From firearms-alert-owner Tue Aug 2 03:59:24 1994 Received: from localhost (chan@localhost) by jobe.shell.portal.com (8.6.4/8.6.4) id DAA14382 for firearms-alert-outgoing; Tue, 2 Aug 1994 03:57:21 -0700 Received: from nova.unix.portal.com (nova.unix.portal.com [156.151.1.101]) by jobe.shell.portal.com (8.6.4/8.6.4) with ESMTP id DAA14375 for ; Tue, 2 Aug 1994 03:57:18 -0700 Received: from gatekeeper.nra.org (gatekeeper.NRA.Org [192.156.97.62]) by nova.unix.portal.com (8.6.7/8.6.4) with SMTP id DAA18992 for ; Tue, 2 Aug 1994 03:57:06 -0700 Received: by gatekeeper.nra.org (5.65/DEC-Ultrix/4.3) id AA00452; Tue, 2 Aug 1994 06:56:59 -0400 Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 06:56:59 -0400 Message-Id: <9408021056.AA00452@gatekeeper.nra.org> Reply-To: alerts@gatekeeper.nra.org Originator: rkba-alert@nra.org From: alerts@gatekeeper.nra.org (NRA Alerts) To: firearms-alert@shell.portal.com Subject: INFO: Washington Times Editorial on 'Crime Bill' X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Comment: NRA Alerts list Sender: firearms-alert-owner@shell.portal.com Precedence: bulk Status: RO The following is reproduced with the permission of Stephen Moore and The Washington Times - 08/01/94. Commentary Section The Washington Times Monday, August 1, 1994 by Stephen Moore Late last week the U.S. Congress pole-vaulted to new heights of fiscal incompetence. Democratic House and Senate conferees managed to craft a crime bill that will cost taxpayers $32 billion but will do virtually nothing to fight crime. That this 1,100-page plus crime bill is irrelevant to the growing scourge of crime in America should not be too surprising. >From Day One, the chief motivation for this legislation has not been to get muggers, thugs and violent gangs off the streets. Rather, it has been to serve as a back-door method of channeling billions of federal tax dollars to states, the mayors and big cities, and a grab bag of special-interest groups. The bill triumphantly succeeds in achieving that goal. One has to go back at least 20 years and five presidents, to the days when Richard Nixon invented revenue sharing and started passing out free money to states and cities, to find a more expensive federal slush fund. Yes, Virginia, California, New York and Ohio, there is a Santa Claus. Many commentators have noted for months that the crime bill is crammed with political pork--huge dripping carvings of it. In the final version of the bill, roughly $10 billion in new social welfare spending has been earmarked for crime "prevention." Here is a brief list of what Congress thinks will "prevent" crime: * $1.8 billion for the local partnership provision. This money is for education, job training, self-esteem programs, and the like. It is federal revenue sharing resurrected. * $100 million for Rep. John Conyer's "ounce of prevention" program. This is free money for mayors to spend on virtually anything tangentially related to crime. * $630 million for "child-centered activities." This is money for arts and crafts, dance programs, recreational activities, and so forth. (Honest, I'm not making up these things.) * $10 million for public housing. The $30 billion a year that the Department of Housing and Urban Development already is spending is apparently insufficient. * $200 million for assorted inner-city youth activity programs. * $6 million for urban parks and recreation. * $270 million for schools, to be used "to improve the academic and social development of youths by instituting a collaborative structure that trains and coordinates efforts of social workers, teachers, and principals." They forgot about school crossing guards and janitors. * $50 million for youth development. * And, of course, no crime bill would be complete without $40 million for the highly acclaimed midnight basketball leagues. The streets of the Bronx seem safer already. The crime bill, says Bob Dole correctly, looks like it was constructed by a panel of university sociologists. What congressional liberals have accomplished here is a brilliant marketing coup. They have taken their lengthy wish list of failed social welfare initiatives --not one of which would pass muster on its own-- tied them with the bow of crime prevention, and now have a package that is likely to pass. We can only be thankful that Bill Clinton didn't have the foresight to put his health care reform in the crime bill, or no doubt that would sail through Congress this week. Probably the most objectional pork in the entire legislation is the $1.8 billion earmarked for Sen. Joe Biden's "Violence Against Women Act." That act sets up gender sensitivity programs for judges and police; classifies assaults against women as "hate crimes" or civil rights offenses, and passes out millions of dollars to women's groups for "rape education" and a smorgasbord of other programs. The act would be more efficient if Congress cut out the federal middlemen and simply required every American household to write a $20 check to the radical feminist group of its choice. How can I say with certainty that the proposed social spending won't prevent crime? We've spent the past 25 years pouring funds into similar initiatives with meager results. We are not talking here about a bold new federal direction in the war against crime. In 1992, government at all levels devoted $1.01 trillion to fighting the crime problem via the "prevention" route. Yet despite this increased spending, inner-city lawlessness has soared. Even the bill's roughly $22 billion in federal spending on police and prisons os of dubious merit. It is a frontal assault on our system of federalism. Why does the federal government need to be in business of building prisons for the states and paying for cops in cities? The states spent upward of $600 billion in 1993. Since 1980 most states have seen their budgets double and even triple-- ditto for almost all major cities. A case might be made that states need more prison cells and cities need more cops, but no principled or fiscal case can be made that the federal government should pay for them. After all, the money that Congress seems so eager to dole