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Thursday, March 21, 1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Fuel Shortage Lingers
The Arab oil producers have pulled the stopper in the oil pipeline to the United States. However, the United States still faces danger, not only because the Arabs still control production and prices, but also because complicity is a natural follow-up to a relief in a crisis.
The energy shortage didn't arise with the onset of the embargo after the October war in the Middle East. As far back as fall 1972 independent service stations were closing because they couldn't get gasoline. In addition, Arab oil accounts for only a fraction of the oil imports here. The United States imports about 30 percent of its oil, and 6 per cent comes from the Middle East. It has been predicted that lifting the embargo will alleviate only 30 per cent of the present shortage.
The upshot of all this is that fuel shortages remain a critical problem. Even though Americans like to put the blame on outside forces, the primary cause of the fuel shortage is their own wastefulness. Even though the embargo has been lifted, the primary cure for the fuel shortage is conservation.
Americans must stop driving their weighty fuel-hungry status symbols to work when buses are available. They must be willing to give up air conditioning in their vehicles, raises gasoline use 20 per cent. A return to stick shifts would cause cars to use 5 per cent less gasoline.
Buildings must be built with the cost of heating and cooling them in mind. Architects might do well to consider an ancient method of cooling buildings—windows. And bricks are much better insulators than glass, and they last longer, too.
Our homes still would be livable without the plethora of time-saving gadgets that abound in them. Electric can-openers, dishwashers, electric ice-cream freezers, self-cleaning ovens and electric yard-dedgers are unnecessary. Not only do they waste electricity, then the housewife or yard man uses it, but they is used by the industries that produce them. Energy used to produce these unnecessary items is being diverted from the more necessary transportation and home heating.
Development of nuclear energy, solar energy and other alternative sources to oil is imperative. In addition the government must inform the oil companies about its future intentions on crude oil import restrictions; otherwise the uncertainty that caused oil firms to build refineries abroad rather than in the United States will continue.
Americans must realize that the embargo was only one of many causes of our fuel problems. If each citizen will put the blame where it belongs, the planet will be "they," and act accordingly, our energy difficulties can be solved.
How to Streak Safely
-Elaine Zimmerman
The National Safety Council's (NSC) public information department recently sent out a breezy little bulletin that tells, believe it or not, how to safely streak.
The bulletin says that the NSC has "uncovered" a few safety rules for streakers. The council advises would-be streakers to wear sneakers and "reflectorized tape" and to keep their eyes peeled.
Sneakers are vital, the NSC says, because "tennies protect your toosie." It's also a good idea to wear reflective tape on all sides of your anatomy, the bulletin continues, to avoid becoming one of the 'streaking bounded' ones. It doesn't hurt with carefully while streeking since "you may miss more than your classes if you don't wear your glasses."
The bulletin ends on the serious
note that "although the National Safety Council doesn't condone streaking, the naked truth is that he baffled." "He was a buffer zoned this weekend."
In anticipation of that event, the NSC decided to issue the bulletin. One has to wonder what sort of mental gymnastics the wizards had to deal with in order to issue of a safety bulletin for streakers. It's comforting to know that the NSC is alert to new hazards, but this is ridiculous.
What will they think of next? Will the NSC boys dispense safety advice to rioters, arsonists and butt flashes, or just flush flashers, voyeurs and drunks?
Come on, NSC, tell us how we all can safely demonstrate our individual brands of craziness. And give our best to Evil Knievel.
Chuck Potter
Tax Pressure Becoming Intolerable
Credit System Proposed
By SEN, WALTER F. MONDALE D—Minn.
April 15 draws inexorably nearer. For the American family, the pressure is becoming intolerable—perhaps more so than ever before.
In recent Senate hearings, I got a concrete idea of the kind of pressure—especially the typical American family. The major theme linking much of the testimony was the way government policies and programs can hinder the ability of families to do what they need.
In a whole host of ways—often unwittingly—the government is placing destructive burdens on families, and taxing them. Consider that the pressure to consider for a moment the tremendous pressure that inflation is placing on so many American families, especially working families, who pay the largest share of tax in the major burdens of making our economy run.
Last year, the cost of living in this country rose almost 9 per cent—the largest increase in more than a quarter-century. Superstar car brands have prices up up 19 per cent, fuel oil and coal 45 per cent—and we are told there is no and in sight. Increased the 160s dollar is now
A recent study by the Joint Economic Committee shows that a family earning $12,000 lost more than $1,000 in purchasing goods and services but paid almost $300 in additional taxes. This inflation hits especially hard at low-income Americans—and large families—because they must spend more on necessities such as food and housing, and price increases have been the greatest.
In short, the average working American has been taking a terrible drubbing from inflation and higher taxes. Indeed, whether we want to admit it, we are already in the middle of an economic crisis. The average family's real income is down 4 per cent from last year, and unemployment in
January took its biggest jump since 1970.
