Newspapers / Daily Tar Heel (Chapel … / April 23, 1990, edition 1 / Page 11
Part of Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.) / About this page
This page has errors
The date, title, or page description is wrong
This page has harmful content
This page contains sensitive or offensive material
The Daily Tar HeelMonday, April 23, 19901 1 H.C. government kills Mtheseda of sper the news in our state these days concerns the choice spending priorities made by our state government. This year our government decided to spend $9. 1 bil lion on new roads even though North Qirolina already has the best state high way system in the whole country. Unfortunately, we also possess one of thp worst primary and secondary edu cation systems in the country. SAT scores in North Carolina are the lowest in; the nation, and teacher salaries are nqtrven competitive with those of our southern neighbor. Somehow our lead ers still were able to confidently claim thai what North Carolina needed in order to enhance the quality of life for its citizens in the future was more high ways. ; Let's step back a minute and take a hard look at this program. Having $9.1 billion to spend, would a wise legisla ture, deeply committed to the well being of our people and our natural endowment for generation after gen eration have spent it on roads? We afrgue that a truly wise legislature would Have spent very little of it on roads. A tfuly wise legislature would be aware that the end of the petroleum age is dose at hand and that our society is rfeptdly waking up to the real conse quences of the automobile. More than 40 percent of the gasoline we use is supplied from faraway places, many of which are politically unstable. This deserves far more attention than it gets in our daily discourse. Supplies of petroleum are limited, and that limita tion, once hinted at in the embargo of 1973, may become crippling at any time. The ecological damage done in exploring for and in production and shipping of petroleum is extensive. This is true for both land and ocean transpor tation. Exploitation of Alaskan oil has not been without its problems. The oil spill from the tanker Valdez in Alaska, the spill of the Argentine tanker in Antarctica and the massive oil spill off of Morocco's coast represent just a few of this past year's major oil spills. Our own gas consumption represents our personal contribution to these oil spill disasters and provides incentives for offshore drilling in places like the Outer Banks. Reagamisim M s. Mona Charon was right, Satan is afoot. In 1988, the former White' House speech writer invoked "Paradise Lost" to decry critics of Ronald Reagan. John Milton's fallen angel urged his minions to resent their lowly fate, and Charon claimed that those attacking Reagan copied Satan's method. They practiced 'politics of envy," she argued, by tell ing America that its hero president favored the rich over the lower classes. ' Ms. Charon's judgment was only partly accurate, and two years later the speechwriter-turned-columnist encoun ter's a Satan less reassuring to Reaganism's defense. Ninety percent of Americans pay as much or more taxes today than in 1980. Even the former New Right propagan dist Mr. George Will acknowledges that Reagan and his heir, George Bush, Have cut taxes only for the wealthiest 10 percent of our nation who Charon Warned us not to envy. The rest of us pay more, and out of incomes harder to earn and that buy less than before Reagan took office. ' ' Ms. Charon, however, argued in 1 988 that incomes kept up with inflation in the 1 980s, discrediting any harping that Reaganomics had leftmost Americans behind. 1990 statistics reveal how families kept up with inflation. Gov ernment reports show we worked more hours in 1 988 than 1979 and were more productive in those hours. . ,Ms. Charon missed that, critics didn't. Overlooked in Charon's judg ment was a fact already well-established in 1988. Families need more than longer hours and harder work to ke,ep up, they also needed two wage earners to maintain standards of living provided by one working parent before 1980. No real rise in family incomes pcjcurred not for most of us. In 1990, families work harder and longer. For many it's just to survive. Child-labor law violations have reached record proportion this year. Children don't work when families prosper. Don't tell that to Elizabeth Dole, though, she's the President 's Secretary pf, Labor and is responsible for enforc ing labor laws. At a Republican party fbum held at the end of March, Dole "was too busy extolling Reaganism's yictory over inflation to mention its -cqsts to children and their families. V ,1s exploitation of children the only 'update on Reaganism from 1988? The 'answer comes from the policies of Bush, 'who wants to out-do Reagan by further shifting the tax burden from the rich. . - The president's most recent budget proposes taxing college students' work i study earnings to help White House budget chief Richard Darmen pay part of this year's $160 billion-plus federal budget