with Charles Peters

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill made a speech on March 31, suggesting that the government "should be able to close down businesses that do not meet a mandated level of workplace safety" reported The Washington Post. Apparently, O'Neill had not read another Post story that week which began, "The Bush administration yesterday ordered the suspension of a Clinton rule that would have significantly strengthened the government's ability to deny contracts to companies that have violated workplace safety, environmental, and other federal laws." This appears to be another case, like EPA's Christie Whitman and global warming, where the subordinate is right and the White House is wrong. Maybe we'd be better off with a Bush administration in which the inmates run the asylum. ******* My fear that government is attracting less than the ablest young people has been confirmed by Seth Stern in an article for the Christian Science Monitor. Less than a third of the graduates of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy are entering the federal service. And the same is true of slightly more than a third of the graduates of Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. The situation is sufficiently dire that Harvard's Kennedy School of government is forgiving loans to students who agree to serve as Presidential Management Interns and giving free tuition to some students who commit to three years of public service after graduation. ******* If Jason DeParle's New York Times' articles on welfare didn't convince you that getting a job doesn't end the problems of welfare recipients, be sure to read Katherine Boo's "Does Welfare Make You a Better Mother?" in the April 9 New Yorker. Boo describes a single mother whose departure from welfare has in many ways been a success story. She's a policewoman, holds another part-time security job, and supports her family of four. But even with a good heart and the best intentions in the world, she doesn't have enough time for children. One incident after another tellingly described by Boo makes clear what her children are missing and the pathetically inadequate array of resources available to help her, the most miserable of which are the D.C. public schools (including, by the way, the charter schools that were supposed to save us). The great irony is that the biggest backers of making welfare mothers work are the same conservatives who urge middle-class mothers to stay home. Why is it good for welfare mothers to work, and not for middle-class mothers? I remember making this point to my friend Mickey Kaus just as he launched his on-the-whole-admirable campaign to get liberals to face the need for welfare reform. But Mickey brushed it off, saying it was more important for the welfare children to have the example of a working adult. A good point, but it didn't and still doesn't answer their need for a mother. Liberals also find the news difficult to face because they are so anxious to defend the right of mothers to work that they don't want to acknowledge any downside that can't be cured by quality day care. The Peters solution for welfare mothers with small children: part-time work which would satisfy Mickey's example point and high-quality day care while that work is being done, which should make my fellow liberals happy. The only problem with the Peters solution is that, although I planted its flag a decade ago, I definitely do not see an army, or even a few stragglers, when I look behind me. ******* IRS employees give the wrong advice on tax questions about half the time. Investigators from the Treasury Department's Inspector General's Office posing as taxpayers were given incorrect answers to 47 percent of the questions they asked IRS employees who answered the agency's toll-free help line. Thirty-seven percent of the calls didn't go through. What's the explanation? For the wrong answers, I suspect the grotesquely complicated internal revenue code that Congress has created is a major culprit. When the income tax was begun in 1913, the instructions took only one page. Today, only a genius in both law and accounting could be expected to answer all the questions. But 47 percent wrong is high enough to suggest that the IRS needs better people. And it needs more of them. The unanswered questions demonstrate that the IRS doesn't have enough people to do the job. Since 1992, as the number of tax payers has grown by 10 percent, the number of IRS employees has declined from 115,000 to 97,000. Audits are the best way of catching cheaters, but the audit rate has fallen by two-thirds just since 1995. ******* Speaking of ineptitude, the District of Columbia's government is, of course, the undisputed champion. The latest evidence comes from the 862 traffic tickets given to city agencies whose cars were caught by a camera running a red light. Eleven of the 21 agencies involved have not been able to identify any of the guilty drivers. Since the tickets state the place, date, and time of the offense--I know because I got caught--this means the agencies have no idea who's driving their cars where or when. ******* In 1965, about a third of American women smoked, compared to more than half of men. Today, the difference between the two