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Tuesday, January 21, 1975
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Tax cut unwise
While federal legislators tremble at a projected $45 billion deficit in fiscal 1976, Kansas legislators are beginning what undoubtedly will be a worry debate over what to do about excess state revenue. Should the state cut taxes and live off its reserves or maintain its reserves as a buffer against a worsening national economy?
The state general fund is expected to have a balance of $156 million at the end of fiscal 1975. This $156 million reserve wasn't accumulated as a result of legislature-approved tax increases. Instead, the balance is a result of inflation.
Income tax receipts in fiscal 1974 were 53 per cent above fiscal 1973, and sales tax receipts were up 17 per cent. As their wages have increased, Kansans have found themselves in higher tax brackets. And as prices zoom, the state receives more in sales taxes.
Gov. Robert Bennett has come out against any tax cut at this time, but state legislators from both parties have opposed the tax cuts. Many Democrats are sponsoring a proposal to increase the state income tax exemption from $600 to $750, which would probably reduce state revenue at least $10 million. Meanwhile, a member of Bennett's Republican party has outdone the Democrats in calling for a $1000 exemption.
Kansas is rolling in money today, and such a situation invites politicians to do the popular thing. But the legislators should look at the situation from the broader perspective of Gov. Bennett. Last year was the first year since 1958 that the nation's total output of goods and services dropped over an entire century but that's not yet been securely hit by the recession, but the past is no guarantor of the future. If unemployment increases in Kansas, state income and sales tax revenue probably will fall.
What many legislators consider useless reserves today may prove helpful tomorrow in providing jobs for workers and stabilizing state government should tax revenue begin to fall. Clearly, it is better to be safe than sorry.
—Steven Lewis
Freshmen first?
Enrollment has exasperated some of us for the last time. Seniors who have faced this necessary evil eight or more times can now bequeath their excuses for escaping a 7:30 math class to the less experienced.
As a senior who's just enrolled for the last time, I must admit that I had no trouble at all this time. I'd like to thank the person who scheduled all the seniors to enroll Wednesday. I finished in less than an hour.
Although it was easy for me this semester, I think enrollment should be changed (especially because I am very new to freshman life) and think freshmen should enroll first.
Yes, I said the freshmen. Why should seniors have the advantage of early enrollment? By the time one becomes a senior, one knows the ins and outs of bypassing the rules anyway.
For example, a good friend of mine had written and erased so many classes on her enrollment card that she couldn't tell which classes she was taking and which cards she had pulled for friends.
Many people I know either pulled cards for someone else or had it done for them. And if you don't know what "pulling cards" means, ask someone. This is not a "how-to" piece.
But freshmen are largely ignorant of these ploys and devices to get the classes they want. They need the advantage of early enrollment.
How many freshmen have a good friend working any of the enrollment tables who will let them in early or late school without meeting the prerequisites?
How many freshmen know the folly of following the enrollment manual religiously, waiting for their scheduled time?
How many freshmen have been educated to the fact that they have to lie, plead or threaten to get the job and want at the time they want them?
Have a heart, Strong Hall. Let freshmen enroll first next time. After all, why make them wait until the last day of enrollment to find out they've done everything wrong?
Tom Billam
Welcome back. The Christmas break is past, a new semester looms. Here's hoping your vacation went as well as your trip from three states gathered for what amounted to a family reunion. We all relaxed a lot, ate too much and even got out the electric train that my dad had to take, was six years old to buy for us.
Busy semester ahead
politicians alike of a good night's sleep, the Student Senate elections, will roll around again in mid-February, and we'll try to provide you with information about the candidates before the election as well as the results.
That break will have to last for a while, however, because the prospects for another in the near future are dim. We at the Kanas are looking for a busy team to help them. There are new faces in the University administration. We have a new Dean of Women and a new Director of the Office of Affirmative Action, and we'll help them to you and help you keep up with what they're doing.
There are going to be more new faces, too, and it looks like a good (or bad, depending on how you view such things) semester for search committees. Three schools, Journalism, Social Welfare and Fine Arts, are seeking new deans.
The folks in Strong Hall are looking for replacements for former Assistant to the Chancellor John Conard, who is now working with netta's staff as his executive assistant, and for David Dary, associate professor of Journalism, who has left his job as Acting Director of the Office of Student Records to return to full-time teaching.
That annual event that robs newspaper staffs and student
Pulitzer Prize-winner Don Wright.
City government elections will be in April, and three incumbent city commissioners and one incumbent school board
And; on top of this news and syndicated commentary, our own staff of contributing writers will offer their own analyses and opinions of events. We also offer Friday entertainment calendar and reviews page to help you plan your weekends.
We'll also try to break the
By John Pike Editor
member have announced they won't seek re-election, thus leaving the wide-open for newcomers.
