Welcome to REASON Express, the weekly e-newsletter from REASON magazine. REASON Express is written by Washington-based journalist Jeff A. Taylor and draws on the ideas and resources of the REASON editorial staff. For more information on REASON, visit our Web site at www.reason.com. Send your comments about REASON Expres to Jeff A. Taylor (jtaylor@reason.com) and REASON Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie (gillespie@reason.com).
REASON Express June 5, 2001 Vol. 4 No. 23
1) Bush Twins Drink, the Nation Stews 2) Check-Cashing Our Way to Prosperity 3) Bath Seats: Uncle Sam to the Rescue 4) Quick Hits
- - Twin Terrors - -
If not for the love of a margarita, the Bush twins would've never given America a chance to confront its wholly dysfunctional treatment of adolescents. But the body poltic, blinder than a frat boy on a spring break mescal binge, totally missed the big blinking caution light that Barb and Jenna threw up.
Instead we fixated on the ephemeral: Was it really a story? What about their privacy? He drank, they drink, a connection? Gov. Bush signed the law they broke. Funny!
Only very rarely did anyone mention that raising the drinking age to 21 via federal extortion was primary to the Bush girls' problem. But even that is far too narrow a focus.
The central question is, How did we get to a point where adults are treated like children and children are treated like adults? Closely related to this is the bureaucratic move to outlaw adolescence, that awkward age were complex rules and regulations just cannot be applied across diverse groups.
It is this refusal to deal with the gray areas that nature saddles human development with--the man/boy duality that Alice Cooper, among others, speak of so eloquently--that is the common thread between zero tolerance in grade schools and neo-dry college campuses.
To be a juvenile is to forget about those nail-clippers in your book bag--swift arrest, handcuffs, and expulsion notwithstanding. For some, it is part of the progress from immature to mature to drink too much and do something you later regret. No amount of finely tuned, best-meaning rule-making can change that.
So for now the matter slides off the national radar screen, to await some future president whose eight-year-old is incarcerated for drawing pictures of a pointed stick.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/front/927303 http://www.newsobserver.com/sunday/front/Story/502865p-501891c.html
- - Check Mates - -
We are all Keynesians now. The plan to send checks out to every taxpayer in the republic was gimmicky enough. Now it turns out that the impulse to construct an instant fiscal stimulus has overridden even that modest threshold.
The Treasury Department will soon begin issuing some 98 million $300 to $600 checks basd on tax returns for the year 2000. That means that folks who'll owe no taxes on their 2001 returns will still get checks. The recently dead still qualify for a rebate, as will anyone else who has suddenly dropped out of the workforce.
"There is no recapture [of the money] because this is designed legislatively as an economic stimulus to inject a shot in the arm to economy," is how Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Rob Nichols put it.
Treasury is not sure exactly how many dead people will be asked to pump life into the economy. Some estimates of the non-rebate rebates go as high as five million.
But as Nichols says, what is important is that somebody cashes the checks and spends the money. Why go through the trouble of creating a tax code that actually encourages saving and investment--let alone one that doesn't snag cash then have Washington defile it, take a cut, and route the cash back--when Treasury can just cut checks?
This dangerous precedent, along with the general underwhelming nature of the Bush tax cut, has otherwise sane Washington heads buying Bushian cover stories that a great tax reform lies just ahead. Either a flat income tax or national sales tax can be moved if everyone would just get on board the Bush Express and stop knocking this first of many tax cuts.
To which the correct response should be: Yeah, right--the check is in the mail.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8837-2001Jun1.html
John Hood detailed the trouble George W. Bush got into when he tried to reform just the Texas tax code at http://www.reason.com/9811/fe.hood.html
- - Rub a Dub Flub - -
The Consumer Product Safety Commission voted unanimously last week to move toward regulating baby bath seats. How that will make baby baths any safer is an open question.
The safetynauts have admitted as much, but that doesn't seem to slow them down.
"We don't think this product can be made safely," Mary Ellen Fise, general counsel for the Consumer Federation f America, said.
From that we must deduce that Fise thinks a world without baby seats will be safer than a world with them. But in no world can the inherent danger of giving a baby a bath be rendered nil.
Dropping an utterly helpless creature in a vat of stuff that can kill it is fraught with danger. Bath seats that tip over, don't stick to tubs, or impart CPSC's famous "false sense of security" only incrementally add to that danger.
On the flipside, used properly, the seats do provide the value of keepig the little tykes somewhat localized to one patch of water. Expecting any more is asking for trouble.
And so is, apparently, asking safety mavens to think clearly.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A329-2001May31.html
QUICK HITS
- - Quote of the Week - -
"It will open up opportunities for athletes with disabilities to compete in events now held just for elite, able-bodied athletes, such as the Olympics," Kirk Bauer, executive director of Disabled Sports USA, on the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of disabled golfer Casey Martin.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A379-2001May31.html
- - Chip Chop - -
The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a $42 billion matching program passed by Congress in 1997, isn't working. States are letting matching money go by the board as complex rules and what are, in effect, high marginal tax rates on the benefits keep parents from signing their kids up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5033-2001May31.html
- - Blow Out - -
The Canadian Tire Corporation lost a battle for the site crappytire.com when a World Intellectual Property Organization arbitrator ruled it could not claim special rights to the expression. The company accused the registered owner the site, Mark McFadden, of using it to make "rude, untrue and libelous statements about Canadian Tire."
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010601/08/odd-tire-dc
- - Pillow Talk - -
Pillowtex Corp. will lay off 590 workers, many of whom less than two years ago voted 2,270-2,102 for union representation. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney called it the greatest union victory in a Southern textile mill.
http://www.charlotte.com/0603newpillow.htm
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