system of health care financing is just as clearly needed, not only to reduce the fear of a calamity threatening a family’s security, but also as a means of providing more equitable care...
...Abolish Dirty Tricks Facing the use of force should make clear how seldom its use is justified...
...A Platform For the Seventies by Thomas Redburn Forget Watergate Watergate 1ias become ~merica’s favorite spectator sport...
...Using Our ‘Oil Weapon’ In tlis kind of bargaining, it may’ be argued, the Arab oil powers have absolutely nothing to gain...
...and, growing from the previous two, c) the inflation which is now clearly the major emergency in both industrialized and underdeveloped countries...
...No system of iuternational cooperation could make the rains come during the drought, or automatically produce limitless supplies of clean energy...
...If we taxed all income the same, whether it came from capital gains, oil wells, state bonds, or ordinary wages, we would reduce the level of taxation on all families earning less than $25,000...
...3. Let the Student Pay A person considering starting a risky enterprise or embarking on a different, more challenging career that involves some financial sacrifice will think twice if he has two children just about to graduate from high school or has a history of heart disease in his family...
...There is a place then for third parties who can play a helpful role and who do not happen to be involved in the local hatreds...
...The result is a lack of respect for law enforcement that liberals perceive as serious only when there’s someone like Richard Nixon they really want to get...
...This health program should not cost over $7 billion more than the combined cost of all present public and private health programs...
...This would cost an estimated $30.9 billion in 1976...
...The Consumer Price Index just isn’t as sexy as Thomas Redburn is on the staff of The Washington Monthly...
...That amount, as well as the net cost of all the other recommendations made in this article, can easily be made up for by the defense savings we propose...
...Of course the Arabs are currently held together by the Palestine issue...
...a new round of indictments...
...Here are some examples of where the money could come from: Aid for families with dependent children (AFDC) will cost $4.9 billion in 1976...
...slept upon...
...We can guarantee, by refusing to build nuclear generators, that none of our cities will be destroyed by an accidental explosion...
...We also don’t mean that half the civil servants should be fired outright (don’t panic all you GS 15s)-only that, as every other job opens up, it should be filled with a non-tenured employee subject to replacement at any time...
...Much-of the world is full of crippling tribal hatreds...
...And if Congress still wants to help out particular friends with handouts, at least it would have to provide them in the form of direct gifts instead of hiding them in the tax laws...
...By those standards, the Arabs have not exactly created ideal conditions for themselves...
...Not even greatly increased security can completely prevent the theft or sabotage of nuclear materials...
...Very rarely do all the members of the UN, for example, agree about anything...
...But it is reasonable to believe that outsiders can do something to reduce tribal hatred-even if that something is merely living without hatred among the bitter people and thereby lowering the average level of hostility...
...Under-funded and compelled to drop “unprofitable” cities and routes, Amtrak is at best a shadow of a genuinely effective national rail system...
...The simplest solution is a program that would provide practically free care for everyone...
...they have the oil and everyone else needs it...
...Many Americans still do not have minimum protection against medical expenses-40 per cent of the working poor have no health insurance and even comprehensive insurance programs often set a limit of $5,000 on claims...
...We are committing the bulk of our research efforts to developing nuclear power to the practical exclusion of alternative possibilities...
...their jobs to politics...
...When they can’t walk, the police should at least use motor scooters, which can’t be...
...Also, the doctors and nurses guilds must open themselves up to people on the basis of demonstrated compassion and comeptence, not on the basis of degrees...
...The 1972 Russian grain deal illustrated how persuasive a weapon our food could be...
...It is worth remembering, however, that for 25 years the cause of international cooperation has been left exclusively in the hands of Norman Cousins...
...This makes the tax clearly regressive, since the higher your salary above the maximum, the lower your effective tax rate...
...In order to protect the submarines, we must also ’ make sure that our research and development of anti-submarine warfare techniques is as good as the Russians’, and that our counterintelligence forces do their best to keep the locations of the submarines secret...
...Most often this statistic is used to justify removing that large portion of the problem from any hope of solution, while the economists apply the tools they have-Phillips curve analyses, or exhorting the average man to spend less-to the part that is left...
...Obviously, it would be in the billions, since so much of social security goes to people who have adequate incomes without it...
...government and pay in one of the two commodities our government most cherishes, cash or natural gas...
...Atomic materials are valuable...