The outlook for the rest of 1974 is just as bad, if not worse. Economists have estimated that rising gasoline prices alone will cut into workers' purchasing power of $18 billion to $20 billion in 1974, and food prices are continuing to soar. On top of all this, the economy has been highly restrictive budget. This will clamp down on growth and employment even more than the current budget, which has already pushed unemployment up to 5.2 per cent and brought economic growth to a virtual standstill. The economy has a sure-tire recipe for a deeper recession.
Action is needed now to stimulate the economy, to avoid recession, to prevent and counter suckered unemployment and, above all, to help average Americans make ends meet.
Some witnesses at our hearing suggested we adopt a family allowance—like those instituted by many Western democracies—to help families cope with these economic pressures.
"VERY FUNNY, HAPLEY! RUN NYONS TAX RETURN THROUGH THERE ONE MORE TIME AND YOU'RE FIRED!"
This is no radical proposal, for the United States already has a kind of family allowance that our income tax system and this is called "family allowance" lets the taxpayer deduct 755 per family member and gross income before figuring his tax.
The problem is that the exemption provides the most help to those who need it least, and the least help to those who need it more. The $750 exemption depends on one's tax bracket. The $750 exemption provides up to $850 of tax relief for individuals in families making more than $200,000 a year, but only about $150 in the American family in the average American family.
Congress needs to act now to help families and individuals deal with inflation and unemployment—and to avoid a recession. It must also and most equitable way would be a tax cut.
I have proposed a bill to cut the average family's tax through a credit system. Under my plan, taxpayers would have the option of taking a $200 credit for themselves and each of their dependents, or continuing to use the existing $75 exemption. This $200 credit would save the $75 exemption to almost all families earning $20,000 or less.
A family of four earning $8,000 a year, for example, would save $236 under this plan, and a family of the same size earning $15,000 would save $117.
Suppose your gross income is $10,000. If there are four people in your family, you have four exemptions worth $750 each, for a total of $3,000. You subtract this $3,000, along with your $1,500 standard deduction, to determine your adjusted income that is left-$3,000 for statutory tax rate on that is just under 17 per cent, and so the tax is $955.
Under a system of $200 tax credits, however, you would subtract only your $1,500 standard deductions from your $10,000 gross income before figuring your $750. The amount you income is just under 18 per cent, and the tax would be $1,490. However, you would then subtract your four $200 credits (worth a total of $600) from the tax you would pay. If you have only $750 instead of the $905 you would pay using four $750 exemptions—a saving of $125.
The day of reckoning is almost upon us. But the e's no reason that Congress—in these economically difficult days for the GOP—may hold hesitate to provide much-needed relief.
Academic Standards Are Often Misleading
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY The Washington Post
WASHINGTON—The public debate over "affirmative action" on behalf of minority groups is now being put to the test; seats always seems to miss one key point. There is a difference between perferential treatment among those who are competent and the placing of those who are insecure.
The point is lost, for instance, by those who ask whether you'd like to be the patient of a neurosurgeon who got his degree under the quota system. And it is missed by many
/But Competence Criteria Needed
of those who are outraged by the DeFuns vs. Odegaard "reverse discrimination" case now being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court,
Marco DeFonis Jr. says he became a victim of reverse discrimination when the University of Washington Law School failed to provide a fee for admission to a number of black and latin applicants who scored less than he on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) (The issue is clouded by the fact that the number of white applicants was greater than the number of lower-
scoring minority applicants who were admitted. Thus if LASAT scores had been the sole criterion, neither the lower-scoring or DeFuns would have been admitted.)
There are many problems with establishing the validity of test scores in the first place. But suppose for the sake of argument that the LASTS do what they are supposed to do: (A) predict which applicants will be able to perform satisfaction in law school, (B) rank those for whom satisfactory performance is predicted.
Russians May Have Last Laugh
By ERNEST CONINE Special to the Los Angeles Times
U.S. Bureaucracy Growing Faster Than Population
One of the Soviet Union's top economists calculated a few years ago that, the way people are doing now, adult population soon would be employed in running the government's economic planning apparatus. There would be nobody left to do the actual work on the farms and estates.
The article brought an appreciative, condescending chuckle from foreign newspaper correspondents, diplomats and scholars whose jobs made them familiar with the terrible, bureaucratic inefficiencies of the Soviet system.
The way government payrolls are asyrocketing in this country, however, the way local governments do it.
If you include state and local government employees with federal civil servants, the population would be growing twice as fast as the U.S. population. At last count, the total stood at 13.6 million, of which some 2.8 million were federal employees, while about 9.7 million estimates that, by 1980, almost 17 million
Americans will be working for one level of government or another.
Jerry Wurff, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, understandably considers the outlook for his union "fantastic."
If the number of people on government payrolls is going up fast, the cost to the taxpayer is going up even faster. Local and state government cost $30 billion in 1962. Ten years later it had skyrocketed to $85 billion.