deficit. The tax will fall on those working their way through a school, a 'group already suffering reductions in federal aid to students, which has low ered the number of poor Americans enrolled in higher education. Even more galling is that the exac tion on students won't even go to the GangiBerry Carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming through the "green house effect." How soon will the oceans rise so that our coastal residents will become "environmental refugees" flee ing their homes? There are such refu gees in many parts of the world now people whose homelands are no longer habitable because of environmental changes. Damage to the ozone layer becomes more alarming with each new gather ing of scientists examining this phe nomenon. The freon used in automo bile air conditioners contributes to the problem. The automobile is also the leading culprit in our state when it comes to producing ground level ozone. Unfor tunately, this ozone does not replace the ozone we are destroying in the atmosphere but instead stays close to the ground destroying or harming trees, , crops, animal and human lungs. Ozone levels are already becoming danger ously high in the North Carolina Pied mont. Farmers in the Piedmont already face crop yield losses of up to 30 per cent. Ozone in summer also represents a major health threat to the young, elderly and physically active. Accord ing to Stephan Ostrowski of the Cen ters for Disease Control, "ozone is nearly as effective at destroying the lungs as mustard gas." People think the problem cannot be too bad in North Carolina. Actually the ozone problem in the Piedmont is among the worst in the country. Ozone is formed when "ozone precursors" such as nitrogen oxides are cooked in the hot summer time sun. Other factors that combine to worsen the ozone effect of car emis sions are humidity, ultraviolet light and stagnant air masses i.e. the normal summertime conditions of our state. The paving of enormous areas so that automobiles can move at high speed from anywhere to anywhere frustrates the Earth's function as a solar collector. Photosynthesis is the basic life support system. The arrival of sunshine and caused economic hell Chris Hood U.S. government, at least not all of it. The rich get 25 cents of every tax dollar paid by the poor and middle classes plus that portion of the Social Security trust fund used by Bush to fuel his deficit spending. Why is it the rich get our tax dollars? The ocean of tax -cut cash they received in the 1980s was money that first Re agan and now Bush since borrowed to pay the staggering federal debt, which owes in part bitter irony to those same tax breaks. The rest of us pay the interest on the debt. Interest payments swallow one fourth of government -spending, and those owning piles of government bonds, America's wealthy, thus enjoy a taxpayer-paid annuity for forever. $3,200,000,000, the current federal debt, won't go away fast, and it's grow ing by hundreds of billions each year under Bush. Besides the debt, other legacies of Reaganism have also worsened since 1 988. Financial deregulation, combined with Reagan's cash windfall for Wall Street and his tax holiday for corpora tions caused a merger mania that, while making fortunes for a few people, now bleeds bankruptcies, junk bond losses and savings & loan insolvencies. Insur ance and pension funds pay for the wreckage, the cash lost no longer avail able for loans to homebuyers or busi nesses seeking to expand. Overpriced leveraged buy-outs thus skewed interest rates sky high for con ventional credit customers. Home ownership became harder in the 1980s as a result of borrowing by takeover artists, who leeched billions in credit to fuel their coups. The damage lingers. Junk bonds losses in failed and fail ing LBOs, plus monumental chicanery in the S&L industry, which helped fund Wall Street's machinations, keep inter est rates high today. Top all that with the $200 billion-plus taxpayers will pay to salvage the S&Ls, money that otherwise would flow to savings or could be used for mortgage payments. Effects of financial deregulation also show at the everyday level. Airline competition reduced by the merger craze has sent ticket prices skyrocket ing. President Bush's response? Raise airline ticket taxes and increase fees for landing rights to repair crumbling air ports, expenses the federal government use to pay that is, before the Reagan debt debacle and which the now less-competitive airline industry will pass on to you and me. Such is the consumer's lot in the Age of Reagan. Consumers of another product, hous ing, have been hit as well. It!s harder to buy a home or even rent an apartment today than before Reagan. Why? The three pillars of Reagan-Bush policy: highly selective tax cuts resulting in a hemorrhaging national debt, which education, clean rain on plants is the essential action. That cannot happen where there is pavement. Road runoff contaminated by auto mobile fluids is a serious cause of pol lution in rivers and lakes and ground water. All the fluids