...It will be painful to give up’ our daily Watergate fix, but there are, more important problems now.’ Among them is inflation, the related possibility of world depression, and the other issues discussed in this article...
...Moreover, air pollution, fuel restraints, and urban congestion will keep us from indefinitely expanding our airline and automobile systems...
...there should be minimum standards of competence that both kinds of appointees must meet...
...The funds could come from getting rid of some-not even all-of the other welfare and incometransfer programs now on the books...
...For instance, a student may agree to pay back one per cent of his income for every $2,500 borrowed...
...Stuck on page four, however, was an article headed “Inflation’s Ugly Questions: Can the Nation Survive It...
...All of this while the economy is collapsing around us...
...As his income changed, the amount owed would change in accordance...
...As long as there are nuclear generators in operation anywhere in the world, sources of plutonium will be there for the hijaclung...
...Life in the bureaucracies might be shaken up because the threat of being left out in the cold would no longer be so strong (see “Putting Yourself on the Line,” page 19...
...BvDass the UN Unlike any of the previous topics, the control of nuclear hazards has a troubling limitation: there is only so much that we, as a nation, can do to protect ourselves...
...Our current approach of I putting people in prison t6-“reforrn3 them is based on an attitude that criminals should be treated like children...
...Experience in our own country suggests why: the “tribal” conflict between black and white in the United States has been resolved in more or less satisfactory fashions in different parts of the country, and one of the things that has seemed to help, as in Atlanta during the 195Os, is the presence of thrd-party Yankees not involved in the hatred...
...1. An Income Cushion for Everyone One of the saddest outcomes of the 1972 presidential campaign is that an idea whose time had come-the guaranteed income-appears to have been banished for years from political consideration...
...Of course, the AEC reassures us, there is nothing to ‘worry about-but just in case, it asked Congress to pass a bill limiting a company’s liability for a nuclear power plant accident to $560 million...
...Defense-The Nukes We Need The modern world being what it is, this country does have a few genuine defense requirements...
...The case against nuclear energy, then, is that the risks overwhelm the good it might possibly do...
...Of course the obstacles are enormous...
...Let’s see how it could work...
...It also does not tax sources of income other than salaries, which is still another way of helping the rich who get their income from interest, dividends, and capital gains...
...McGovem convinced a great many people that the cost of a guaranteed income would be so large that he couldn’t even talk about it...
...And this doesn’t include the miltions in tax incentives for continued plundering of oil and gas, when we may need them for many more years than we are presently counting on...
...airplanes are inefficient for many of the shorthaul flights they now make...
...Two reforms, however, could ease the anxiety . One such change would be to establish a variant of the Educational h Oprpoppoorsteudn ityb y BManilkto, n anF rieiddemaa n firisnt 1955...
...There are, to be sure, important lessons to be learned from Watergate, but most of us have already learned them...
...But beyond the extension of security to many who are not rich, there is still an overwhelming need to provide greater equity in the way government pays its way and provides its rewards...
...The truly surprising thing about this change is that it wouldn’t cost the taxpayers anything new...
...and, when dealing with countries whose cooperation we need in efforts against nuclear terrorism and economic dislocations, to recognize that our food is a powerful bargaining asset and should be used accordingly...
...Of course, third parties can make a situation even worse if they are allied to one of the factions-as were our Special Forces in Asia and the British in Ireland...
...the diversion of nuclear material in the Middle East...
...Working wives suffer because they are required to pay the tax on their wages, yet can receive benefits based only on their husband’s earnings...
...In thc same way we trapped ourselves by relying on the single solution of highways to solve our transportation problem, we are in danger of placing our fate in the single salvation of nuclear energy...
...As of now, all corporate profit above $25,000 is taxed at the same rate...
...It is wise to consider, though, that the AEC argument rests on the assumption that nothing will ever go wrong...
...A better approach would be to say that we don’t need nuclear generators, can’t trust them to supply us with a safe source of energy, and should stop building them before it’s too late...
...There is not, of course, any immediate programmatic solution to tribalism...
...A more realistic approach would consist of two steps: committing ourselves, when dealing with poor countriesespecially those which lack mineral resources and which have suffered most terribly from the rise in fuel and fertilizer prices-to provide the food they need to keep their people alive...
...but I’ve never seen one...
...Under pressure from the industry, he was reorganized out of his position...
...It is a simple transfer of income from one group of citizens, who happen to work, to another group, who don’t...
