4
Fridav. March 10, 1972
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Guest Column
Paying Taxes on Taxes
By JOHN PATRICK MAHER
A basic inequity exists in federal and state income tax laws in regard to the payroll tax. This inequity should become apparent to tax-payers as they wrestle with their income tax forms and try to beat the April 17 deadline.
The payroll tax is levied against a person's wages or salary to pay for the health and welfare benefits provided for him later in life by the Social Security Administration.
The payroll tax is not tax deductible. Income taxes are levied against a person's taxable income, including that part of his salary or wages that goes to the Social Security Administration.
Each employee pays one-half the total social security assessment and his employer pays the other half.
This is taxing a tax. And in paying state as well as federal income tax, a person is paying tax on a tax twice.
What is more, as payroll deductions for Social Security increase, a person pays tax on an increasing amount of unrealized income.
Where is the fairness in paying taxes on unrealized income?
When a person invests in U.S. Savings Bonds, he voluntarily invests his money in his country to be used for its general well-being. He is paid interest on these bonds, and upon selling them back to the government, he pays income taxes on his actual profit.
When a person is taxed for social security purposes, a payroll deduction is mandatorily made from his wage or salary to pay for his eventual well-being. He draws no interest on this money, and he pays income taxes on money he never really had.
Where is the fairness in paying income taxes on mandatory losses?
Two suggestions are possible: First, change the Social Security laws so that each individual assumes the entire payroll tax burden. Relieving employers from paying half of their employees' payroll tax would serve to remove a source of higher prices.
Second, change the income tax laws so that the amount paid to the Social Security Administration by each individual not be counted as part of his taxable income.
"I just can't see the problem!"
Judge Wright held that the death penalty is "unusual" largely because of the declining number of executions in the United States between 1987 and 1989 in 1993 to two (1987), and the fact that there is a trend toward abolition. To which one might reply that the imposition of the death penalty in this country has been growing (a averaging about 100 annually for the past decade) and that the
The California court's ruling was based on a clause in the state constitution virtually identical to the Missouri Amendment. Chief Justice Donald R. Wright, speaking for the majority, partially based his decision on the long time-lag between conviction and implementation. The obvious reply to that is that the legal process ought to be speeded up.
However the U.S. Supreme Court may rule, the California verdict will stand in that state barring an amendment to the California constitution. The state court contended that the frequently expressed will of the elected representatives of the people of California, who on several occasions in recent years have legislated bills which would have abolished capital punishment.
Smith Hempstone
Is Society Diminished By One Person's Death?
The death penalty is still permissible in 40 states, although the United States Supreme Court is expected to rule soon whether executions are allowed in a *institution's* Eighth Amendment prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment." There have been no executions in the United States since June, 1967, and 888 men and two women executed of capital offenses await the decision of the High Court.
A side effect has been the release on bail of Angela Davis, who is charged with murder. He was also connected to the Marin County Civic Center shoot-out in which four people lost their lives. It is earnestly to be hoped that they may lay eyes on Miss Davis again.
WASHINGTON—By a 6-1 vote, the Supreme Court of California has declared the death penalty to be unconstitutional in that state. The court's decision is to give (literally) a new lease on life to 107 death row inmates, including such luminarys as SIRian B. Siran, the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, a mass murderer Charles Manson.
problems of Britain (for an example) are not those of the United States.
Stanford University law professor Anthony G. Amsterdam argued the case for abolition before both the U.S. Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court. One of his arguments was that the only exceptions to the abortion penalty are "the poor, black, personally ugly and socially unacceptable."
All right. Forget Sirhan and Manson; their cases may be so emotive that it is impossible for any of us to render a balanced judgment. Take instead the case of Ernest J. Akens Jr., who was then represented before the national and state supreme courts.
Does anybody really believe that Aikens was sentenced to death because he was "poor," or that his mother was socially unacceptable? "I do not know (or care) whether he was black or white, but I rather imagine that the severity of his sentence is greater with the fact that he beat, raped and stabbed to death two women, one of them five months pregnant, and shot to death the car of a car who gave him a lift.
In his opinion, Judge Wight stated that the California court's decision to suspend the sympathy for those who would commit crimes of violence but do not want to do so.
diminishes itself whenever it takes the life of one of its members. A noble sentiment. A noble sentiment. Quentin, let alone that of the United States as a whole, truly be diminished by the execution of her husband's will, importantly, can society afford to turn men like Alkiss free from they have served eight or 10 years in prison. The sentence frequently amounts to:
There's the rub. What is the alternative? To keep them caged for the reminder of their natural lives? In Judge Wright's eyes the judge has an edge, perhaps correctly, constitute "theeps and unanim punishment?"
Abolitionists like to claim that those who favor the retention of the death penalty do so largely out of an atavistic thirst for power. The right to kill something in that but not much. What law-abiding people want—and have a right to expect from their government—is that men Sirhan and Manson and Akhenat never walk the street again.
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision may not echo that of California. But if it does, the U.S. Constitution requires legislatures are going to have to frame legislation which provides decent folk with the protection to which they are entitled in an effort to ensure that a share of depressed psychopaths.
Copyright, 1972, Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
AP Backgrounder
N.H. Primary Sets Pattern
MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP)- Sen. Edmund S. Muskie's victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary enhances a pattern likely to be a familiar one in the long primary season: a race that fails to narrow the big Democratic field of candidates.
