Tilting at Windmills - analysis of various social trends and events - Column

Washington Monthly, April, 2000 by Charles Peters

The bad news is two-fold. First, most other states are using less of the settlement money for anti-smoking efforts--the average is only seven percent. Second, in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush has slashed one-third of the funding for the program.

WHAT ECONOMISTS USED TO worry about as inflationary were wage increases without comparable productivity increases. American productivity grew five percent in the second half of 1999. Wages grew at less than half that rate. Why doesn't Alan Greenspan attend to these statistics, instead of insisting that growth has to mean inflation?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL reports that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has not only (1) sued to overturn an Exxon policy, made after the Exxon Valdez accident, that bars anyone with alcohol or drug abuse from safety jobs but (2) also sued to prevent a railroad from relieving a train-dispatcher of his duties because he has a heart condition that can cause him to lose consciousness. The Commission is arguing that consciousness is "not itself a job function" and the employee's condition is not a "direct threat" to others.

This warped reasoning reminds me of the District of Columbia's Department of Motor Vehicles Director Sheryl Hobbs Newman, who defends her department's policy that counts safety violations against the truck company but not against the truck driver. Thus a driver can have an unlimited number of tickets and still keep his driver's license. Willis Curry still had a license--even though he had twice the number of violation points needed to revoke it--when his runaway rig ran a red light, flipped over, and killed a 17-year-old student. According to Ronald J. Hansen of The Washington Times, the four DMV employees responsible for Curry's license have been rewarded by Director Hobbs Newman with routine raises and one has even been promoted.

IF Fox HAS TAKEN THE LEAD in encouraging money mania, the other networks are not far behind. As we have pointed out, even PBS has been featuring a show called "The Courage to be Rich." And as we were going to press with this issue the local public television station WETA was advertising: "Live from the WETA Studios: `SMART WOMEN FINISH RICH.'"

IF CONSERVATIVES, OTHER THAN George W. Bush, talk about education reform at all, it is usually to advocate vouchers. Liberals on the other hand tend to be automatically against vouchers. It seems to me that both sides are wrong. The reason is that vouchers can't be that big a factor. There simply aren't enough vacancies in the parochial schools, which are usually the only affordable institutions where the vouchers can be used. Catholic schools had more vacancies in the 1970s and `80s but the middle class has awakened to their value and has been snapping up the remaining slots so that there aren't a lot left for the poor. But where the vacancies still exist liberals--including Al Gore--are wrong to oppose vouchers that can permit the poor to escape from public schools when those schools are too abysmal to have any hope of giving the students a fair chance in life.