sexes is only four percent. The result: "Smoking-related deaths have doubled for women since 1965," according to The Washington Post's Abigail Trafford. This has to be one of the great disasters of the women's movement. As they move into male roles they take on male values--and male anxieties. Unfortunately, as U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher put it, "Women who smoke like men die like men." ******* One reason more women are smoking may be that so many are becoming lawyers. Last year women made up 49.4 percent of first-year law students. When I was a lawyer, I smoked three packs a day. If you're a litigator, constant worry goes with the territory--what is your client thinking, what is the opposing lawyer thinking, not to mention the witness on the stand and the judge and the jury, and the appellate court that may second-guess your every move? If you're the kind of lawyer who works on documents in the backroom, self-flagellation is required to keep you alert enough to spot that one little variation in reams of numbing legalese that makes your client the loser in the big merger instead of the other guy. It's like, as one colleague put it, trying to find a flyspeck in black pepper on a dark night. A cigarette helps, or at least seems to. Some people really love the law and are hardy enough not to let the anxiety get them down. Some manage to find work that is genuinely interesting in the service of clients, and causes, they truly believe in. But I have to say that these "somes" are less than a third of the lawyers I've known. Most really don't like their practice. You can see their unease begin even in law school. Only a minority of the students seem really excited by the intellectual content. Even those who find parts of it stimulating as I did, often find other courses dull, sometimes stupefyingly so. So ladies, unless you really love the law, follow the advice I've long given other unhappy lawyers--get out now. Throw away that pack of Marlboros and find work you truly enjoy. ******* Sometimes however, lawyers get a bad rap. One we've all heard is about how they're suing doctors too much. But my hometown paper, the Charleston Gazette, has studied malpractice claims in West Virginia and found that during the last eight years they have not increased but declined. Less than 4 percent of the state doctors were involved in claims filed in the average year. And the claims do not appear to have been frivolous. More than two-thirds ended with a settlement or verdict for the claimant. What turns out to be the story is that a few doctors account for most of the damage. Twenty doctors had more than five claims made against them. Forty accounted for more than one-fourth of the verdicts and settlements. Some of the propaganda from the medical association and insurance companies is demonstrably false. For instance, they tell the legislature that doctors are leaving the state because of malpractice claims. Yet the Gazette found that the number of West Virginia physicians has actually increased in the last decade. But the propaganda goes on because, among other factors, the state's main malpractice insurer pays the state medical association "at least $115,000 a year to lobby legislatures on the company's behalf." This insurance company recently persuaded the state to raise the rates by 35 percent, alleging that it was losing money in the state. Yet the Gazette found that between 1995 and 1999, the agency had collected $71.8 million in premiums from the state while paying only $44.2 million in claims. One other tidbit from the Gazette: the doctors who complain the loudest about malpractice cases are often the doctors who are themselves guilty of malpractice. ******* Another reason to think twice about Bush's tax cut: the Congressional Budget Office projections of a 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion that are used to justify the cut. The projections assume that capital gains realization will continue at almost the record levels of last year, dropping gradually from $652 billion to around $550 billion. "CBO is assuming that the extraordinary capital gains revenues are here to stay," economist Mark Zandi tells Tom Redburn of The New York Times. Another economist, Robert J. Barbera adds, "Estimates of revenues will prove to be greatly exaggerated." So, unless you're confident that the stock market of this decade will repeat the performance of the last, a tax cut of the size proposed by Bush might not be such a good idea. ******* Back to religion. I wrote a few months ago that the voucher argument was becoming irrelevant because parochial schools were running out of space. Take Washington area schools. Even without vouchers, "There are far more parents wanting to put their children in parochial schools in Northern Virginia than there are desks for them," according to a recent article in The Washington Post. ******* Last month I mentioned speaker phones in cars as a possible substitute for a total ban on cell phones. But the more I think about it the less I like the idea. Even though your hands are left free by the speaker phone, your mind is occupied by your conversation instead of what's ahead of you on the road. Even ordinary conversation in the car demonstrates the