4
Wednesday, November 3. 1976
University Daily Kansan
Comment
Opinions on this page reflect the view of only the writer.
Election night no bore
It may have been a boring campaign, but it certainly wasn't a boring election night.
Carter climbed to within a tew electoral votes of the presidency and then just hung there. It was a case of 265—er—261—puff, puff, puff, until almost 3 a.m. But he finally won and, for the first time in its history the United States will have a President named Jimmy.
NOW IS the time for the last onslaught of the political columnists—the analysis, the second-guessing, the Wednesday morning quarterbacking. Did the larger-than-expected voter turnout make the difference? The Solid South? What were the little things that made one state go 50 per cent to 49 per cent for Carter and another state go 50 per cent to 49 per cent for Ford?
I voted for Carter. I wanted Carter to win and I predicted he would win. But, deep inside, I had this feeling that Ford would win in the end.
This time, at least, my deep inner feelings were wrong.
So, as the haggered Senator-elect Robert Redford asked in "The Candidate," "What do we do now?"
WHAT DOES Gerald Ford do? He is still president, you know, even if he is the first incumbent president to be denied reelection since Hoover. For the next three months, Ford has to perform the job he wasn't allowed to keep. This is a strange, unfamiliar and uncommon situation for everyone concerned.
And what does Jimmy Carter do? He has won the thing he spent the last 22
months working for. He has triumphed.
But he won by a very small margin and
there are tens of millions of people in
this country that think Carter is a wish-
ful religious believer with fanatical
religious beliefs and a dangerous,
calculating personality.
These people are all just waiting for Carter to do something to prove them right. At the same time, millions of other people are waiting for Carter to justify their trust and votes and instantly fulfill every promise.
CARTER WILL be under great pressure to make or break himself in his first few months as president.
And what about the American public? Jimmy Carter, Jerry Ford and Walter Cronkite weren't the only ones who had to endure month after month of speeches and primaries and conventions and foot-filled mouths. We all had to endure it. And enduring it, at times, took quite some doing.
NOW WE can finally relax. We can all ignore politics for a while. Ideally, we would use this time, when the demolition endurance derby of the last two years is still fresh in our minds, to think about reforming the primary system or the infamous Electoral College. The world, however, is far from ideal and the public is far too washed-out to dream of thinking about politics.
By Jim Bates Editorial Editor
After all, we have to grab our rest while we can. Any month now, some politician will call a press conference to announce his Presidential campaign will be under way.
GM talked. didn't listen
1977 Cadillac Sedan DeVille
varies according to dealer location. . .
A definitive text turned up the other day of the new Tax Law, which was produced by U.S. Law Week, the text runs to 131 pages of the law; these pages stigge like those under the grave of common sense.
How did we get into this mess? Man and boy, I have been reading the English language for more than 50 years and claim some modest competence in comprehending the word. But this is monstrous. The text falls open at random;
Tax Code prose unclear
ways the Founding Fathers never dreamed of. When they gave Congress the power to impose duties, imposits and excuses," the framers of the Constitution couldn't have imagined a net so vast.
That is among the simpler provisions. Whole battalions of lawyers and accountants—nay, whole divisions, whole armies—are now the primary complexities for months and years. Within the Internal Revenue Service, the task of drafting forms will occupy a full corps of analysts. In the course of those analyses, we probe the impenetrable prose,
"FOR PURPOSES of paraphrase (b), the term 'ad-respect to the estate' means respect to the estate" means the excess of what would have been the estate tax liability but for it (a) over the estate tax liability.
We have drifted into this sorry mess for one big reason and a host of little ones. The big reason is that the federal government has come to dominate our everyday lives in
THE TAX Code directly affects marriage, family, home.
business, the buying and selling of property, the survival of charities. The index to the 1976 act touches upon vineyards, cattle, oil wells, gas wells, hospital services and amateur athletics. The provisions deal with trade, stocks, bonds, billboards, large cigars, and livestock sold on account of drougt.
James J. Kilpatrick
( c ) 1976 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
a former judge of the U.S. Tax Court. In his knowledgeable view, nothing will be gained by further patchwork. The jerry-built code is beyond repair. He would junk it all, root and embed the bank's money in form tax upon all net income, however derived.