...In trying to strike bargains on nuclear control, energy coordination, efforts against inflation, and the rest, the U. S. should not overlook the importance of its own version of the “oil weapon”-its exportable food supplies...
...For decades even the most muted criticism of social security has been , politically suicidal...
...Otis Pike has said, “Somewhere in this country there may be Reserve and Guard units dedicated, highly motivated, and ready to go...
...But by ourselves we cannot guarantee that our cities will be safe from terrorists with homemade nuclear bombs...
...This involves restoring the quality of service between the major cities, of course, but it also means massive construction of small-city networks, commuter routes, trolleys, and subways...
...Philip Stern estimates that $77 billion is lost through tax loopholes, each year, and although they’re designed to give the average man a bit of the money being spread around, the rich are the prime beneficiaries (for why this persists, see “The Screwing of the Average Man: The Victim as Co-Conspirator,” page 35...
...Behind the liberal distrust for law and order there is, of course, the important understanding that social forces and economic injustice are the deepest causes of many crimes...
...Legalizing these victimless crimes would free both the courts and the police to concentrate on violent crime, which has risen 46 per cent in the last six years...
...The Peace Corps, however, has stumbled into something that has possibilities...
...By “political appointees” we mean anyone who would be spending a limited time in the governmenteither through a short, fixed term or serving at the whim of the President...
...b) the rise in food prices, which has Q made world conditions of supply and demand a reality in every local market...
...But instead of attacking those causes directly, liberals have too often attempted to make up for them by altering the rules and condemning persons who enforce them...
...But if-and only if-all reasonable approaches fail and the Arab oil powers continue to threaten the world with economic disaster, we should be prepared to threaten them with military force...
...6. Punishment Is Necessary For many Americans, crime and the fear of crime have become the single greatest threat to physical security...
...Supplementary security income (SSI), a new program to provide a minimum income for the aged and disabled who don’t receive an adequate income from social security payments, will run $5.6 billion...
...It may also be worth stationing a small U. S. force in Europe to present a “tripwire” appearance to both our allies and the Russians...
...We have asked everywhere, but no one in the i) government, including the Office of Management and Budget seems to know the answer...
...Prisons should be merely the place where people who have broken serious laws are forced to go...
...there are also the 50,000plus annual deaths from auto injuries...
...Too often, the liberal response has been to wish away the genuine fear of crime, or to regard it as somehow beneath considera tion, and to focus exclusively on the social forces behind criminal behavior, leaving the right wing to monopolize programs of crime control...
...It was comfortingly subtitled, “History’s Parallels are Plentiful and They All Say No.’’ The relative placement of the stories reflects the amount of attention we have given Watergate and inflation...
...Fusion power, which uses universally available hydrogen and which may turn out to be a safe, virtually limitless source of energy, will receive only $100 million...
...It would also reduce the power of the civil service unions and help us cope with the geometrically escalating bill for public employees’ salaries, since people who expected their government service to be temporary would not need to insist on the annual grade promotions or in-grade raises that are the civil servant’s ticket to security...
...Our certainty that hijackers will not succeed will be only as good as the security system of the most weakly protected generator in the world...
...Before the Department of Agriculture turned the deal into a disaster by channeling it through the big grain companies, the Russians had offered to buy directly from the U.S...
...once the bank is initially funded (probably by selling bonds), it would support itself...
...In their discussions of inflation, many American economists have alluded to estimates that between 55 and'60 per cent of the recent dramatic inflation has been caused by rises in food and fuel prices...
...The federal government has allocated $600 million for research on nuclear power in fiscal 1975, compared to $300 million for fossil fuel research, and negligible amounts on solar, tidal, and wind research...
...However, if by the time it occurs we’re depending on nuclear power as a major source of energy, it will be incredibly expensive to switch to other energy sources, if it is possible at all...
...Such a system should not be merely a nostalgic adjunct to cars and planes, but a serious alternative means of transportation for both passengers and freight...
...The slogan “No More Munichs” led us into the criminal folly of Vietnam...
...It might also reduce the taxes of lower income families, who disproportion- @ ately contribute toward financing the public universities that serve primarily the off-spring of the upper-middle class...
...4 But there is still another way t o use the tax system to encourage competition: making all investment losses in new businesses deductible (and eliminating the complicated restrictions and special provisions of the current code...
...We have tried to figure out how much we would save if we abolished social security in favor of a guaranteed annual income...
