Capital offense: government largesse brought Washington to its knees. Only a huge federal tax cut will get it back on its feet - Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton pushes bill in Congress - The Decline and Fall of Washington, D.C

National Review, July 15, 1996 by John Dizard

A few weeks ago I went back to see my old high school in Washington, D.C. In those days (I graduated in 1967) it was called Western High School, and was integrated de facto as well as de jure, with a roughly even balance of black and white students. The building, nearly a century old, was a little run down, and we had to scrape up money from our parents to keep the school newspaper going, but you could get an education there. We went to Harvard, Stanford, Tufts, the service academies, and other good schools. The middle-class white and black kids were in the same school activities, behaved equally badly at the same parties, and believed in the same government-issue Great Society politics. We all knew Marion Barry, then a local hustler on the rise who was just hitching a ride on the politics game.

Western is now the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Much has been added, and much taken away. The most telling sign, I decided, were the clocks in the classrooms. They're the same clocks we had, and they've all stopped. The people in charge of the school have spent thousands of dollars on an elaborate closed-circuit TV system to tell the students about the week's special events, but didn't think some fraction of that should have been spent on teaching the kids to show up on time. And, indeed, the students wander around pretty aimlessly, I suppose waiting for the producers of Fame II to sign them up.

They're being cheated, of course, as they will find out after some very cruel lessons. So is everyone else living in the District of Columbia. The city, now in receivership for the second time in its history (the first occasion was in the 1870s), is a poster child for a 12-step program to kick Government Abuse.

A decade ago, D.C. seemed to be on the way to becoming, if not a state, then the political equal of the states. Now the city is being run by what is universally called the control board --formally, The District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority. It is slowly attacking the most egregious fraud and mismanagement. Its charter is to balance the budget in the next three years. It may succeed, if the tax base doesn't shrink any faster than its present rate.

But while the control board may give comfort to the holders of D.C.'s $3.5 billion of bonded debt, it cannot revive the city. Only a restored civil society with a middle class anxious to defend its families and property can do that.

Most of the people now living in Washington are welfare recipients, D.C. government workers, or criminals, and their dependents. They are all opposed to the reforms needed to save the city.

According to the most recent Washington Post poll, conducted between May 16 and 19, Mayor Marion Barry has a "good" or "excellent" rating of 52 per cent. When asked if Barry was "trying realistically to deal with the city's problems" 70 per cent said he was. Not that there isn't some dissent: In an earlier Post poll, conducted in February, 60 per cent of D.C. residents said that Barry's proposed cutbacks in the unbelievably bloated city government are a "bad idea."

What can you say? Most of the people, white, black, or whatever, who don't take the majority line have left town. They don't want to pay the taxes for nonexistent services, and are appalled by the schools and terrified of the crime. In 1970 there were 757,000 residents; today there are 540,000.

Now if nature were to take its course, the place would soon crumble, be abandoned by its surviving inhabitants, and then be excavated by puzzled archaeologists some centuries hence. It has happened before. But D.C. was formed by the Federal Government, which is constitutionally committed to the place; it cannot strike camp as a private employer or property owner might.

Until now, under both Democratic and Republican Administrations and Congresses, the response to problems in the District has been to fund another program or two. But in the past year, a tectonic plate has shifted. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting D.C. Delegate to Congress and a member of the city's black political elite, has put forward a bill to cut federal taxes on residents' local income to a flat 15 per cent, with exemptions of $15,000 for single filers and $30,000 for joint filers. Last year, District residents paid about $1.6 billion in federal taxes; Mrs. Norton's bill would cut that by an estimated $750 million. There is a precedent for this sort of tax break. Guam, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico also have limited self-government and representation in Washington, and their residents pay no federal income taxes.

THERE is a popular perception in the rest of the country that Washington is a nest of ill-gotten wealth and privilege. Privilege? Yes. Ill gotten? In many cases. But wealth? Last year, there were only 4,300-odd taxpayers in the District who earned $200,000 or more. What if their tax liability were to be cut by more than a third? Think some of their friends might move into town? As for the core middle class, there were only about 75,000 taxpayers in the District with family incomes between $30,000 and $75,000. If the better-off are the ones who might start new enterprises, the people in the middle are the ones who will harass the school board, the police, and the City Council into delivering real services.