IS THIS feasible? Alas, the answer is: technically, yes; politically, no. Train has worked out the revenue projections. His flat-rate approach would produce whatever income Congress desired. There are thousands of such a law. But the howls would be horrendous. Few politicians could resist the pressures that would be applied. If gifts to colleges, charities and churches were no longer deductible, how would these institutions survive? If the interest on state and municipal bonds were no longer from taxation, what would become of these securities?
Train has sensible answers.
The realistic prospect, sad to say, is that few members of Congress will pause to discuss them. But the next Congress might be persuaded to take one major step, not in the name of simplification in the equivocation we could move toward the "indexing" urged by New York's Senator James Buckley as a counter-measure against inflation.
complicated; it isn't. Buckley would discount a taxpayer's income according to the cost-of-living index, so that tax rates were applied to constant income. So, if you say, $20,000 had a purchasing power of what $15,000 had a few years ago, he would tax on the basis of the $15,000. One effect would be to keep middle income taxes below the upper tax brackets where those are putuntively higher.
General Motors visited KU Monday in the form of Thomas Fisher (mechanical engineering, 1951), R. T. Kingman (journalism, 1947), R. W. Klinger (mechanical engineering, 1863), George G. Dodd (electrical engineering, 1960).
One thing is certain: We must not drift indefinitely from a large mess to a larger one. At some point, a taxpayer's revolt will occur. If the 89th Congress produces only another 131 pages of this type, the revolt may come sooner than anyone thinks.
THE IDEA may sound
What to do? The only intelligent answer is to scrap the whole thing and start over. This is the straightforward approach urged in a recent essay by Russell Train, a tax expert and
The four men, all KU alumni,
visited classes, went to lunch
with "opinion leaders", visited
with students at a GM
exhibition in Learned Hall and
about 150 people who showed up
in Hoch Auditorium for a "town hall" meeting.
questions is that GM is doing the right thing.
The purpose of the visit was to answer questions about GM, a corporation that some people think was screw the American people.
Standard equipment on this
vehicle at NO EXTRA COST:
AM-FM RADIO W POWER
ANTENNA; TURBO HYDRA-
MATIC TRANSMISSION;
TREX BREAKS; DISC BREAKS; POWER
WINDOWS; POWER SEATS
...
pretty bad showing, but the GM executives seemed pleased.
The group that showed up at Hoch was spread out over the auditorium, which will seat 6,000 people. It looked like a
GM looks at ideas for 50-mile-to-the-gallon cars but they haven't found one that people would buy.
Courts have ruled that the Corvair was a safe car—bad publicity just killed it.
America lives in extravagance while the working class is constantly being dehumanized and brutalized by a productive system that places profits before people."
detectives secretly pleased.
Kingman said they had a goal of 150 to 200 persons, so a crowd of about 150 was fine. The idea
Carl Young Contributing Writer
Catalytic converters work well.
POWER DOOR LOCKS;
AUTOMATIC CLIMATE
CONTROL; SOFT-RAY
GLASS; FREEDOM BAT-
TERY; MONITERING;
CORNERING LAMPS;
MIRROR; CHROME BODY
SIDE MOLDINGS;
STOWAWAY SPARE
TIRE...
The "blue collar blues" is just something dreamed up by the press.
The questions asked: How effective are catalytic converters? Is the Corvair safe? Do big car companies buy up patents for cars that will get 50 miles to the gun just to keep the kind of car off the market? What does this mean for blue "color blues" of day in and day out assembly line work?
VISOR VANITY MIRROR;
MATERNAL LOCKER;
DIGITAL CLOCK;
MILEAGE SYSTEM
INCLUDING WHITEWALL
STREET-BELTED RADIAL
HOLDER OTHER VALUE
FEATURES.
A question not asked at the town hall meeting concerned GM's assembly plant in South Africa. A two-page statement submitted by the Liberation Supply Committee charged in part;
"The super profits that U.S. corporations," e.g., GM, Ford, Chrysler, and others, use the use of cheap labor in Azania (South Africa) is used to support this decadent system of capitalism in America.