...Tax reform is the best way to achieve that goal...
...But even as they expand their fleets of limousines and Lear jets, the Arabs must be thinking anxiously about the economic havoc in the rest of the world...
...In contrast to present loan arrangements, repayments for this loan would be spread out over the course of the recipient’s working life and would be directly tied to his annual income...
...We could save $13 billion every year by cutting back our ratio of support to combat troops to what it was at the end of World War 11 and which is what the Russians’ is today...
...The expansion of the nuclear industry also increases the possibility that potential blackmailers could obtain enough nuclear material to build a weapon...
...Real police competence must be rewarded...
...Right now, the make- @ up of the federal government and many state governments is more like 95-percent civil service, five-percent political...
...There is a real danger, however, that such a federal program of health financing would merely turn into a giant Blue Cross, unquestioningly shelling out for ever-higher medical costs...
...If we can persuade Israel to a fair compromise, we will then have non-oil Arabs such as the Egyptians as powerful allies in seeking reasonable accommodation with the Saudis and Kuwaitis...
...4 11...
...At that point they would enter the regular tax system...
...Unlike the threats to economic security, the apparent solutions to crime are distasteful and authoritarian...
...Attack Tribalism Next to the idiocy of the- CIA dirty- tricks operation -and aren ’t E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy perfect symbols of the kind of demented plotters and gunslingers who should be in jail instead of working for the United States governmentranks the silliness of trying to change the American image abroad represented by the United States Information Agency and the Peace Corps...
...9. The National Defense Railroad Act Autos are too small-scale for most transportation in big cities (it is as if every person in an office building had to provide his own heater...
...That moment ended when Russia produced its bomb, and it was understood that the control of nuclear weapons would be a matter for the two great powers to decide...
...2. No More Social Security But this proposal doesn’t take into account social security-the most regressive income transfer of them all...
...Now for the first time since the I late 1940s, there is again a compelling reason to tlink hard...
...Actually it would be relatively inexpensive to institute a negative income tax that promised a family of four $4,800” annually at an additional cost to taxpayers of about $1 billion, or less than one-half of one per cent of the federal budget...
...India was able to divert enough material -from a Canadian-built reactor to construct its nuclear device...
...The social security tax is a flat-rate tax on earnings which applies only to the first $13,200 of salary...
...Can anyone imagine continuing to use nuclear plants once one has blown up, whether it is caused by mechancial failure or sabotage...
...The USIA should be abolished...
...The slogan “No More Vietnams” can lead to more criminal folly, the acceptance of worldwide depression-with depression’s proven capacity for breeding dictatorsliip and war-as preferable to the use of muscle against Kuwait...
...It should almost go without saying that we are not dreaming fondly of resurrecting the seedier aspect of the spoils system...
...The money they hurried to invest in foreign business stocks niust have lost half its value already, and while they may be feeling the pinch of inflation less than the rest of us, they can’t be happy to see their dollars and Deutsche marks devaluing before their eyes...
...This bank would lend money to students for any kind of post-highschool education and require them to pay it back out of their future earnings...
...McGovem’s clumsiness in proposing “demogrants” frightened liberals away from what could have been the most important change in domestic policy since the New Deal...
...The only cold comfort to take from the situation is this: all governments are increasingly being forced to face similar problems...
...The Nuclear Threat Next Door ~ A recent study by the Atomic Energy Commission, the people who are trying to bring the pleasures of peaceful nuclear power to America, estimates that a blowup at a relatively small nuclear reactor could kill 3 400, injure 43,000, and cause $7-billion worth of property damage...
...Congress could change corporate tax rates to discourage mergers and uneconomic growth...
...In addition, if the smaller corporations, where the experiments and the risk ventures are undertaken, had lower tax rates, capital would be more likely to flow to them instead of being locked up in the General Motors and Prudential Life Insurance companies...
...The $300-million WIN program, which provides training for people on welfare but has produced only a handful of jobs, and $879 million in compensation for disabled miners could also be eliminated...
...it can only make it more difficult...
...It might, however, avoid what is all too real a prospect: countries using whatever resource they have to hold the other countries to ransom, in a system which permits very few countries to win (perhaps only the Arab oil powers), brutally punishes others (those underdeveloped countries without minerals or oil), and makes life in the remaining majority more chaotic and uncertain than it needs to be...