Kansas has a new governor for the first time in eight years, and a new session of the legislature has just convened. We'll be reporting the attitudes and actions of both branches of state government on the issues related to their action on KU's budget requests, which are before them now.
In addition to this local and state coverage, we'll bring you major national news from the Associated Press and comics from James J. Kilpatrick. We'll also carry editorial cartoons by
occasional monotony of daily news with feature articles on unusual people and events, and from time to time suggest ways to help you keep your head above the economy.
One of the difficulties in maintaining high quality in a newspaper like the Kansas is the upset we go through each week to get the news in months of working together has finally settled the staff down into a smoothly-functioning unit, we bring on a new editor and we move around in jobs they usually have had little experience at.
Despite this handicap, every member of the staff is experienced in some phase of his job. He may have many have had professional
journalsim experience off campus. With your help, they'll do their best to gather and the news you want and feed.
Note that I said, with your help, because we need your help to do the best possible job. If you know of an approaching event, give it a chance or criticism for something on the campus or in the city, state, nation, or world, this is the place to bring it. And that includes us, if we. Use a mistake, if we know and we'll correct it.
Our masthead this semester contains many names familiar to readers of the fall Kanan, but an introduction of a few of our staff and their new jobs is in order.
Craig Stock, a senior in journalism, is the associate editor. He was the associate campus editor last semester, and has covered the Kansan's police beat in past semesters. Craig has worked for the Kansas State Journal and the Eastern, Pa. Express, will be primarily responsible for the Kansan's editorial nage.
Our Campus Desk is the staff unit chief responsible for the local news content of the campus, and Mr. Dennis Ellsworth, the campus editor, Dennis is a senior in journalism, and was an assistant campus listmaster and covered the administration as a reporter.
His three-man staff consists of Carl Young, associate director of campus editors Alan Mansager and Kenn Louden. Carl, a
junior, covered the administration last semester. Alan, a senior, worked on the curriculum and also covered the Student Senate. Readers of Karsan reviews will remember Kern, a journalism graduate student, as the mentor editor last semester.
Keeping an eye on the fortunes of the KU basketball team will provide additional to the rest of the sports news, will be Mike Fitzgerald, sports editor, and Ken Giles, associate sports editor.
Mike has reported sports and other news for the Kansan in past semesters, and also the summer's Kansan. Ken has also been a sports reporter, and spent Christmas vacation working for a local golf club.
As for the editor, I'm John Pike, a senior in journalism. I've covered the Senate and assorted other news for the Kansan during the past two years, and was the associate campus editor for the fall 1973 student survey of the Wichita Eagle and Beacon and the Phillips County Review, and spent three months last spring in Washington, D.C., as a congressional intern.
That's an introduction to some of our staff and a preview of some of what we hope to offer you. You will have Kansan and read it. We hope that you find it enjoyable and informative, that you let us know in either case and that you be given the best possible job. Welcome back.
Death penalty has a place
By STEPHEN BUSER Contributing Writer
The Supreme Court ruled on June 29, 1972, that the "imposition and carrying out of the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in connection with Fourteenth Amendments."
Georgia) spared the lives of 631 people awaiting execution in 32 states.
The 5-4 majority did not rule unconstitutional capital punishment per se. it struck down the uncontrolled discretion of judges or juries to impose the death sentence. In the words of Justice Peter Stewart, jury has the unique penalty to be so warrantly and so freakishly imposed" as to make it unconstitutional. The Court's 1972 ruling in this case (Furman v.
Since the Court's invalidation of the death penalty, 30 states have enacted revised capital
punishment legislation designed to meet the constitutional standard of the civil society the pitfall of uncontrolled juris discretion, state legislatures have made the death penalty mandatory for all killers, murder, first degree rape and armed robbery. The Court will
Fowler has been on death row in North Carolina's Central Prison since he was given the death sentence for 1973, for the first degree murder of his former roommate. Fowler's lawyers will argue that their client's death sentence is in violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The judge will affect 188 other prisoners on death row across the nation.
rule on the constitutionality of this new capital punishment legislation during its present adoption, as in the case of Jesse Thurman Kewler.
Supporters of capital punishment legislation base their position on a need for deterents
to crime and protection of society. Opponents of the death sentence dispute the effectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrent and argue that, in context of modern crimes, such punishment with the death penalty has been carried out in recent years makes it cruel and unusual punishment.
It would be ludicrous to assert that the framers of the Constitution intended the Eighth Amendment to ban capital punishment. To be given the death sentence for murder, rape, treason and half a dozen other crimes was not unusual in the United States, as indicated to be cruel at that time. The Eighth Amendment was adopted from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, with the intention to prohibit torture as a method of criminal justice.
Positive thinking needed
In the second act of the great play Hamlet is kicking things around with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The conversation turns to prisons, and Hamlet says Denmark itself is the worst of all prisons. Roseencrantz says he doesn't think it's a prison.
devices, and the ban on new federal spending programs. Indirectly and eventually, these measures should benefit George
than then," says Hamlet,
"tis why to you; for there is
nothing either good or bad, but
thinking makes it so."