Kingman said, after the town hall meeting, that GM pays its employees from companies in South Africa, although there is a difference in the amount of pay that white and African workers get.
"The capitalist class in
"I had my fact book open to the page, but the question never came." he said.
The presence of something like a "fact book" bothered me. The teacher prepared to answer questions, but the impression I received from the town hall meeting was that they didn't want to listen to anyone.
They won't go back to GM headquarters and say that some of the students they talked to were children, so cars are built with little care. They will go back and say that 1,000 students saw the GM exhibition and that they told 150 them that the Corvair was a safe car.
Options and Accessories on the Display Vehicle by the Manufacturer. . .
U.S., Africa inextricably bound
The United States, after decades of maintaining a distant laissez-faire policy toward Africa, has suddenly become the Dark Continent's leader in monitoring her internal affairs and sending favored sons to plot her future.
With increasing frequency, news of U.S. involvement in Africa is reaching the American public. Most do not follow the
publicize policy objectives, it patiently refuses to explain the motives behind them. The puzzlement will probably
complicated day-to-day events. Few try to decipher foreign names or consult an altar to see what nations our new godchild
Mary Ann Daugberty
Contributing Writer
1876 NYT SPECIAL FEATURES
comprises. Many are fearful of our new interest in Africa.
AS LATE as August 1975, the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Public Affairs released a statement describing how African Americans involved in Africa. In this statement we said we opposed the continuation in Africa of political systems based on racial discrimination and involvement in African internal affairs, recognized special obligations to assist in the economic development of Africa and showed concern for the safety and security free of superpower rivalry.
It was a comfortable policy. Most Americans could agree that the Senate was a glowing example of Democratic rhetoric, and it didn't cost us much if we weren't going to back our own policy with opinion.
But questioning minds are asking why all that has changed. Why has Kissinger been sent to negotiate for a peaceful compromise between Rhodesia's white and black leaders? Why has the U.S. suddenly begun pouring more water into the conflict development? In short, why have we eschewed our longstanding policies for active pursuit of African friendship?
ALTHOUGH THE state department may be willing to
remain until the moment the African situation becomes a world crisis. Meanwhile, our friends in Africa are still a matter of conjecture.
There are those who say President Ford wanted a hand in restoring black majority rule in Rhodesia this election year. The idea of taking direct action to participate in the black overthrow of Ian Smith's white regime to bring much-needed glory to the Ford administration in the field of innovation assertion is discounted by those who say Ford would never have entered Africa solely on those grounds for fear of drawing the United States into another war from ridding a loss of votes to the conservative electorate.
SOME SAY that our involvement is purely humanitarian, that the United States, being one of the last free societies, seeks to spread its influence across the racial strife. After all, they say, we have pledged ourselves to oppose racial discrimination. But many others are certain the United States wouldn't waste time, energy and possibly the lives of the name of humanity alone.
A third and possibly more viable explanation is that U.S. strategists want to have a strong influence in Africa to
protect our commercial and naval operations in the area. If we lose control of their sphere of influence to include key African ports, waters and territories, U.S. forces will have strength will be leopardized.
But there's one other explanation that no one seems to be discussing. It involves rich African resources that the U.S. has. We can say that our primary resource is chromium, a valuable substance that resists rust and heat when mixed in the metals of certain machinery. If we lost our supply of chromium, which we now import, we would lose a good deal more than shiny automobile bumpers. We would lose spacecraft, aircraft, satellites, and some of the machinery on the major industries. In fact, many of our highly developed devices
UNFORTUNATELY, the United States produces almost no chromium. We rely almost entirely on South African exports, which could at any time be used as a lever against us by South African regime. We would like to avoid using it. We find other supplies, for the only other major producer of chromium is the U.S.S.R.
Each explanation has its merits, and it is conceivable that elements of all four are present in the still-secret reasons for our recent interest in Afghanistan. We know that the days of ambivalence toward a sleepy continent halfway around the world are over. The military and economic complexities of this nation are too demanding for many to handle; hope to employ a laissez-faire attitude toward so promising, yet treacherous, a continent.
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