...Of course justice must be done, but to the extent it remains possible after the Nixon pardon, it should be left to the special prosecutor and the courts...
...The last time that anyone with pretensions to political, power or a reputation for pragmatism gave a thought to the cause was immediately after World War 11, when the U. S. had sole possession of the atomic bomb and everyone else was apprehensive about how it might be used...
...The first major indication of that pattern emerged from the environmental crises of thee and four years ago, when it became clear that neither pollutants nor biological systems respect national borders...
...The highway lobby sold the interstate highway system in the 1950s on the basis of it’s contribution to national defense, perhaps those who support rail transport might sell Congress on a National Defense Railroad Act...
...If we have to choose one place to start dismantling, the grotesque and anachronistic schemes for a mighty fleet of aircraft carriers is the obvious place to begin...
...This would free parents from the task of coming up with the $4,000-5,000 per year to send a child t o a p r i v a t e university or $2,000-3,000 for a public-institution...
...Another $4.4 billion can be saved annually by abolishing the Reserves and National Guard, of which Rep...
...Another fine candidate for extinction is the B-1 bomber, which the Pentagon is proposing as a substitute for the present bomber fleet but which does not have any persuasive advantages over the modernized B-52...
...There is another conclusion we might draw from the inflation statistic and from the other indications that major problems such as the multinational corporations have gone beyond the scale of national control: that the time has come to devote serious, practical thought to systems of international cooperation and world government...
...See “How Not to Help Small Business,” page 29...
...2.5-billion worth of additional social services provided by the states under federal financing that people would be able to buy themselves under a guaranteed income T h e $4,800 guarantee is based on providing $1,600 for the first two family members, $800 for each of the next three, and $500 for each family member thereafter...
...For many liberals, crime has been the most difficult social issue to confront honestly...
...Even if students who choose to become social workers, small businessmen, or poets paid back less than they borrowed, their classmates who became lawyers and doctors would make it up by paying more...
...Theodore Taylor, one of the men who helped develop the atomic bomb, is convinced that a small group would have no trouble constructing its own bomb, once it got the six kilograms of plutonium or 20 kilos of enriched uranium...
...Nuclear power is the only source of energy presently being considered that can never be allowed to go wrong...
...Take a recent “Week in Review’’ section of The New York Times: almost all of its front page was devoted to Watergate and none of it to inflation...
...The nuclear industry has forcefully resisted even modest improvements in security precautions...
...With the exception of our involvement in the Vietnam war, most of the blood that has been shed in warfare in the last decade has been the result of disputes between opposing “tribes” occupying contested grounds: Greek and Turk in Cyprus, Israeli and Arab in the Middle East, Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, Hindu and Moslem in the sub-continent, Ibo and Hausa in Nigeria...
...Eliminating food stamps and nutrition programs would be another $5.9 billion...
...We should do what we can to cope with the real source of most armed conflict in the world today-not ideology but “tribal” disputes...
...We could abolish veterans’ pensions, on which we will spend $6.5 billion...
...A policeman on foot is a more reassuring presence than an air-conditioned patrol car with closed windows speeding by...
...But if your income from wages is over the maximum, you pay the tax on only the first $13,200...
...If you earn below the maximum $13,200, you pay the tax on your full salary...
...There is every reason to believe that people will attempt to steal them, and that eventually they will succeed...
...A family with two workers, each earning $13,200, pays the full tax on both salaries...
...It should be abolished forthwith...
...Too many police departments use a quota system that encourages traffic arrests and do little to grant promotions to officers who spend several weeks tracking down violent criminals...
...In addition, police should attempt to build confidence in the safety of the streets by placing more patrolmen on evening walking beats in areas where people might congregate...
...The type of reactor the U. S. is promising Egypt and Israel is capable of producing up to 200 kilograms of plutonium annually...
...The 30 per cent rise in Amtrak business within the last year indicates that the nation is ready for such a move...
...It would also free teachers from having to teach students who don’t care, who are in school only because their parents are paying for it, which corrupts the whole process of higher education...
...Not only have such methods failed to rehabilitate criminals, they have tended to increase the cruelty in prisons by giving prison officials and psycholo gists much greater freedom to impose arbitrary sanctions under the guise of treatment...
...5. Encourage Free Enterprise The E d u c a tional Opportunity Bank and comprehensive health financing together would ease the fear of being plunged over the brink into insecurity...
Vol. 6 • October 1974 • No. 8
