January 1998
Talking Points: What kids teach us about liberty; rich slaves; and Nazi anti-smokers
Marc Beauchamp, Editor
140 years of spending
In the year Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, federal outlays totaled $1.46 trillion. This year, federal outlays are expected to hit $1.7 trillion.It is hard to grasp amounts so unfathomably huge, but here is an exercise that may help: Add together every penny the federal government spent from 1800 to 1940. Adjust the total upward to reflect nearly two centuries of inflation. You will wind up with less than the $1.7 trillion budgeted for this fiscal year.
In other words, the government in Washington will spend more of the nation's wealth in the next 12 months alone than it spent in the 140 years from Jefferson's first term through FDR's second. It will cost more to run the federal government for a single year than it cost to fight the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the First World War; more than it cost to pay for the Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of Alaska; more than it cost to build the Panama Canal, to construct the Hoover Dam, to carry out eight national censuses, to relieve the Great Depression, and to operate the postal system for five generations -- combined.
-- Jeff Jacoby, Syndicated Columnist, November 3, 1997
Anti-smoking Nazis
"Under Hitler's dictatorship, the Nazis conducted one of the world's most vigilant anti-smoking campaigns. They imposed severe restrictions on smoking in public places and banned pregnant women from lighting up as part of their quest for racial purity. A British medical journal quoted Adolf Hitler as saying his Nazi Party would never have ascended to power if he had not given up smoking."-- William Drozdiak, The Washington Post, December 6, 1997
Kids are Libertarians
The tax package came wrapped in the usual rhetoric: "The rich have too much and the poor have too little," "It's only fair," and so forth. The fact of the matter is that nobody really believes the rhetoric of redistribution. Nobody even comes close to believing it deep down.How do I know this? I know it because I have a daughter, and I take my daughter to the playground, and I listen to what the other parents tell their children.
In my considerable experience, I have never, ever heard a parent say to a child that it's okay to forcibly take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do. Nor have I ever heard a parent tell a child that if one kid has more toys than the others, then it's okay for those others to form a "government" and vote to take those toys away.
--Steven E. Landsburg, Fair Play: What your child can teach you about economics, values and the meaning of life (The Free Press, 1997)
Rich slaves
According to the latest information released by the IRS, the top 1% of income earners paid 30.4% of the personal income tax revenues collected in 1995. The top 5% paid almost 50%.What we have done is to put the rich in chains and make them work for the rest of us. They are publicly owned slaves. Our slaves are such productive people that governments at all levels can take away more than half of their incomes and they are still rich after-tax. But nonetheless slaves.
This is not what our country was supposed to be. Unless we get rid of the income tax, we won't return to freedom... [where] citizens receive the full fruit of their labors and are responsible for themselves and their families.
--Paul Craig Roberts, The Washington Times, November 11, 1997
What do women want?
Scholars studying the growth of Big Government in the United States have stumbled upon an unexpected factor: women's suffrage.Economists John R. Lott Jr. of the University of Chicago and Larry Kenny of the University of Florida examined what happened to government spending in states where women were granted the right to vote.
"Suffrage coincided with immediate dramatic increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and the size of these changes continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise," Lott said. "Within 11 years, real per capita expenditures had more than doubled from $101 to $208," an increase their statistical analysis suggests was nearly all due to women's suffrage.
Why did government suddenly get bigger when women won the vote? Kenny and Lott say government grew in direct response to the different needs of female voters. "Women have lower wages," said Kenny, and that means they're more likely to need -- and support -- government programs and services."
-- The Washington Post, November 30, 1997
The myth of crack babies
[Here is] the central fact about the Reagan/Bush "war on crack": From the start it was built entirely on lies, both about crack and the people who used it.Crack In America, a collection of papers by 20 broadly experienced researchers and scholars in the field (research pharmacologists, sociologists, criminal justice experts) is important because it exhaustively and authoritatively lays out the ways in which Republican administrations and a gullible, sensation-seeking media created and sustained a phony drug war.
Consider the drug war's most powerful and shamelessly deceptive myth: crack babies. We've all read accounts like Reader's Digest's of "tiny addicts" who are "poisoned in the womb," and then faced, at birth, a "world of nightmarish withdrawal." The big media repeatedly quoted a Department of Health & Human Services study that predicted 100,000 crack-disabled babies every year during the '90s, at an annual cost of $20 billion.
But as Morgan and Zimmer write, "the 'crack baby' on which drug policy is increasingly based does not exist."
Dr. Ira Chasnoff, whose 1985 study in the New England Journal of Medicine kicked off the crack-baby craze, has effectively recanted. Chasnoff had to admit after three more years of studying the infants that a large majority turned out quite normal, with absolutely no detectable behavioral or learning disabilities. A Canadian meta-analysis of the 20 most reliable studies on drug use during pregnancy found that if a broad range of drugs, including alcohol, is considered, crack as an outstanding factor in birth problems disappears completely.
The best evidence indicates that "crack babies" are simply poverty babies, whose enfeebled condition is the predictable result of poor nutrition, bad or no prenatal care, hopelessness, despair, and physical abuse.
-- John DeVault, Review of Crack In America: Demon Drug and Social Justice The Washington City Paper, October 3, 1997
Send "Talking Points" contributions to Marc Beauchamp, 2231 Kings Garden Way, Falls Church, VA, 22043. E-mail: mbeaucha@ix.netcom.com.