The President's program isn't bad. Its fault is that it makes no particular sense. In terms of its dollar impact on George and Martha Spelvin, the middle Americans of Westbrook Pegler's invention, the President is proposing to cut gasoline miles simultaneously to soak them 85 more for gasoline, electric power, transportation costs, and fuel oil. Big deal.
deficit; and if the expanded federal borrowing is floated by a kind of fiscal helium, the expanded money supply will
What the country needs right now, more than it needs any specific economic remedy, is a return to positive thinking. For the past nine months, all of the economists, most of the politicians, and even a gaggle of gloomy businessmen have been telling us how bad things are. We would get worse, that it would get worse, and their forecasts have contributed to self-filling prophecy. Sure enough, things have gotten worse.
In the dead of winter, with the snow piled 20 feet high in Nebraska it may seem a feeble confidence. But maxim. Yet a restoration of confidence—simple confidence—would do more to reverse economic trends than the cold and snow pills are likely to accomplish.
By James Kilpatrick
(C) 1975 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
him by ten. This way lies cha
contribute to renewed inflation.
The Democrats, never to be outdone in these gains, likely see Maze's Fifth century and raise Maze's sixth billion.
There is any reason to "think positive?" Look: Unemployment is in truth woeful high, but compared to employment are not alarming. More than 85 million persons are employed. Personal income is running at a rate of more than a trillion
Capital punishment should be applied, however, against defendants guilty of committing repeated capital offences. This may prevent the elimination capitious jury discretion and would allow the first or second time offender of a capital crime the opportunity to be reformed or rehabilitated. If the criminal was not this manner would be useful as a deterrent for the criminal whose profession or way of life is to commit capital offences. For the criminals who can't be convicted, the sentence would at least serve as a measure to protect society.
Perhaps the President's multiple vitamin pill will help. Even if it is no more than a mere placebo, psychologically the prescription may tend to lift us out of the blasts. If George and Martha could be persuaded to think in affirmative terms, the idea of remodeling the kitchen or replacing the car.
and Martha and everyone else. In the name of fighting crime, the $10 billion tax cut will produce a large increase in the federal
It would be a mistake to send Jesse Fowler to the gas tank, because the former friend as a result of a crap game argument. But I think it is just execute a code that executes of repeated capital crimes.
dollars, 9 percent above a year ago. Interest rates are easing and money is moving back to the savings and loan associations; home building is being done, a was dismal year for the auto salesman, with passenger car sales of 8,050,000; but that's not far below the 4,800,000 as recently as 1970. In sum, the picture can't be seen as unless thinking makes it so.
Our economy wouldn't be in such a mess if it weren't for a combination of circumstances that hit us all at once—a couple of years ago, we were wheat blunder, and most seriously, the Mideast crisis
that triggered the oil embargo.
Another such embargo would be a bitter blow—no amount of positive thinking could make that good—but the other factors can be overcome. America is not effeebled, not dying, not done for.
If the Court strikes down Fowler's death sentence it will eliminate the role of capital punishment in our criminal justice system once and for all (barring the enactment of a constitutional amendment. If it is enacted, it will be an unprecedented endorsement of capital punishment and renew the practice of executing criminals which has ceased since June 2, 1967.
Capital punishment should be maintained by the Court. Where rehabilitation is at all possible for the defendant convicted of a capital offense, it should be employed to the highest extent. In many cases, the number of approximately 75 per cent of our national penal system, I think that every effort should be made to reform all criminals.
It is a precarious balance that separates the sluggish and the active economies. Yes, our economy is sadly out of balance now. But that balance can be tipped in the right direction because we owe that George says to Martha, "Okay, honey, let's buy the stove." That heartening day can't come too soon.
The application of the death penalty should be applied where appropriate and criminals who shoot to kill during successive robberies and holdups or any other defendants who use for human life whatever.
My argument may seem to be advocacy of pure, ruthless retribution with no concern for the plight of a certain criminal element in our society. On the other hand, I believe that penal reform organizations and have great interest in the welfare of persons who are victims of our pernicious penal system. But when it comes to my life, the life of my family or myself is in general, my concern for defendants of capital crimes isn't even a close second.
"----JUST UNTIL I GET MY REBATE"
Letters Policy
Letters to the editor should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. All letters are subject to editing and condensation, according to space limitations and the editor'a judgment. Students must provide their name, year in school and home town; faculty and staff must provide their name and position; others must provide their name and address.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Published at the University of Kansas weekdays and on Saturday afternoons and animation periods. Second-class postage at Lawrence, Kan. $6045. Subscriptions by mail are $8.95. Subscription fee to print is $1.33 a semester, paid through the student activity center.
Editor
John Pike
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