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Show alt fak Friday Morning April pilmnr 6, 1984 Section A Page 18 With Renovation Course Set, Public Must Be Educated Much was left unsaid when Salt Lake City Council voted Tuesday night to renovate the Building at an estimated cost of $30 million. In fact, hardly anything was said at all about details of the project, for the simple reason that council members arent yet sure about these particulars. That is understandable in view of the uncertainty about Salt Lake fix-u- p Countys role, if any, in the to reaction voter and Mayor project Ted L. Wilsons prosome with bonding possibly posal later. About all the council decided was to accept the obvious. Public sentiment is apparently against demolishing the old and deteriorating building or even abandoning it to the pigeons. It would cost as much to construct new city offices as to put the historic pile into usable shape. So, the councils verdict on renovation was predictable. That was the simple part. Coming up are the difficult choices. These can be made easier if the council determines early on, and repeatedly tells everyone in Salt Lake City in no uncertain terms, that it is thrifty renovation or rehabilitation and not elaborate restoration it has in mind. Further, the council should hit hard and often with the argument that repairing and using the gritty, Romanesque structure on Washing City-Coun- ty pay-as-you-- ton Square is the least costly as well as an aesthetically pleasing option regardless of what Salt Lake County does. In this regard, Council Member Sidney Fonnesbecks Tuesday night remark to the effect that the general public probably doesnt know enough about the situation to make a decision, is decidedly troubling. Sounding somewhat like the 18th century British political thinker Edmund Burke who had little regard for what constituents wanted, Mrs. Fonnesbeck noted That as elected officials, we have an obligation to make up our minds on information we have that others dont have. Girl Scout cookies! What are you trying to do, kill me? . That statesmanlike attitude is acceptable, even commendable, up to a point. And that point was reached with Tuesdays decision to renovate. From now on, the councils duty is not only to employ its superior command of the facts but to do everything it can to share that information with the people who must ultimately pay the reconstruction bills. Although the decision to rehabilitate was almost preordained, when it comes to shelling out additional tax dollars, more than a fiat from the City Council will be needed to overcome inherent resistance to higher taxes that will be spent mainly to house government workers in more elegant quarters. Those contemptuous cowards Utahns mustnt let cookie monsters spoil what has traditionally been a worthy childrens cause in this country. Deplorable assaults on children and the publics sensibilities have become part of our daily diet. This latest, vicious attack tampering with not only endanGirl Scout cookies gers the health of cookie customers, many of them children, but also jeopardizes the financial stability of a childrens club by tainting a major source of its income. The cookie proceeds in Utah pay for the staff and maintenance for summer camps, camp scholarships, transportation and training of adult volunteers. Apparently, the cookie deviants far have limited their dispicable so deeds to the other states. But the negative publicity will put Utah Girls Scouts in a tough spot when delivering their wares to customers next week. ful Not only that, the usually delighttreats will be slightly hard to Disgraceful Demos Ignore the Future swallow for long-tim- e Girl Scout cookie cravers, despite precautions d taken with the cookie supply. The U.S. Food and Drug AdminisUtah-boun- tration has inspected and approved Utahs cookie supplier in Louisville, Ky., and has been supervising security scans of the products there and in Salt Lake City. (If problems are detected with the cookies, Utah Girl Scout Council officials suggest they be reported immediately to the council offices in Salt Lake City, Orem or Ogden or to local law enforcement authorities.) Utah customers can soften the impact of this harsh lesson in reality by sparing the girls their suspicions and displeasure. They also should stand ready to support the Girl g Scouts in future campaigns, should the cookie incident take an undue toll on cookie sales. Unless Utahns firmly stand their ground against this unwarranted, unfair and illegal smear against the Girl Scout cookie kooks will get far more perverse mileage than they deserve. fund-raisin- Stinginess is when you salvage paper plates. If people looked like their passport photos, few countries would let them in. New York Times Service At least one thing is these clear fairly days: Everything seems to be changing faster than the politicians. The scientists, the educators and the businessmen are trying to adjust to a different future, but the politicians are still stuck in the mud. The New York presidential primary election was merely the latest evidence of the point. It was conducted with roughly the same old lines and whistles as the 1928 presidential election, except that A1 Smith said Lets look at the facts. Former Vice President Mondale, with the help of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, Mayor Edward I. Koch and the unions, won big, as if Tammany Hall was still in charge. But these are funny days, when you win one state, lose the next and, the way the world is going, the winners often envy the losers. The Democratic candidates were supposed to be leading us out of the puzzling changes of the pfesent, but they dont look at the facts, and doht even know how to change i themselves, So maybe the time has come to protest against the cynical assumption that the peo- pie are a collection of indifferent dummies, more interested in the basketball playoffs than the political playoffs, who can be manipulated by television, confused by