danger. When my wife and I start talking, we will often miss a turn. If the discussion turns into one of those domestic disputes, we end up in Maryland, in which case the dispute becomes even more heated as we try to blame each other for the error. The point is that any conversation can distract, so why add to the risk with a phone? By the way, just in the week this issue is going to press, a friend of ours was hit and injured by a motorist talking on a cell phone. And I saw another woman pushing a baby across the street in a stroller, absorbed by her cell phone, not looking either way ******* As regular readers know, I find it difficult to resist stories of bureaucratic travel abuse. The latest comes from Montgomery County, Maryland, where Liquor Control Director Howard Cook managed to increase his travel budget from $3,800 in 1997 to $46,000 in 2001. It turns out he and his associates had been visiting vineyards in California, a four-star hotel in Verona, Italy, a Corona beer conference in Mexico, and a "Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Society" gathering in Tennessee. Why do they have to go? One of Cook's associates told The Washington Post's Jo Becker that the trip to Verona was an opportunity to "test new products." Why can't the products be tested in Montgomery County? ******* Some editors are skilled at making sure articles are well written; some are demonic in making sure the facts are right; but few are good at challenging the argument made explicitly, or more often implicitly, by the piece. The articles hailing the success of welfare reform frequently fail to ask what happens to those who have left welfare. Do they have jobs? What kind of jobs? How long have they been able to hold them? Is their life significantly better? What problems remain? What can public agencies do to help? How do these agencies need to be changed in order to give more effective assistance? Obviously short pieces done under daily deadline pressure can't be subjected to this kind of scrutiny. But we can and should expect the editor of a long article or series to demand that the writer supply context, explain significance, and, most especially, examine the evidence that lies behind the opposing quotes that otherwise leave the reader hanging. ******* Here's another discouraging fact about the District of Columbia's school system. Sixty-two percent of the city's residents are in the two lowest levels of literacy. Level 1 readers, who constitute 37 percent, don't read well enough to follow map directions or fill out Social Security applications. Level 2 readers, another 25 percent, can't use a bus schedule or read and summarize magazine articles. 17,000 of the poorest readers are district women on welfare. What kind of jobs are they going to be able to get? The city has an adult literacy program, but, according to The Washington Post's Colbert King, to whom I'm indebted for these facts, it serves less than 3 percent of the people who need it. So here again we see a need for more public money to fund a program large enough to meet the need. Conservatives have to face this fact. But we also need to fire the large number of incompetent teachers and administrators who have made the D.C. school system the disaster it is. And liberals don't like to face this. I remember discussing this issue with one of the best liberal journalists, William Greider, in the Œ80s. Bill said his kids were in the D.C. public schools and he didn't see any problem. The catch was that his kids attended one of the handful of public schools in the prosperous Northwest section of Washington where the Greiders and other influential parents demand quality and push to get rid of teachers and principals who just don't have it. Kate Boo's former welfare mother not only doesn't have this kind of influence, she doesn't have time to try. ******* Eighty-five percent of food poisoning comes from fruits, vegetables, seafood, and cheeses regulated by the FDA, reports The New York Times. The catch is that the FDA has less than a tenth of the inspectors of the Department of Agriculture, which guards against the remaining 15 percent of the danger. The result is that the FDA inspects food manufacturers only once every eight years. You could conclude that inspectors should move from Agriculture to FDA, but not unless you are confident that meat and poultry don't need at least the level of inspection they're getting now. (In fact, as a recent series in The Washington Post demonstrated, what the agricultural inspectors need is not less work but more authority.) Isn't the right answer that the FDA needs more money to hire more inspectors? Of course it does, and that is just one of the many needs for more public money--from having the revenues to provide health care for the uninsured to the funds needed to bring inadequate schools up to snuff. That makes Bush's tax cuts seem unwise. As our contributing editor, Matthew Miller points out, Bush's tax cuts are going to mean that the discretionary domestic budget--total funds available for all the programs I just listed--will shrink to 2.5 percent of GDP. Even under Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior, the figure averaged 3.3 to 3.4 percent. ******* Speaking of needs for money for the District