that automobiles require are pollutants: brake fluid, trans mission fluid, battery acid, anti-freeze and lubricants. Most end up in the ground and ultimately in the water. The Earth is the source of everything, and it must absorb everything our wasteful economy discards. A polluted Earth cannot sustain decent life. New roads and highways around towns and cities may temporarily re lieve highway congestion but they also facilitate urban sprawl and strip devel opment. Stripsprawl development is unfortunately becoming an all too familiar site in the Piedmont. It is not too early to begin speaking of the New Jerseyfication of our Piedmont since the day is not far away when dense development will cover the Piedmont from the Virginia state line north of Durham to the South Carolina state line below Charlotte. The construction of roads in the mountains will also be followed by intense development and the building of more bridges along our coast will open up more areas to devel opment further endangering wetlands and other coastal ecosystems. The loss of vegetation because of paving and the subsequent develop ment seriously handicaps the ability of natural systems to sustain healthy eco communities. Trees, particularly are essential to the retention of soil and groundwater, to the absorption of car bon dioxide and the manufacturing of oxygen. Many world changes in cli mate are due to the loss of trees. North Carolina is naturally forested and should continue to be largely forested. The implications of the dying trees in the mountains are not sufficiently reported nor sufficiently appreciated. The automobile is a major factor in the loss roadkill of native wildlife which rightfully belongs in our com munity of life. We need to call into question the faith we as a people put into the auto mobile and the funds we devote to drives massive government borrowing that inflates interest rates; a tight money campaign that protects the rich against inflation while capping wages and reducing credit for new housing; and financial deregulation, the cost of which has been described already. Adding lower average incomes for young people 25 to 34, which result in part from Reaganism's regressive taxa tion, the housing picture for most Americans has become very bleak. "Even today the real cost of financ ing a home the nominal mortgage interest rate minus the rate of inflation is many times higher than it was in the late 1970s, when home ownership was still expanding." Rolling Stone magazine. If housing is harder to obtain, and especially harder for young people, consider one last legacy of Reaganism that shows on our own campus today, one heaping an additional burden on students already enduring cuts in fed eral financial aid and facing the pros pect of taxes on work-study earnings. Republican Gov. Jim Martin's tax breaks for the wealthy now cause a $200 million-plus shortfall in state revenues. The fiasco doesn't owe to the cost of repairing Hurricane Hugo's damage, which is the governor's de fense (Hugo is only 10 percent of the problem), and unlike B ush, Martin can't pass on the red ink to future taxpayers, hence the budget freeze in effect in our state university system. If you're a student who can't get a computer to use in campus labs, or if your fees and tuition are raised next year, remember who to blame. Most importantly, if you're one of the nine of 10 of all Americans, not just students or other young people, who've been left behind by Reaganism, re member that your economic well-being today and in the future is indentured to the $3.2 trillion tab of 1 0 years of prodi gal, elitist national government. That brings us back to "Paradise Lost." Where is Satan's handiwork evident today, or phrased another way, would envy be the evil Ms. Mona Charon beholds in 1990? First, current critics of Republicans in the White House suffer two facts: Bush has two more years in office, and he currently enjoys a whopping poll-approval rat ing. So if Ms. Charon continued using Satan's anguish as her guide, she might liken the critics' futility to this sigh heard from Milton's black pool: "Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable." Hope Charon would be both wrong and right. Misery can turn into positive action, and those thus energized, critics and the voters they appeal to, can soon enough end Reaganism's burdens. Consider that Charon's hero won in 1980 by asking, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" New Right ideologues and their presi dents should have to answer that ques tion in 1992. Chris Hood is a senior interdiscipli nary studies major from Southern Pines. to fond unnecessary making it possible to get from here to there quickly without any delays. A five- or 10-minute delay requires that new roads be built and old roads wid ened. Neighborhoods are changed, beautiful hundred-year old trees are cut down, hundred acre parking lots are built for unnecessary shopping centers. Downtown areas which once gave our towns and cities so much character and vitality have been sacrificed