Tilting at Windmills
Tilting at Windmills The cost of higher education is being recognized more and more as a serious national problem. The Washington Monthly got into it several years ago through a logical back...
...Percy, with a choice of over a hundred trips by Lance to his vacation home at Sea Island, asked about one “on February 5,” to which Lance was able to reply, “That was to the American Banking Association convention that was held at Sea Island...
...So that the student won’t fail to repay-as we recently learned 37 HEW officials making between $15,000 and $43,000 a year had failed to do-repayment should be withheld from earnings along with income taxes at a rate of 3 to 5 per cent annually...
...B e r t Lance always seemed to us a bizarre choice to head OMB, and indeed, beyond hiring excellent subordinates he spent little time on that job...
...So as we reflect on the press coverage of his story, it is not the end of the affair that bothers us so much as does the failure of the press to put Lance’s failings as a businessman into perspective...
...Some of the reasons we’ve found for that caution are deeply ingrained in character and difficult to do anything about...
...Norman Dick, who was elected to the House last year after spending eight years as an aide to Senator Warren Magnuson, was recently quoted by Martin Tolchin of The New York Times as saying, “People asked me how I felt about being elected to Congress, and I told them I never thought I’d give up that much power voluntarily” . . . . On the other hand, one’s staff can provide life after electoral death...
...Another untaught truth is that even someone who can’t afford a lobbyist can practically assure favors from his congressman by making a relatively small campaign contribution$500 for congressmen, $1,000 for senators...
...T h e rash of plane hijackings abroad reminds us of one of the most successful crime prevention actions ever taken by a government: the federal requirement that passengers and their luggage be subjected to inspection for firearms before boarding aircraft . . . . Ray Marshall, the Secretary of Labor, is reported to be concerned that Michael Blumenthal, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Charles Schultze, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, are not being frank enough with Carter about what’s wrong with the economy...
...Further evidence that prison does not rehabilitate comes from this report from Sweden by Jonathan Kandell of The New York Times: “Norrkoping, Sweden-The Swedes have one of the most progressive and humane prison systems...
...Lance pointed out that when Georgians went to a place called Warm Springs they went to Warm Springs, Georgia, not Warm Springs, Virginia, to which, by the way, there are two commercial airports closer than Lynchburg...
...The rest are GS-14s and 15s, most of whom can charitably be described as having, in the words of Leonard Reed, responsibilities roughly com,parable to those of a supermarket manager...
...T h e picture of lobbyists that is usually presented to students of government is that there are bad ones who bribe and good ones who seek to use rational persuasion...
...One of the great truths of Washington life little known by the folks back home is the power of congressional staff members...
...This is enough to buy “access” to a member of Congress, and the side that has access usually wins...
...Of these, only 4,500 are in the top supervisory jobs...
...We hope Congress will get busy and enact it...
...But one seems easy to cure...
...The Government has striven to keep prison populations low, to mete out short sentences, to provide a vast array of services and support facilities for inmates, and to experiment with minimum-security detention centers...
...The farewell party crowded with fatcats proving their devotion to some departing official is a standard Washington ritual...
...How many grocers sell their customers bacon with cancercausing nitrite...
...One of our central concerns has been the extreme caution, often bordering on cowardice, of federal employeestheir unwillingness to blow the whistle when they encounter wrong-doing, or to take risks to make sure their bosses are exposed to the right ideas and facts...
...At a recent party attended by junior members of the White House staff, a vote was taken to name the biggest selfpromoter among their superiors: the winners were Zbigniew Brzezinski and Esther Petersen...
...To us, then, a federal student loan program became an important way to deal with the fears of these government employees, and of course, as we thought about it, with the fears of n on-rich parents throughout the country...
...Norvill Jones is chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...J. William Fulbright has been out of the Senate for several years but his influence lives on in the presence of his former staff members...
...People who say disarmament and prosperity are incompatible should study the period from September 1945 through June 1950 when we had both...
...It needs to be taken out of the hands of the banks, made available to everyone who needs it, and made impossible for either schools or students to defraud...
...We have repeatedly expressed our suspicion that there are more than a few isolated cases of former Pentagon officials going to work for defense contractors with whom they had done business while at the Pentagon...
...Senator Percy’s questions about Bert Lance’s use of his company plane illustrated the long limb you can be left on by bad staff work...
...Despite these efforts the prison system has failed to make significant inroads in the rehabilitation of criminals, particularly among those with previous convictions, whose rate of return to prison is over 70 per cent- as high as anywhere in the world...
...That Lance never did harm to his customers is not a bad defense in the world of American businessmen...
...It is the cost of college, a cause for caution most commonly found in people between 40 and 55 who feel that they can’t take the slightest risk of losing the job that is paying their children’s tuition- that indeed it would be selfish of them to seek the personal glory of courageous public service at the risk of denying their children a college education...
...If a student gets cheated, either he or the government should be able to sue the school or its head (so that he can’t hide behind a corporate shield) for triple damages...
...Doesn’t this suggest that repeating criminals should be kept in jail not for their own sake but only to protect society...
...The Washington Monthly got into it several years ago through a logical back door...
...For once there is a reasonably simple solution to a pressing public problem...
...How many retailers sell their customers cigarettes...
...The reality is that the most effective lobbyists work in neither of these ways, but by forming genuine friendships with important officials...
...Also see pages 28-32...
...Remember Charles Wilson and Robert McNamara, two men who were conf i i e d without question as Secretary of Defense-why didn’t anyone care that they had spent years building urlsafe cars that didn’t just cost their customers money, but sometimes killed them...
...and Lee Williams holds a key position on the staff of the Democratic Policy Committee, . . . But congressmen can also be victimized by their staffs...
...We continue to marvel at the ineptitude of the government of the District of Columbia...
...According to a report prepared by the Congressional Research Service, the cost of running the District government is $2,203 per person, while the average cost per person of running 18 other cities of comparable size is $1,320...
...And good lobbyists show their genuineness by remaining loyal friends after the official has lost his power...
...The cleverest demonstrate their friendship by help ing the officials live the lives they wanted to lead when they sought office, whether that involves getting to know Washington socialites, influential journalists, and movie stars, or participating in locker-room camaraderie at Burning Tree...
...77,500 federal civilian employees now make between $30,000 and $47,500 a year...
...There is now evidence in the form of a recent study by the Council on Economic Priorities that the number is slightly more than one fourth of all former Pentagon officials in private employment...
...The way to do all this is to make the loans payable by the government directly to schools for tuition and directly to the students for living expenses, in installments as needed...
...Hoyt Purvis is foreign policy advisor to Robert Byrd, the Senate Majority Leader...
...But the present federal student loan program is a disaster...
...Then Percy moved on to a Lance trip to Warm Springs and asked if the nearest airport to Warm Springs wasn’t Lynchburg, Virginia...
Vol. 9 • November 1977 • No. 9