of Columbia, did you know the city's sewer system is 130 years old? Some of it is actually made of wood. "During periods of heavy rains," reports the Associated Press' Darrell Holly, "storm water and waste water mix together enabling raw sewage to flow unimpeded into the waterways [Rock Creek and the Anacostia and Potomac rivers] that ultimately drain into the Chesapeake Bay." $12 million is needed to begin fixing the problem in the next year. Where is it going to come from? ******* After a year or so in power, new administrations tend to become defensive about whatever deficiencies are revealed in the government they oversee. Up until then, they can usually get away with--and often are justified in--blaming it on the other guys in the preceding administration. But sometimes the defensiveness is so much a part of the new gang that it begins to show up immediately. Consider Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (on whom you will find more in "Who's Who"). When the army recently lowered the readiness rating of its 3rd infantry division, Wolfowitz tried to get the rating reversed, according to Paul Bedard of U.S. News and World Report, even though the readiness decline could have been blamed on the Clinton administration. The champion of this form of paranoia was Richard Nixon. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked, he exploded and got the Justice Department to try to keep The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing them--even though all of the misdeeds exposed in the papers happened in the Kennedy-Johnson period. It seems that Nixon so hated leaks that helped the truth get out that he instinctively sought suppression. ******* The Monthly's conflict-of-interest policy, as Christopher Buckley suggests on page 48, is a bit unconventional. In Buckley's case, we have twice asked him to review books we already knew he liked. If we respect the reviewer, we're not bothered by knowing his sentiment in advance. What harm is there? Looking for the harm is the key to our conflict-of-interest policy. It's not whether an official stands to gain personally from a decision, although that is of course grounds for suspicion, but whether, when all the evidence is considered, the decision was a good one or, at least, mainly made for good reasons. Too often reporters jump to the conclusion that the conflict itself makes the official action wrong. Every newsroom should have engraved on the wall Michael Kinsley's question, first asked in these pages 20-years ago: Is it a conflict of interest for a mother to have a second child? Government can decide, often wisely, to remove officials from temptation by forbidding even the appearance of a conflict of interest, but that simply does not mean that every official involved in a conflict of interest always acts wrongly or for wrong motives. What we find least attractive about our colleagues in the press is when, because they have spotted a conflict, they refuse to even consider the possibility of a right action or a good motive. ******* I'm often asked if the lock box where politicians love to say Social Security funds are safely tucked away is real. The answer is no. Your Social Security payroll taxes are not neatly stashed away in a mountain of cash locked in a giant vault. They are used to make payments to the current Social Security recipients and to buy government bonds. Some readers wonder if the people won't have to pay off these bonds some day. The answer is yes. But the money that goes into the bonds does decrease this year's deficit. The catch is that, when the bonds come due, they add to that year's deficit. But the good news is that the bonds are paid with interest, from general revenues instead of Social Security tax receipts. For those of us who deplore the unfair burden the payroll tax puts on workers, this makes sense. General revenues come mainly from the income tax which is more progressive than the payroll tax, meaning the rich pay more. ******* Warren Buffet was one of the early backers of this magazine, but since his last investment was made 30 years ago I hope I won't be accused of some kind of conflict of interest for saying a few words on his behalf. They have to do with his ability to rise above his n self-interest. His stand against eliminating the estate tax is an example. Another is his recent call for broadcasters to contribute time to political candidates. It is unusual to say the least to hear the owner of a large amount of stock in a media empire, in Buffet's case the Washington Post Company, which derives a substantial hunk of its profit from the television stations it owns, to frankly describe broadcasters as "beneficiaries of incredibly valuable licenses courtesy of your government." Media moguls usually act as if these licenses were conferred on them by natural law or divine right. ******* Does snobbery survive in the meritocratic class? You may not find this evidence conclusive but I offer it as at least a suggestion that the new elite is like the old in wanting to keep its blood line pure: the newsletter of the Vassar Club of Washington, D.C. listed as two events in its Coming Attractions for April-May: "April 20 - All Ivy Singles - hosted by Yale; May 18 - All Ivy Singles - hosted by Vassar.²