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Show Siturday, April 10, DAILY HERALD 2004 A7 Opinion MIKE JER WAN I'M VW BEMNP BUSH IN Private answers to puoiic neea forWfih apmss w nod ION T FW-RNSN3,BU- S CKCT UR ,1 I i . rv w in several Utah Taxpayers being asked to bonds on the risky UTOPIA telecommunications project, j Proponents argue that UTOPIA is needed in order to expand broadband capacity GUEST and access. OPINION Fortunately, an alternative to UTOPIA exists that is based on sound tax policy and eliminates taxpayer risk. Instead of exposing taxpayers to an ultra-risk- y gamble, ytah should offer tax incentives to private sector telecommunications companies such as umcast, xu, Heritage tireless, Qwest, and others to expand existing infrastruc-turThis proposal offers several advantages over UTOPIA, j First, offering tax incentives to the private sector would be it worst revenue neutral compared to the UTOPIA project. e. UTOPIA is government-owne- d and would therefore be exempt from paying sales taxes on equipment purchases and property taxes on infrastructure. Providers on the UTOPIA System would be exempt from privilege taxes if the system is ippen to all comers, j Second, expanding an existing infrastructure makes inuch more sense than building a new one, like UTOPIA, from scratch Currently, Utah's private-secto- r companies have thousands of miles of fiber in the ground. Other investments include numerous central offices and remote terminals. The Utah State Tax Commission currently assesses privately owned telecommunications infrastructure at $3 billion, an amount that excludes intangible value and accounts ijor depreciation. Walking awflu frnm this invpctmpnt and starting anew, as UTOPIA proponents suggest, makes no sense. Third, creating incentives to expand private sector investment exposes no risks to taxpayers. Telecommunications is a rapidly changing and inherently risky business. Share holders, not taxpayers, should bear the risks. Fourth, exempting business inputs from taxation is sound tax policy. Taxing business inputs discourages investment telecom-ijnunicatio- rs rv - and simply hides the true cost of government since these taxes are eventually passed onto consumers, shareholders and employees. UTOPIA proponents have argued that tax incentives to the private sector will affect state arid local government budgets. However, as previously mentioned, UTOPIA itself will be not be paying property taxes on infrastructure nor sales taxes on equipment purchases. Offering similar exemptions to the private sector would therefore be revenue neutral compared to UTOPIA even in the worst case. Utah's private sector telecommunications industry pays a lot of taxes: $50 million annually in property taxes and $20 million annually in sales taxes on equipment purchases. Reducing these taxes in exchange for investment and expansion in the current infrastructure makes more sense than expecting the taxpayers to secure debt on a venture government-ownelike UTOPIA which has no current infrastructure at alL Reducing the effective tax burden on private sector telecommunication investment and infrastructure by 50 percent through targeted investment-based tax credits and exemptions would still leave more than $35 million for state and local governments (UTOPIA would pay zero dollars in taxes) and allow companies to increase investment by $35 million annually. Utah currently has two extensive telecommunications networks: one belonging to Comcast and the other belonging to Qwest. A third type of network, wireless, is emerging and is already offering services along the Wasatch Front. Numerous other smaller networks exist such as XO, Her itage Wireless and others, are growing and with tax incentives will expand even faster. Government should not be in the business of competing against business, especially in risky industries like telecommunications. Utah should create incentives for the private sector through sound tax policy to get the job done. t, Taxpayers Association. Stuck between Iraq and a hard place Muslims parade the bodies of four through the streets of Fallujah, Iraq, as thousands cheer. ' The American military response is the encirclement of the city, a nighttime curfew and throwing up barricades across possible escape routes. But the battle around Fallujah goes on through the week, with a dozen marines killed in one day. In the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City formerly Saddam City a radical Shiite whose cleric, Moqtada father and two brothers were . executed by Saddam Hussein, leads a militia uprising in which eight American soldiers are Slain. The Shiites represent a new threat to the American-lecoalition. Sunnis and Shiites ' lighting on the same side con- front the coalition with an unexpected twofront insurgency. The Governing Council announces an arrest warrant for Sadr without saying when it will be executed. Meanwhile, fiie Shiite uprising spreads to other cities and towns. Ironically, the Sadr insurrection was touched off by the American suppression of his incendiary newspaper democracy in Iraq is still a tentative thing. The fiery Sadr proclaims that he has forged links with the Palestinian Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah. Volunteers for the holy war are reportedly infiltrating from Syria. When President Bush said ! d The Wgh rollers are still rolling ft o longer able to collect seven-figur- e soft J money