'Good' corporation tax breaks are bad idea - like AmeriCorps

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 22, 1996 | by Woody West

Let us contemplate, if we can remain calm, two bits of governmental lint: one a program already cruising at expensive heights, the other being rolled out of the hangar by the Clinton administration.

The first is AmeriCorps, President Clinton's ambitious program of paid public-service volunteers (a crank might think this a contradiction in terms) that eventually, gloriously, would mature into national service. The Republican Congress keeps muttering that it will suffocate this venture, but, well...

The second is a notion floated by the White House by which the feds would give tax breaks to "good" corporations -- which is to say corporations run according to governmental criteria of "responsible" practices toward workers.

AmeriCorps was one of Clinton's giddiest campaign pledges. He had big plans -- a five-year, $10 billion program of college-age enrollees in a domestic version of the Peace Corps. The then-Democratic Congress put $1.5 billion in the pot in a three-year authorization, and it has chugged along with more than 20,000, ah, corpspersons.

The states kick in for AmeriCorps projects and there are modest private contributions, but the loaf basically is federal wheat. The members bear a hand with local schools and charities and the like, though more than 2,000 are assigned to federal and state agencies where doubtless their aid in keeping the office coffee percolating is appreciated.

Those enrolled are paid $7,640 a year for bacon and beans and $4,725 for education benefits. The overall assistance they provide probably is marginal given the nation's immense (unpaid) voluntarism, but it's great feel-good stuff.

However, what's most interesting is the usual cost projections vs. actual spending. The General Accounting Office last year reviewed AmeriCorps and found that taxpayers were coughing up $26,037 for each "volunteer" working in private programs and $31,592 for each one laboring in the bureaucracy -- administrative expenses, you know. These costs are, of course, far in excess of the $15,000 per head the president's minions swore would be the tab.

Last year, AmeriCorps was appropriated $470 million. This year, Congress, with a changed political complexion, first "zeroed out" the program. But politics being politics and money for "youth" and "education" being splendid election-year imagery, it looks like AmeriCorps may get about $400 million when the budget dance concludes. (The president asked for $819 million so, actually, don't you see, the country is saving more than $400 million.)

Sen. John Ashcroft, a Missouri Republican, has called AmeriCorps "a $27,000-per-person boondoggle for rich kids trying to find themselves." Just so. What especially is disagreeable about AmeriCorps, though, is the philosophy that underwrites it -- government as the drill sergeant calling cadence for social improvement.

Listen to Harris Wofford, the liberal ex-senator who, when given the boot by Pennsylvania voters, promptly was seated as baron of the Corporation for National Service -- the parent bureaucracy. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Times recently, he argle-bargled piously and said he was sure someday "national service will have the same broad-based support as military service or Social Security." That vision of institutionalized altruism ought to rattle our front lobes.

But here's the kicker: A few weeks ago it was reported the AmeriCorps books were in such a mess that it was impossible to audit them! So, quick, send more millions over there!

Now to "good" corporation tax breaks. This authoritarian idea initially was wafted by Labor Secretary Robert Reich, the high-rise intellect of the Clinton administration. The vision, which surely will be transmuted into proposed legislation, would grant tax-favored status to companies that pay high wages and provide job training, generous pension and health plans, perhaps high-fiber meals in company cafeterias -- and other provisions that unaccountable federal munchkins would prescribe.

When Reich blew the bugle, administration colleagues sniped at the scheme as vacuous. The Washington buzz was that Reich had gone public on his own. But the president shortly said he had "encouraged" Reich to give the notion a spin down the track to see how it politically cornered.

Clinton called the idea "an incentive to invest in labor" and noted that the tax code now offers corporations breaks for investments in equipment and various capital expenditures, so why not for beneficence to workers -- as if corporations routinely break their workers on the wheel, and as if these things were comparable anywhere outside a faculty playbook.

AmeriCorps is pork, and the good-corporation notion is piffle.

Sail on, O Ship of State -- and keep those pumps bailing.