for easy convenient but sterile shopping malls. A lot of us are weeping in sorrow as we watch the automobile steal beauty and community from our lives, as we watch opinion leaders voice their support for more and more concessions to the auto mobile and more and more damage to the land. Can they not see that a com mitment to doing more and more of Reagan brought prosperous era Left-wing revisionists are on the prowl. Rather than admit that, the conservative ideal articu lated by Ronald Reagan has brought America a decade of peace and pros perity, they are attempting to rewrite history. They desperately seek to prove that the Reagan era was a failure. Don't believe it. America truly is better off today than it was 1 0 years ago, and with a little luck, the best is yet to come. Evidence that Reaganism has bene fited the nation abounds. Typically, however, left-leaning demagogues have stretched their collective minds to blame the now legendary "Reagan budget cuts" for everything from homelessness to AIDS. Volumes could be written refuting these charges. Given the limited space, however, I am able to focus on but a few of the so-called "facts" recited by my liberal counter parts. Reaganomics, the liberals charge, spawned a "decade of greed." This is preposterous. Certainly, people had money to spend, but they also had money to donate, and they gave it away at an unprecedented rate. Between 1981 and 1989 charitable gifts more than doubled, to over $100 billion a year. After adjusting for inflation, contribu tions rose more than 30 percent. Dur ing the same period, the number of Americans doing volunteer work also skyrocketed. Far from creating greedy misers, Reaganism restored a sense of community to America. Along with this came something almost forgotten in the age of detente and disco: belief in civic responsibility. If this is what the decade of yuppies wrought, I say let 'em eat Haagen Dazs. According to another popular leftist myth, only the rich benefited from Reagan's tax cuts. It is true that the rich got richer under Reagan. So did the poor. After adjusting for inflation, the income of the poorest two-fifths of Americans rose by a full 10 percent. Median family income rose more than 10 percent in real terms. The poverty rate among African-Americans fell by more than 13 percent, and more than 3 million people rose above the poverty line. Unemployment fell dramatically, and the free-market created over 20 million new jobs. Thanks to the Reagan tax cuts, the percentage of taxes paid by the richest 1 percent of taxpayers has increased nearly every year, and income taxes currently account for an ever-decreasing percentage of the little guy's tax burden. As liberal Harvard economist Lawerence Lindsey notes, the tax cuts spurred the phenomenal economic growth of the 1980s. In sum, the poor have not gotten poorer. There are, however, more wealthy Americans, and that is what bothers the left. Radical egalitarians, especially those in the University, just can't stand the fact that Donald Trump makes millions. Sure Trump can build skyscrapers, but can he deconstruct Milton? Naturally, the liberals are calling for what is already wrecking rhe planet, and wrecking North Carolina? Human destiny and the Earth's des tiny are inseparable. The destiny of North Carolinians and North Carolina's land are inextricably entwined. We have an obligation to pass on to our children and grandchildren a land of fruitfulness and good health. The elevation of the automobile to the role of primary deter minant of how our economy functions, how our energy and our money are spent is ridiculous. We are making our place into a poisoned wasteland be cause we will not give up an addiction that destroys us. Our society tells its youth to say no to drugs. They ought to be saying right back to society, "Why don't you prac tice what you preach?" The automobile Bob Lukefahr a tax increase to "make up for lost revenue." If the Reagan era has taught us anything, it is that decreasing the tax burden enhances revenues and reduces the need for high-priced welfare pro grams. Reaganism reminded the nation that the free enterprise system remains the most effective anti-poverty pro gram ever created. If the current expan sion is to continue, more tax cuts must be forthcoming. This is not to say that we have dis covered Utopia. Even in the shadows of Trump's skyscrapers dwell legions of homeless men and women who have been left behind. They seem ignored and trampled upon by the affluent soci ety around them. But the question remains, is this the fault of Reaganism? While demagogues frequently ac cuse Reagan of "decimating the nation's supply of low-cost housing," the facts tell a different story. First, there are not 3 million homeless people in the United States. Credible estimates range from 350,000, as claimed by Harvard Pro fessor Richard Freeman, to 650,000 according to the National Academy of Sciences. Nobody, except Mitch Snyder, Sam Donaldson and the edito rial board of The Daily Tar Heel, still believes there are