Show v COMMENTARY The Salt Lake Tribune Iff ill t r y ' - - !? SMTHf The Public Forum MtTJNTCUJGCNCU v X A33 Friday October 2 1992 1 Tribune Readers' Opinions J ri" fK H ®)h U I i GRIM JU5T fV--N Monorail's the Answer v Thanks to Dave Jonsson for his article on monorail in The Salt Lake Tribune Sept 14 Traffic is growing worse on the Wasatch Front in West Valley City and Davis County Light rail will add to the problem with more crossings and stop lights Why live with past solutions such as light rail when we could make the wonder of our canyons and lake scenery an attraction for tourists? If I lived in Davis County and had a beautiful alternative to the wracking road to Salt Lake City I would park the car and read a little of the news on the way to work Light rail is past monorail is future Vote "no" on light rail We can do better GLEN UMBERGER Salt Lake City Open Pit Perot's Plan Sounds Like Clinton's THE WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON — For the first time the Ross Perot team has conceded — as many economists have been warning — that putting Hobart Rowen his dramatic program into effect immediately while the country is mired in rebudget-balancin- cession g would make things worse But this revelation appears nowhere in published Perot materials where immediacy is the name of the game In his paperback summary of his economic program United We Stand Perot sets the tone this way: ''Unless we take action now our nation may confront a situation similar to the Great Depression — nay maybe even worse" But according to economist John White who wrote the Perot budget plan "now" insofar as actual deficit reduction goes means starting in 1994 because that is the time by which Perot assumes the economy will be moving out of recession Moreover White said budget cutting takes "a very very gradual slope" with about four to five times more cuts in the fifth year than in the first "In the short term we do have to have more stimulus and more growth We're in a recession But in the longer term and the longer term is as we get out of this recession we have to get that " White said deficit down He offered these important clarifications Tuesday night on r the Newshour a day after the Bush and Clinton camps had made presentations of their own programs in Dallas to Perot and his "volunteers" Responding to comments that the Perot plan would bring disaster to the economy White said: "I think there's been an unfortunate confusion here about the Perot plan The Perot plan was intended to start at the beginning of 1994 It is explicitly assumed in orjr plan that we are on the upside '94-'9- 5 McNeil-Lehre- - Glinton-Gor- e of the business cycle not in a recession (in 1994 "So people that tended to take our plan and say 'Oh my God you can't do that now we have no intention of doing that now We ought to do it when it's appropriate It is appropriate when we begin to come out of the recession and begin on the upside of the business cycle" The implication of that and it makes good sense is that if the economy is not expanding in 1994 Perot would postpone ax wielding his budget-cuttinSignificantly these statements by White tally closely with the warnings voiced in Dallas by New York banker Felix Rohatyn on behalf of Bill Clinton "The risk of stepping on the brake too hard too quickly at this point with the economy as fragile as it is is pretty high" Rchatyn told reporters in Dallas Liberal economists including many who support Clinton argue that with the economy giving fresh signs that it is stalling again now is not the time to be planning big deficit reductions Some even insist that the next president — whether it's Clinton Perot or Bush — will have to face the reality of a temporary boost in deficit spending to prevent a total collapse of the economy In the private session the Democratic team had with the Perot "volunteers" Rohatyn observed that the way Bush has run the country boosting the deficit and allowing the dollar to sink "It's like the management of some company that has quadrupled the company's debt quadrupled the g WASHINGTON rt knew: "In April 1989" Gore charged "a nuclear proliferation expert from the Department of Energy reported intelligence indicators that Iraq had a crash program under way to build an atomic bomb In September of that first Bush year in office a high State De- partment official acknowledged secretly that an FBI raid on a corrupt Atlanta bank showed that money mingled with loans guaranteed by our Department of Agriculture "appear to have been used' to finance acquisition of sensitive military technology "In the same month" said Gore "the CIA reported to Secrethat tary of State James Baker Iraq was clandestinely procuring nuclear weapons technology through a global network of front companies" And what did the Bush administration do when informed that Iraq was using our grain money to build nukes and missiles? It pressed for "an additional f 1 billion in agricultural loan guarantees for Iraq notwithstanding the " mushrooming scandal decithis doubts that Nobody sion was a colossal foreign policy