Tilting at Windmills

Washington Monthly, June, 1999 by Charles Peters

A Possible President * Celebrity Journalism * Credit Card Companies Crow * The Toilet Paper War * The Case of the Missing Plutonium

If you want evidence that treating drug addicts is more effective than locking them up, take a look at Arizona, the first state to try treating all of its nonviolent drug offenders. The program saved the state more than $2.5 million in its first year of operation, according to a report issued by the Arizona Supreme Court.

A revealing difference between "You've Got Mail" and the 1939 movie upon which it is based, "The Shop Around the Corner": The leading characters in the latter, played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, were salespeople in a small retail store. In the 1990s version, the screenwriter, Nora Ephron, elevated their status. The Sullavan character, now played by Meg Ryan, is a bookstore owner and the Stewart character, now Tom Hanks, is the head of a mega bookstore. Could this be because Ephron felt today's audiences couldn't identify with anyone who loved a lowly salesperson, that to be a romantic object today you have to be glitzier, or at least the credible possessor of a nice apartment in Manhattan?

$80,000 FOR EVERY 21 YEAR OLD, to be financed by a 2 percent tax on the property owned by the richest 40 percent. That's the proposal presented in The Stakeholder Society by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott. I am sympathetic, but I wouldn't give it all to them at 21. Samuel Butler--I think it was either in Erewhon or Erewhon Revisited--discussed a similar idea and observed that even the brightest 21 year-olds are capable of behavior that reminds one of how close they are to adolescence. So why not give half at 21 and the other half at 30? Or maybe, unless the money is used for education, hold it all `til 30. Judgment usually matures by that time and a stake can play a magical role. This magazine would not have happened if my parents hadn't given me $20,000 to help start it. Being able to invest my own money convinced other investors that I was serious.

To give you the flavor of the White House Correspondents' Dinner, this year's guests included Larry Flynt, Sean Penn, Colin Powell, Claire Danes, Betty Currie, Henry Kissinger, Lucianne Goldberg, Val Kilmer, Vinny Testaverde, Melanie Griffith, and Bill Clinton. At the high point of the festivities, Susan McDougal sat on Flynt's lap.

The town of Somerset, MD., located just outside Washington, is populated with the kind of affluent suburbanites who usually frown on those who take handouts from the government. That is, of course, unless the handouts are going to them.

The town had a swimming pool that was supported by membership fees. Then someone figured out that if the pool was turned over to the town, the fees would be paid in the form of town taxes that could be deducted from the federal income tax. At a town meeting where the idea was proposed a few idealists objected that it was wrong to transfer the cost to the average national taxpayer, who was less well-off than the citizens of Somerset. But that argument proved unpersuasive. In fact, the town voted in favor of adding its tennis courts to the package so that they too would be paid for not by the people of Somerset but by the people of the United States.

Buried on page 79 OF the 616-page second volume of the four-volume annual budget put out by the White House on Feb. 1 was a proposal to tax the investment income of trade associations. What happened next was that the fur--or more precisely the faxes--flew. The trade associations are lobbies. No group is more skilled at expressing indignant opposition. The National Food Processors Association called the proposal "an anti-food safety tax." The U.S. Chamber of Commerce called the tax an attempt by the administration "to punish and silence its critics" "The American Society of Association Executives ... hand delivered a letter to every congressional office urging opposition," reports The Wall Street Journal's Jacob M. Schlesinger. "`Immediate Action Needed!' the group's website blares in red letters."

Is the proposal that excites so much rage an unreasonable one? What it does is try to eliminate a double tax break. A business gets a deduction when it pays its dues to its trade association. If the association then invests part of that money, it does not now have to pay taxes on the income from the investment. That's the second break. So a tax does not seem at all irrational. "The people who oppose this," outgoing Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin told Schlesinger, "are basically going to be opposing having lobbyists pay their fair share of taxes."

This year the people who give out the National Magazine Awards presented one to Good Housekeeping for an article on colon cancer and one to Cigar Aficionado. Isn't there a contradiction here?

For years, most coal mine owners in my home state, West Virginia, have gotten by with only a slap on the wrist for violations of mine safety laws and failure to pay their share of the Workers' Compensation Fund. But last month one got hit with a 32-month prison sentence and a fine of $850,000. My congratulations to U.S. Attorney Rebecca Betts and to Assistant U.S. Attorneys Stephanie Thacker and John File, who prosecuted the case, and U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Staker who so gratifyingly stuck it to the bad guy.