popularity polls and convinced by anonymous officials that the candidates positions can be read from invisible mirrors to millions of voters who dont quite believe, but still believe in believing. Anyway, it would be interesting to see what would happen if by chance one of the candidates treated the voters of Pennsylvania, Ohio, California and the remaining primary election states with a little more respect than the voters got in New York. Walter Mondale still has a battle from here to the nominating convention in San Francisco, not because he is a man of Old this is Ideas and a clone of Jimmy Carter a cheap shot against him but because he has not been faithful to himself. Hes a decent, intelligent, nice guy who, losing to Gary Hart in the New England primaries, adopted Leo Durochers baseball principle that nice guys finish last and turned personal and mean. Maybe it will work out for him in the end, as it has many times in the past, but dont bet the rent on it. WASHINGTON father-knows-be- st Guard Against Cookie Monster who skulk about, sneaking pins, glass and other dangerous objects into the mouths of those who support the Girl Scouts cookie drive, have sunk to a new low. James Reston . - Hes a little fuzzy and a little phony with Jack Kennedys gestures and themes, but hes more specific than Kennedy ever was when Jack went for the White his imitation of House against the elders of the Democratic Party. And hes beginning to convince a lot of Democratic delegates that he has the best chance of beating President Reagan in November. He sees Reagan as an amiable well-meani- man, the candidate, appealing to the Hollywood and televisioh fantasies of America, the conservative economics of Adam Smith and the prejudices of Archie Bunker. Mondale underestimated him. Reagan, who knows his own age, even if Hart doesnt, is not making the same mistake. The conflict in this election, however, is not mainly between Mondale and Hart, or even between the two major political parties there are basic differences within and between them. It is between the past and the future. This is what we should be writing about now, and this is what the politicians should be thinking about, though in this election so far they have been talking about what divides them rather than what unites them, and arguing about who has the beef, and er what Ed Meese remembered and what he forgot. What may have been forgotten by Mondale in his long, careful and expensive effort to win the support of the unions in the state primaries and caucuses is that they are not bound to vote for him unless he sweeps support in the primaries and comes into the convention with a commanding majority. The chances are that either Mondale or Hart will prevail in the Western primaries, but much will depend not on their appeals to special interests, as in the New York primary, but on the larger issue of what vision they have of the 1980s. The New York primary cannot be a model for the coming tests farther West The Democratic New York performance was not only a disgrace but an insult to the voters, and even worse, an embarrassment to the democratic process. But we cannot be sure. Maybe the voters would rather be fooled than pay attention. Even Thomas Jefferson wondered whether they would think, as he was always thinking, about the coming generations or whether they would regard their own selfish interest and think merely about themselves. Dick West Density Is Not Stupidity - WASHINGTON (UPI) A group organized to offset MENSA, the high IQ organization, held its first national convention in Texas on April Fools Day. The counter-grou- p calls itself DENSA, but dont let that name fool you. Being dense is not necessarily the same thing as being dumb. Or Or stupid. Or any of the other synonyms for a low IQ. You can be as smart as a whip and still be dense, in the sense of having a brain that is easily boggled by high technology. Many of the historic events I studied in school have become in modern perspective dense events. For documentation, see Barbar, ra Tuchmans latest The March of Folly. I gather from her subtitle, From Troy to Vietnam, that Mrs. Tuchman doesnt regard the Trojans as being any too swift. Granted that dragging a huge wooden horse inside a walled city might not stand up in court as evidence of a high IQ. Even so, it may be going a bit far to characterize falling Hart has come along as the latest young for the Trojan Horse ploy as folly. Lochinvar, presuming to represent the The strategy was good; only the tactics young generation, unfairly pinning the trag- were faulty. edy of Vietnam on Mondale and calling for With a little less density, the outcome new ideas, a lower defense budget and a have been entirely different. more compassionate policy toward the old might and young. If, once the wooden horse was within fun-lovi- slow-witte- best-selle- their perimeters, the Trojans had bothered to look inside, they could have captured Odysseus and other Greek military elite in a single swoop. One of the captives surely would have leaked their plans to sneak out under the cover of darkness and unlock the gates of the city. Im not trying to put a happy face on, the defense of Troy. Im only suggesting the Trojans might have been more dense than foolish. As to whether the Trojan War should have been fought in the first place well, that is another matter. Certainly mounting an armed expedition to try to separate Helen from the clutches of Paris might strike some historians as sheer folly. In searching for modern parallels, we can say with some degree of confidence that the United States probably wouldnt have escalated the fighting in Vietnam had Lady Bird Johnson fled to Hanoi with Ho Chi Minh, or some such personage. We can, however, only guess how the' North Vietnamese might have reacted had the Americans left a wooden horse loaded with CIA agents and military advisers on the shores of the Tonkin Gulf when they departed. Ernest Conine Proposal: Eliminate Corporate Income Tax Not-So-Si- lly Los