As in the nonprimary states of Arizona and low last month, the Maine senator led the field in New Hampshire and appeared to either break even or claim an eagle in convention delegates.
But the political benefits were divided more than one way and none of his foes plans to get out of the country, poor New Hampshire showing.
Even Sen. Vance Hartke of Indiana and Mayor Samuel F. Yorty of Los Angeles planned to move on to the next round of the 24 primaries in which more than 1 million delegates will be selected.
Because Democratic delegates
case for division up delegates,
even primary leaders won't be in
position to sweep a large number
of voters.
Thus candidates will be able to pick up a few delegates here and a few there in order, to keep in the contest until the big June 6 California primary, when theinner winner will receive 271 television-ready-18 per cent of the 590 needed for the presidential nomination.
Except for Muskie, who is running every election practically every fall, the few fellow candidates, most of the Democratic contenders are
pull the frontrunning Maine senator back to the field.
Muskie complained in New Hamphire that the need to spice up the terrain for a reason he failed to get the landslide endorsement he sought would have been more effective.
Of his major opponents, only McGovern conducted a full-fledged bid in New Hampshire.
In Florida next week, McGovern is expected to finish quarterback in 11man field. Muskellady probably for second place behind Alabama Gov. George C. Humprey is been Hubert H. Humphrys.
In Illinois a week after that, Muskie's only rival in the presidential preference contest is former U.S. Senator Jude Gilley M.Carthy
But Humphrey, Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington and D.C., who will go straight from Florida to Wisconsin to prepare for the April 4 primary in muskie and MeGovern also are
Despite the strategy of his rivals, Muskie remains favored in the early primaries except for Florida.
Muskie still has an important part of his initial advantage—the importance of the congressmen and other congressmen and their success in his futures.
This is why the Maine senators' aides say only he has the potential of putting together a convention majority. And with the rest of the country in future primaries will have to do more than finish strong second.
Garry Wills
From Legend to Reality
In this dessicant time of too much politics, one can refresh the soul with Elie Wiesel's new book, *The Art of Survival*, a collection of Hasidic Jewish tales.
It is the pseudo-scientific conviction that return to Washington with the white belt behind back in reality—that one must, for instance, go back through Parsen Weems's book on the White House and Washington to the General's own journals. But some people record is inconvenient—in legacy.
St. Francis is one of these, the farther back one goes in the Franciscan literature, the more important a glow of magnified impact. It is precisely in the eyewitness accounts that every story is a
Israel ben Eliezer, the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism in Poland, is another great Jewish sage. His phrase—a legend in his own
time—startlingly literal. He not only had a legacy, but was one. We are all such stuff as dreams are made on; only most of us are nightmares—so it is hard to believe in them. There is a history that is all legend, we do find this Baal Shem Tov (as he was known)
Like St. Francis, he exerted great influence, but more by his person than by any teaching. Such men do not come to instruct, but do so because from them, it is only by force of their blessing—as the birds learned to talk from St. Francis. And, once again, the first, best-authenticated stories are miracle stories; that is not true of them, nothing is.
Readers of Elie Wiesel's fine novel Beggar in Jerusalem have already met modish versions of the stories that are the glue holding together these descendants of the Baliah series of lectures he has given, series of lectures he has given,
recounting as simply as he could the tales he heard as a boy from his Hasicid relatives. The bitchen of Martin Burber's. But the oral form and the sense of tradition—of a duty to hand on what one has done—will continue, and returns us to real "sources" better than anything else could—anything that is, short of hearing from one's own grandfather.
After the Baal Shem Tov, teachers of a more distinct sort followed (as Bonaventure did St. Francis). Seismicism is the true fact that earthquakes are Tradik or community model, hardened himself against hope;
Griff and the Unicorn
concerned any Messiah who might come to such an age as this; he saved Talmud by the gift of God, his provoke His action.
N
By Sokoloff
Mil
rent
accor
tratic
ment
Th dow $80,0 men tan
These men were survivors, believers, doubters, tough and soft at the same time—men not all of whom have been killed if a particular Rabbi is genuine? Ask him if he knows a way to chase impair thought processes. Do you know you'll be a fake?" They formed a great chain of teachers, and we are lucky that they were still though not the 'ast link, still read to teach us.
Copyright, 1972 Universal Press Syndicate
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
America's Pacemaking college newspaper
Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Mail subscription@univ.kansas.edu. Estimate $60.00 for K-12 education programs. 6044 Ackermann Services, services and advertisement offered to all students without regard to color, creed or national origin. Opinions and notices may not necessarily be accurate to the original address of Regents.
"Copyright 1972, David Sokoloff."
NEWS STAFF
News Adviser... Del Brinkman
New York | New Jersey | Detroit
Editor
Associate Editor
Campaign Editors
News Editors
Copy Chiefs
Assistant General Editors
Sports Editor
Assistant Sports Editors
Feature Editor
Editorial Writers
Wide Edition
Markup Editors
Photographers
Office Manager
Gerald Serber, Tom Thrones, Haak Young
Dave Skooloff
BUSINESS STAFF
Business Adviser .. Mel Adams
Business Manager
Account Manager
Marketing Manager
Advertising Manager
National Advertising Manager
National Advertising Manager
Promotional Advertising Manager
Promotional Advertising Manager
Dave DeRosa