anywhere near 3 million people living on the streets. The problem is much more manage able than we have been led to believe. Also, most homeless persons, 71 percent according to the Urban Insti tute are drug addicts, alcoholics or suffer form mental illness. Not even Sam Donaldson would blame that on Re agan. So what is the problem? Clearly there is a scarcity of affordable housing. But this comes as no surprise when local government officials have strangled the housing market. Destructive policies like rent control and overly restrictive zoning regulations have given many inner-cities that chic Third World look. When market forces are held at bay, incentives to build housing disappear. Should the left become serious about solving the homeless problem, they will deregulate the housing market. Until then the poor will suffer. Unfortunately, deregulation is an anathema for the left. According to the conventional wisdom, everything from airline delays to the savings and loan crisis stem from inadequate govern ment oversight. One would think that the pundits and policy dweebs who perpetuate this myth would take a les son from Eastern Europe. Asking a politician to tinker with the market is a little like asking a pit preacher to re write the Bible. Just because he know John 3:16 by heart does not mean he can compose the Summa Theologica. In any case, blaming deregulation for either airline delays or the S&L mess is foolish. Since deregulation, hi; gfaways is as great as an addiction as heroin. It , destroys the land, which is really the body of our society, but we keep on catering to this monster and acting as though that's a good thing. Those of us in the environmental; community also need to begin to visu-i , alize a world in which automobiles no longer shape our world and we need to begin working toward that end it's never too early to start such a monu-. mental task. Greg Gangi is a graduate student in ecology and the vice chairman of the Research Triangle Group of the Sierra Club. Jim Berry is the director of the Raleigh-based environmental group The Center for Reflection on the Sec ond Law. airline fares have fallen almost 40 per cent in real terms. U.S. airlines are carrying 60 million more passengers each year and the number of passengers that have three or more carriers from which to choose has increased 37 per cent. Unfortunately, the government still owns the airports and runs the air traffic control system. Is it any wonder there are delays? We can also thank state control for the savings and loan debacle. Congress deregulated the risks and guaranteed against losses. In an effort to protect their political hides, corrupt congress men shielded insolvent institutions from market forces. We are now presented with the bill and an admonition that America must rely more on govern ment. (Is is just me, or is there some thing wrong with this logic?) Deregu lation works. We ought to try it some time. ,: Perhaps the greatest failure of the Reagan era has been the accumulation of a massive federal debt. Since the early 1980s, deficit spending has risen at an unprecedented rate. Once again, however, it is disingenuous to blame this on Reaganism. ; Balancing the budget is a fundamen tal tenant of the conservative doctrine. (Personally, I have been against deficit spending $ver since my ex-wife got her first credit card.) Conservatives have been calling for a balanced budget amendment since 1981. Even though annual federal tax revenue has increased from $517 billion in 1980 to $980 bil lion in 1989, there is never enough money to satisfy the congressional spendthrifts. Lawerence Lindsey prom ises that by limited government spendj ing to 3 percent annual growth, there will be a budget surplus by the end of the decade. There is no shortage of funds, only a shortage of leadership. And with some 98 percent of our repre sentatives being re-elected every two years, the leadership deficit will likely continue. In spite of all this, there is on thing about which both conservatives and liberals can agree: Eight years of Re aganism radically changed the country and the world. In 1979 no self-respect ing American politician would have dared to stand up and proclaim the virtues of limited government and the lasse-faire capitalism. Today one finds such visionaries in nearly every com--munist country. A few can even be found in America. The desire for lib-r erty is rocking the foundations of so cialist monoliths around the world; From Peking to Sacramento advocates of big government are on the defensive) People finally realize that a strong dose: of Jeffersonian liberty is the only way! to halt the cancerous growth of the; state. Reaganism reminded the world that government is the problem not the solution. For this alone we owe a great deal to the man and his vision. f Bob Lukefahr is a senior political science major and publisher of The" Critic magazine network. i ?
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
April 23, 1990, edition 1
11
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75