Angeles Times Service This is a presidential election year, which means that its the silly season for tax talk. Congressional Democrats, acknowledging the need for higher taxes to reduce federal budget deficits, say that the burden of such tax boosts should fall most heavily on upper income groups. Toward that end, both Walter F. Mondale and Gary Hart have proposed tax surcharges on incomes above 8100,000 a year. So far so good. But then both presidential hopefuls turn around and propose a posta move that ponement of tax indexing Americans far more would hurt than upper-incom- e people. Equally off target is the perpetuation of the great American myth that by raising corporate income taxes we would somehow to pay a larger share of require the well-of- f the federal tax burden. Both Hart and Mondale are guilty. There may be a case for increasing corporate income taxes in order to raise revenues and help reduce the federal deficit. But no one should imagine that by so doing we would also impose higher taxes on wealthy Americans. It just isnt so. In fact, heretical as it sounds, it would the corporate majte sense to do stway with Income tax altogether. less-afflue- Such a suggestion runs counter to everything that most of us have been conditioned to believe. But the truth of the matter becomes evident to anybody who bothers to think about it. Look first at what happens under existing tax laws, which theoretically impose a 46 percent tax on corporate income, and their effect on a fictional company called Fudge Motor Co. A few wealthy individuals hold sizable shares of stock in Fudge. But, as in the case of most other big companies, the day has long since passed when Fudge was owned and controlled by a few millionaires. The largest concentrations of stock are held by a n big employee pension funds whose ultimate beneficiaries are ordinary workers in other companies. If proposals f a surcharge on corporate income taxes are enacted, does that mean that the corporate brass and a handful of wealthy stockholders must now pay higher taxes? Hardly. The salaries of the president of Fudge and his executive colleagues are unaffected by tax increases on corporate income. In terms of taxation, stockholder dividends are, too. However, the Fudge board of directors does face the question of how to respond to the bigger tax bile on the company itself. half-doze- The directors may decide to postpone the construction of a new plant. To squeeze out more after-ta- x income they may be more tight-fistein wage negotiations. They may decide on smaller dividends to stockholders. But one thing that the board will certainly do is raise prices in order to pass part, or perhaps all, of the extra tax burden on to the people who buy Fudge products. Since other companies are doing the same thing, the net result is a higher cost of living for everybody, rich or poor. In short, the ultimate effect of a corporate tax increase is not very different from a sales tax; all of us pay at the cash register. Now ponder what would happen if the corporate income tax was eliminated. As things stand, the corporate income tax creates a management obsession with how to reduce a company's tax liability. Some corporate takeovers occur purely out of tax considerations not because the merged companies will be any more efficient. Such shenanigans, which distort the workings of the economy to the detriment of us all, would no longer be attractive if the corporate income tax was eliminated. The corporate income tax encourages the wasteful use of company resources in other ways, too. WhenVudge buys a corporate jet for 2 d million, the executives figure that they are vent Congress from taxing away whatever dollars. Since the portion of such windfalls it considered apreally spending the effect on botto- propriate. Almost certainly it would do so. purchase is m-line earnings is much less than $2Vfc million. Unfortunately, there is a downside. Elimthe corporate income tax would deThe same mentality is used to justify ex- inating prive government of a powerful lever in inpensive corporate junkets, company yachts fluencing corporate behavior. and weekend and a whole host of 56-ce- nt retreats, executive perks. Without the corporate income tax, for exTake away the corporate income tax and ample, companies would have no financial every dollar spent for whatever purpose incentive to support charities, universities, effect on prof- foundations and other good works. (No tax, translates into a full its. Company expenses of all kinds would no deductions.) There might be an extra come under closer scrutiny by both manag- temptation to skimp on pollution controls or ers and kibitzing stockholders. The result other socially desirable outlays that do not would be leaner and more efficient compa- translate directly into profits. 100-ce- nt nies. The elimination of the corporate income tax could in theory lead to lowered prices. But in real life it is more likely that the extra profits would be reinvested in new plants and equipment, creating jobs in the process, But these downside considerations dont really explain why the idea of eliminating the corporate income tax, though occasionally discussed among economists and tax theorists, is never considered seriously by practicing politicians. and distributed to stockholders as dividends. The real reason is that politicians know Obviously, such a process would benefit stockholders, be they wealthy individuals or that the American people are convinced that pension funds representing the financial in- a tax on corporations is a tax on the rich. And that illusion is unlikely to gq terests of millions of ordinary citizens. sway. Affluent stockholders could reinvest If you climbed into a time capsule and these extra dividends in productive enterstayed there until the presidential election prises r spend the money on wine, women vear of 2084, you would no doybt emerge to and song. But there would be nothing to pre xiiscover that the silly season is still with us |