contributions under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, the national political parties have to concentrate their efforts on raising hard money. That has made donors who can afford the maximum contribution of $25,000 per party committee a highly coveted breed. , "In this new world, it's critical that organizations have ties to their largest hard money contributors," says Jim Lamb, a Re- last year, while the Republicans counted just 91 of these contrir utors. "Before (BCRA) we were able to go to a small group of people for big checks," says Cara Morris, deputy communications director for the DSCC "Since (then), we've really been changing our strategy." The Democratic congressional committees' success at attracting donors willing to give the maximum has not been shared by the Democratic National Committee. Once known for its ability to draw big soft money donors, the DNCJias struggled to convert them into large hard money contributors. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee, known for its skill in raising small donations, has seen enormous growth in its number of maximum hard money contributors. The DNC took in $25,000 contributions from 219 donors in 2003. By comparison, 689 individuals gave $25,000 to the RNC. This disparity can be explained in part by the fact that Republicans control the White House, giving the RNC a clear advantage. It raised close to $108 million in 2003, nearly 2.5 times the DNC's $44 million. Being able to attach a face to the party is critical for fund raising, according to Democratic consultant Bob McDevitt. Re 111 six- - and I ; publican and president of Commonwealth Consultants. So far in the 2004 campaign, the parties have had mixed sue- cess with courting donors who can contribute at that rate. Despite a Republican-controlle- d House and Senate, the Democrats' two congressional g committees are both doing better in collecting donors money from than their Republican counter parts. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised the maximum $25,000 from 110 donors last year, compared to just 61 who gave that amount to the Republicans. Meanwhile, . the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee took in $25,000 from 206 individuals fund-raisin- big-doll- ar I Mike Jerman is vice president of the Utah DANIEL SCHORR Sunni STEVE WEISS d that Iraq was a central front in the war on terrorism, he may have been only premature. Eleven months after Bush proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the repatriation of 135,000 American troops is on hold and the Pentagon mumbles something about reinforcement as a contingency. Clearly the Pentagon, expectstreets, ing flower-strewfailed to foresee that some Iraqis might fight for liberation from their liberators. Bush insists that the June 30 date for transfer of authority to some Iraqi entity still holds. But he expresses himself in a curious way : "The intention is to make sure the deadline remains the same." How does the American public react to all this? A Pew Research poll taken after Fallujah says that 57 percent of Americans still believe that war in ' Iraq was the right decision. But the same ratio 57 percent dont think that Bush has a clear plan for ending it. Maybe it's time to dust off that unhappy word from Vietnam days quagmire. For those too young to remember, quagmire means that, whether or not you should have been there in the first place, you're stuck there now because you can't get out without making ' things infinitely worse. n I Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst for National Public Radio. donors. According to the RNC Web site, the group was created "in response to a dramatically intensified Democrat major donor effort at the then-un- - publicans have made President Bush their chief , just as Democrats did with President Clinton. But since the end of Clinton's term, Democrats have lacked a clear choice to head their efforts. Now that John Kerry looks like a shoo-i- n for the nomination, McDevitt says he expects the DNC to attract more $25,000 donors. "Giving is a personal thing," he says. "Calling up a potential donor and saying 'It's really important to John,' is different than saying 'It's really important to the party.'" Jsut McDevitt says Republi- cans also hold a distinct advantage over Democrats in their ability to promise donors access to the president. "The perception of being around the leader of the free world is a powerful draw," he says. Lamb argues that the Republig success cans' party has less to do" with President Bush than it does with the party's longstanding commitment to exclusive donor membership groups. "It's not a matter of who's in control right now," he says. "The Republicans have just always been better about having membership groups." That's been true at least since 1988, when the RNC founded "Team 100", the party's most exclusive group of fund-raiser-- in Avn UnJnntnJ ff 1 ti llt el." For the past 14 years, chances to meet with top Republican leaders and invitations to private party dinners were doled mit in owktanrro frr t WV in contributions to the party committees. With the ban on soft money, Team 100 now asks for the maximum hard money contribution of $25,000 per year, but it retains its special rewards. The DNC has similar donor clubs, but some of the Democratic Party's former soft money contributors appear to have turned to newly formed advocacy groups for their giving. 