Editorials Good news, bad news The opening of the basketball season the last day of November brought good news and bad news for Hoke County High School's sports fans. The Hoke girls made a lot of mistakes but won over Cape Fear. The boys made a lot of mistakes and lost to Cape Fear. Over-all good news came after the game, along with critiques, from coaches Ron Parson and Audrey Long. Both see their athletes as good, which holds promise for the rest of the season. The good news also is the teams learned from the mistakes they made in their opener. True, it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game, namely on the high standard of sportsmanship, which Hoke teams do. Still, winning is more fun than losing, and we are sure we'll see a lot of that as well as continuing demonstrations of good sportsmanship. "BL All Thumbs We hope President Reagan has a pleasant flight down to Brasilia and perhaps a little time along the way to reflect on the latest triumph of informational disorder in the White House. We're referring, of course, to the great Thanksgiving tax-the-unemployed fiasco. Taxing unemployment benefits at some level is a respectable idea. Martin Feldstein, the president's chief economic adviser, has been making excellent arguments for years about the disincentive effects of our present unemployment insurance system. There seems to be a little doubt that, aside from its very large cost ? upward of $23 billion ? it tends to encourage more frequent and longer layoffs than are necessary to provide workers with a sufficient cushion against loss of job income. But throwing out an incomplete hunk of this thesis as raw meat for the nightly news shows was roughly equivalent to drunken political driving. TV news being what it is, the camera crews were quickly out on the streets interviewing jobless workers in the unemployment lines on how they felt about this latest affront from Ronald Reagan. Most of them ? one might say all of them ? thought it was just as awful as the TV reporters implied in their questions. Later explanations that the president hadn't even seen this particular proposal and that he hit the ceiling when he saw it didn't help much. Political impressions didn't help much. Political impressions are ephemeral and the damage was done. Such things do not happen in a well-ordered establishment. Leaks are as old as government itself, but one of the simple little rules is that the leaks should help your side, not the opposition. You leave it up to the opposition to put out their own leaks. Certainly the nightly news folks can't be blamed for believing that this was a serious proposal of the Reagan White House. The president started out as a tax cutter but now seems to be inclined to tax anything that isn't nailed down. He has just signed onto a gasoline tax that Howard Baker and Tip O'Neill came up with as a way of being able to say they were creating a "jobs" program through increased highway funding. The lame-duck session of Congress that began yesterday now seems well-positioned to commit whatever sins of commission or omission it pleases without the slightest interference from the White House. The president's White House problem is all the clearer. He has staffed the White House with too many people who either don't understand or don't agree with the supply-side principles that got him elected. No one in authority other than the president himself seemed equipped earlier this year to make the economic case for ending dollar inflation and suffering the economic dislocations that flowed inevitably from such a policy. And no one other than the president seemed able to make the corollary argument for cutting, rather than boosting, taxes. Indeed, the stampede for new revenue measures seems to have led the White House into the Thanksgiving trap. Taxing unemployment compensation above a certain income level can best be described as a supply-side revenue measure. The fundamental supply-side thesis is unassailable: An economy becomes weak and inflation-prone when public policy discourages work and investment and encourages idleness and borrowing. Anyone who cares to think about it a moment knows there are substantial numbers of people with relatively high incomes who rely on tax-free unemployment compensation above a certain level would raise the cost of idleness sufficiently to keep some of them at work. They would cease to be a burden on other producers. But there is a far more palatable way of getting the same result: simply cut the rates in the higher tax brackets. It is a sad commentary on the policy-making process that positive, politically palatable ideas are being rejected in favor of negative, politically unpalatable ones. We hope the president has time to reflect on how he has been maneuvered into a position where he can be portrayed by his opponents as a tax booster rather than a tax cutter. When he solves that problem he may be on the way toward getting his administration under better organizational control. From The Wall Street Journal The^n euM - journal _ ^iu.^1 rA/ottA Ca/io&na. Z?~, *S^<> ~ PRESS NATIONAL NEWSPAPER ~^9r^ association ASSOCIATION Published Every Thursday at Raelord. N.C. 2S376 119 W. Elwood Avenue Subscription Rales In Advance Per Yew? M OO 6 Months? S4.25 3 Months? $2.25 LOUIS H. FOGLEMAN. JR Publisher PAUL DICKSON Editor HENRY L. BLUE Production Supervisor WARREN N. JOHNSTON News Editor BILL LINDAU Associate Editor MRS. PAUL DICKSON r Society Editor SAMC. MORRIS < onlrlhutin? Editor ANN WEBB Advertisinf Representative Second ( las* Postage at Raeford. N.C. (USPS 3M-240) JUCte-e, x mow too geUBME 1W1H14 STUfF ? po^t" ftts&uMp fooe kncH . u \ r3 $UT IMS' Me &7T R POC? H6t26 vOKo SC*?>1V*Hr V I C\X r-AA. / /