out to the residents of states and cities came from the taxpayers of states and cities in the first place. The purpose of an effective crime bill is to teach criminals tat crime doesn't pay. George Mitchell, Joe Biden, Charles Schumer, and the big-city mayors are laughing all the way to the bank. [Stephen Moore is director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute.] ------------------------------------------------------------------- The following is reproduced with the permission of Donald Lambro and The Washington Times - 08/01/94. Commentary Section The Washington Times Sunday, July 31, 1994 by Donald Lambro As Congress rushes to finish its business before the August recess and the midterm elections beyond, our lawmakers are doing their best to spend all of the money we're giving them. And not just what we're giving them in taxes, but billions more in borrowed money for which we and future generations of taxpayers are fully liable. At the top of Congress' spending list is a wide assortment of health care bills that carry some very big promises and some even bigger price tags. Some don't even carry price tags, and the costs of others are deeply underestimated or hidden in some vague spending language. The Senate Finance Committee bill is estimated by some members to cost at least $100 billion more than its cost projections. The House Ways and Means Committee's Clinton look- alike bill still does not have a full cost analysis of all its provisions. And a proposed new health care entitlement to create Medicare Part C is said to cost $55 billion but could cost anywhere from 2 to 4 times that amount. After years of complaining about the rapidly rising costs of controlled federal entitlement programs, which now consume more than half of the budget, it is the height of fiscal irresponsibility to create still more entitlement programs whose costs would be on automatic pilot. Meantime, House and Senate leaders are still wrangling over crime bills that call for throwing nearly $30 billion over the next five years into the fight against crime. If any of the bills could deliver on their promises to make our communities a little safer, few taxpayers would begrudge spending what is a small fraction of a $1.5 trillion budget on the most serious issue facing the country. There are some good provisions in the crime bills, like the proposed $13 billion in new spending for prisons, and the "truth in sentencing provisions" that would require violent criminals to serve 85 percent of their sentences (though why not 100 percent?). But the bills are also loaded with $10 billion worth of some very dubious 1960's-style social welfare spending that would do nothing to curb violent crime. There is money for "cultural programs, arts and crafts, health education and dance programs." There is $50 million for an inner-city Midnight Sports Program that includes money for midnight basketball, complete with rules on who will compose the teams. There are funds to "increase self-esteem" of young criminal offenders. There is money for mire job-training centers, despite 125 existing federal job-training programs run by 14 different federal agencies costing $16.3 billion a year. (These centers spend about $200,000 per recipient, or about what it costs to attend Harvard each year.) There is even more money for guidance counselors and social workers, and some $2 billion to be spent on the Local Partnership Act, which is just another version of the old discredited revenue sharing program. None of this money will reduce crime. But the root-causes- of-crime crowd knows an easy way to spend more money when they see it. They're betting that this social welfare spending, which would not have a chance of being enacted on its own, will sneak through if it is wrapped in a crime-fighting package. "There is more pork contained in the crime bill than any legislation to pass Congress in the past 10 years," says budget analyst Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute. "The public does not favor dance classes, self-esteem training, drug-treatment and job training as a way to get thugs and dangerous criminals off our streets." But this summer's spending spree doesn't stop there. Congress is funding agencies that have been among the most wasteful, scandal-redden programs in the government. No effort is being made to assess whether its programs have been successful or not. (In a recent column I reported that the White House is proposing to expand the long-discredited Economic Development Administration to dish out more grants to help create jobs in our inner cities.) There is even more money for the Small Business Administration, which helps less than half of 1 percent of all small businesses with federally funded loans and other assistance programs. Instead of the billions wasted on this and other jobs programs, millions of small businesses would be better helped by cutting their capital gains and payroll taxes and reducing regulations. But lawmakers can't go home and point to what they've done for some special interest when everyone benefits. They would much rather boast about how they got a local EDA grant into a spending bill or lobbied for a self-esteem center for their district. Economist Milton Friedman is fond of reminding us that we tend to spend our money much more carefully that when we spend someone else's. And this is what is happening in Washington. Members of Congress are spending our money much less carefully than they would spend their own. The American people can put a stop to such squandering. And they will get their chance in November. [Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of the Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.] -- This information is presented as a service to the Internet community by the NRA/ILA. Many files are available via anonymous ftp from ftp.nra.org and via WWW at http://www.nra.org Be sure to subscribe to rkba-alert by sending: subscribe rkba-alert Your Full Name as the body of a message to rkba-alert-request@NRA.org Information can also be obtained by connecting to the NRA-ILA GUN-TALK BBS at (703) 719-6406.