527 committees, named for the section of the tax code that governs them, have replaced the Democratic Party as an outlet for unlimited contributions. Republican interests, perhaps waiting for clarification on the permissible activities of 527 committees, have formed fewer such groups than Democratic interests. fund-raisin- I Steve Weiss is media director for the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, nnnnmfit r - - - .rpsparrh oprnunr based in Washington, D.C. big-doll- MAX BOOT Weapons may be smart but intelligence is not April 9, 2003, Baghdad far faster than most commentators, and even most military commanders, had expected. The U.S. armed forces looked invincible. A year later, the perception is very different. The carnage in Iraq is front page news week in, week out. US. forces in Iraq are beleaguered on two fronts and appear unable to vanquish their foes. They have suffered three times more casualties since the fall of Baghdad than they did during the war itself. What accounts for this? The answer to that question was provided by political scientist Barry Posen in the scholarly journal International Security last summer. His thesis was that "the United States enjoys comcommand of the commons mand of the sea, space and air." No other country has naval, space or air forces remotely capable of challenging ours. But this edge slips away the closer U.S. forces get to the enemy. In "below "contested zones" feet (altitude), within several hundred kilometers of the even relshore, and on land" atively unsophisticated foes have a good chance of inflicting serious harm on our troops. This is precisely what weVe seen in Iraq, where American soldiers have proved enticing targets for enemies armed with cheap, simple weapons like On . grenades and homemade bombs. All the hightech weapons in the U.S. arsenal are of little use against a foe you can't find. U.S. troops have little choice but to venture into such messy "contested zones" if they want to win the war on terrorism. Otherwise they will be limited to ineffectual gestures such as cruise missile strikes against terrorist training camps (like the ones Bill Clinton launched against Afghanistan in August 1998). Unfortunately, winning the close-i- n fight against guerrillas requires skills that the U.S. armed forces don't possess in abundance. It requires, above all, the ability to generate "actionable" intelligence about who and where the terrorists are. The only way to get good information in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq is to spend a lot of time there, drinking tea with the locals and earning their ' trust. But not many U.S. offi- rials do that. All of the U.S. soldiers who spent the last year in Iraq have gone home or are about to. They are being replaced by an entirely new crew that will need months to figure out which sheiks and mullahs to cultivate. Likewise, in Afghanistan the military starts virtually from scratch every six to 12 months as new units rotate in and old ones leave. The situation is no better rocket-propelle- . d among the diplomats and spies who are supposed to support military operations. As Greg Miller and Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times reported in February, many CIA agents who "take sensitive overseas assignments are willing to serve rotations, a revonly olving-door approach that has undercut the agency's ability to cultivate ties to warlords in Afghanistan or collect intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency." The CIA and the State Department allow officers to specialize in a particular region, but they can rarely spend too long actually living there without hurting their chances of promotion. They get ahead by being known at headquarters, not in the Afghan outback. That's also true in the Army, where Foreign Area officers who specialize in a particular region can kiss their chrjices of making general goodbye. Moreover, it's common for CIA, military and State Department officers to be reassigned to a region far outside their expertise a Latin America specialist being sent to Asia, for instance. Sometimes this makes for a healthy influx of new ideas, but often it just wastes knowledge that took years to acquire. For 'a better approach, we should emulate What the British did when they were engaged in many of the same places that currently bedevil us. Look at the example of Gertrude Bell, a British intelligence agent, archeologist and diplomat who spent decades living and traveling in the Middle East and became known in the 1920s as the "uncrowned queen of Iraq." , Or Col. Robert Warburton, who spoke fluent Persian and Pashto and spent 18 years (1879-97- ) as the political officer in the Northwest Frontier Province of what is today Pakistan. He kept this volatile region (now a Taliban and stronghold) quiet through his personal influ- . ence. "In an area where every male was habitually armed at all ' times," historian Byron Farwell wrote, "he went about with only a walking stick." Within a month of his retirement, the area was swept by an Islamic fundamentalist revolt that took thousands of British soldiers to put down. The U.S. military has the best "smart" weapons in the world. But unless we get more smart, n knowledgeable people like and" Bell, we will always be at a major disadvantage in the war on terrorism. , War-burto- ' I Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This essay first appeared in the Los Angeles Times. |