At the federal level, the civilian work force has actually declined 200,000 since 1968—thanks solely to a 20 per cent cut in the number of nonmilitary personnel employed by the Defense Department. But in that same five-year period, because of fast-advancing scales, federal payroll went up 45 per cent. They now exceed $44 billion a year.
The very term "public service" suggests that a certain sacrifice is involved in working for the government. Historically, it has been used to mean jobs in competeable jobs in private industry.
That may still be true in some towns and
cities and in upper runs of the federal government. But your run-of-the-mill federal bureaucrat is doing better these days than most white-collar workers and professionals who work for giant corporations.
As the Tax Foundation concluded in a recent study, "Federal employee salaries are not as high as they appear and equal to amounts earned by similar workers in private industry. Moreover . . . the latest surveys indicate that trinkets benefits for employees exceed those in private industry."
Between 1962 and 1972 the average earnings of federal civilian employees increased from $890 in 1962 to $1,350 in average pay boost in private industry during the same period, and far more than in government jobs.
Griff and the Unicorn
Living costs have gone up since 1972, of course—but so have federal salaries. If you include the two pay increases that went into taxation, the cost of checking has more than doubled since 1962.
Looking at it another way, 15 per cent of all federal employees earned less than $5,000
by Sokoloff
a year in 1968. Now the figure is 0.2 per cent.
Five years ago only 1.5 per cent made more than $20,000. Now almost 12 per cent do.
Averages nav has come to exceed $12,000.
There is no reason to quarrel with the dramatic improvement of federal pay standards—provided they now level off and move more or less in lockstep with private industry, as they are supposed to do under the law.
It won't be surprising, however, if in practice, feds pay scales far outrun taxes. That is because of the
Congress can overrule the recommendations generated by the bureaucracy, of course, but it is loath to do so because it has a very healthy respect for the clout that government employees and their union allies exercise in the voting booth.
For one thing, the comparability studies of federal-verse-private compensation are made by a board of federal officials who hold the position of approval of ever-high government salaries.
It is self-evident that, given the resistance of the people to higher taxes, the explosion in government payroll costs is a matter that should concern liberals and such public-interests groups as Common Cause and the Nader organization.
They know, or should know, that a lot of the money that goes into federal salaries is taxed away from people who earn less than the average government employee. They should be able, for example, to obtain $10,000 a year that they own $10,000 a year in private industry to pay taxes so that a government secretary can be paid $11,000 a year.
They should worry that too little money will go to the intended beneficiaries of federal programs because too much will go to other agencies for the bureaucrats who administer them.
Unfortunately for the taxpayers, there is no indication that the thought ever occurs either to the politicians or other supposed members of the average citizen's pocketbook.
Clearly you wouldn't want to admit any student who was doomed to fail the course. But are you certain that you would want to study them based solely on how high they scored?
That is, if you could establish that applicants who score 70 or more on the entrance test have a good chance of academic success, would you still insist on filling your law school seats from the top of the list, to the exclusion of other considerations?
The meritocrats at us, I suppose, would say yes. But I'm not yet convinced we can win a position. The postal exam is necessarily going to be a better postman than one who scores 86. I'm willing to concede that it is possible to win the job with the implicant is likely to be incompetent.
But I've got my doubts that test scores are the best way to rank those already certified as competent. And my doubts remain firm. I have received the mail or getting into law school.
one "affirmative action" view would hold that to help correct some of the present disadvantages stemming from past discrimination, it makes sense to let race be one factor in the ranking of those who are competent. It may not be of overriding value to have the brightest possible law students or people to pursue a career with competent people—even if in a given case all the competent people turn out to be white males.
Something else needs to be faced
sunarily: There is a difference between
making it easier for minorities to try and guaranteeing them success.
That is precisely what has been happening at a number of the country's most prestigious law schools, according to Paul G. Haskell, in an article in the February issue of the American Bar Association Journal.
"Place yourself in the position of the teacher of a major first-year course in law school who has in his class a black student whose Law School Admission Test score is far below that of any of the white students of the college where education was obtained in a weak college.
It may be reasonable to say that tests, with their inherent cultural bias, may not accurately predict success probability for minority applicants. But if you admit low-scoring minority members because you doubt the validity of the test, you have to be prepared to face up to it when subsequent experience shows that the test was right.
"This student works as hard as any other in the class, yet his examination in the course is poor and not deserving of a passing grade by the standards of the school. If he fails this course, he probably cannot continue his legal education."
Haskell is right when he says such situations create "serious problems of conscience." His solution is to rely on the test scores after all.
And that may be the most difficult part of all. It easy to shade a few points and admit a borderline applicant because you doubt he is a competent lawyer. You say to him later, "Sorry, but this time the test was right." You are more likely if you aren't careful, to make excuses for keeping him around, even after you are convinced of his incompetence—especially if he seems to be really good at it.
But if you have reason to believe that the test scores are apt to be misleading in the course of your study, you yourself be guided by those scores simply because you might not have the guts to admit later that, in a particular instance, you are right, too, a "serious problem of conscience"?
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