inv- McNeil-Lehre- correct" The most urgent economic priority that will face the nation next Jan 20 Rohatyn said in an interview here will be to set up a bipartisan commission like the National Economic Commission appointed in 1987 This one would be directed to report to the president and Congress at the beginning of 1993 with a workable program The last NEC was disbanded by Bush in 1989 before it made its recommendations which was a tragic mistake That was the time when a tough strategy not much different from Perot's right now could have been put into effect The economy was in better shape in 1989 and could have more easily absorbed the pain Now the problem is more difficult: The nation has to find a way of blending its short-terneed for stimulus with the need to curb deficit longer-terspending Easy it will not be budget-balancin- 111 I lf William f — bafire — 'v VV h blunder necessitating a war to clean it up The question — which Gore delicately says he "will leave to others to debate" — is whether the perversion of funds and its subsequent concealment was illegal If there were serious doubts that Iraq was a creditworthy borrower under the grain program and if foreign policy advisers prevailed on Agriculture to ignore the risk then — in the arcane language of the law — somebody belongs in the hoosegow Both the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve vigorously opposed loans to Iraq at the time In a memo to Baker urging additional loans from the Export-ImpoBank Under Secretary rt Robert Kimmitt referred to "Iraq's cash flow problems and heavy debt load" and noted that "US banks are cautious in asrisk sessing Iraq's Eurobanks also take a cautious near-terr- view a " Despite the risk to taxpayers Bush personally leaned on the inchairman to make cautious Ex-Ithe loan to Saddam I say that imperiling public funds in giving grain subsidies to a dictator — when the president had good reason to suspect he was using our money to build a nuclear missile — is in a near-bankru- word corrupt Concealing this from Congress by altering damaging documents Where to Write When submitting letters to the Public Forum please include your full name signature address and daytime telephone Bush's school voucher system we keep hearing buzz words like "free market'' ' free enterprise" and "school tax reform'' from the fanatic right They keep referring to "their" tax dollars and what is fair A 100 fair system would make the people who use the school system pay for it It would give them the choice of paying for any school whether it be Mormon Catholic Jewish or some order of holy blood drinkers Hov ever the fanatic right would wt be very happy at their high cost of education and six of their nine kids would probably numbers Information other than your name will be kept confidential Preference is given to original letters of 300 words or less that are typewritten double-- and permit spaced publica- tion of the writer's true name (Names may be withheld for good reason) All letters are subject to editing Mail to Public Forum The Salt Lake Tribune PO Box 867 Salt Lake City Utah 84110 new-foun- Population and Ecology not be going to school Of course this won't happen Most of us who haven't any kids or just one or two understand th' importance of educating the next generation Despite the income tax exemptions Mr J Smith gfts at tax time for his tune kids (nine kids by choice I assume) the high property tax that I and others pay help see that all of Utah's chil- Scholars have been telling us for the last century that we are headed for a major crisis and for a reason so obvious anyone of reasonable intelligence could understand: Our population has out- grown the capacity of our ecosystem As a recent study from Canada indicates to support the current world population with the standard of living enjoyed by the average Canadian would require two and a half planets comparable to our own A decade ago it would have only required two Earths to sustain the population of the world at just above the American poverty level assuming distribution problems could be dren are educated What the fanatic Republicans want is the best of both worlds educational welfare and the right to use my dollar to support their particular religious institutions hard-earne- d MIKE KKTTERMAN Salt Lake City Old Storv solved We now find ourselves in a Sept 13 1789: "The national debt is born as Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton begins negotiating a loan of nearly $200000 to the US government The money provided by the Bank of New York and the Bank of North America will be used to pay the president members of Congress and congressional staff during the new government s first session The loan will be paid off in full in June 1790" Time does not change many things in our government When my grandchildren are senior citizens will they receive Social Security and Medicare or will the people still be paying off the national debt? world where ecological security must be our primary concern where people of every nation must take full responsibility for the portion of the ecosystem they occupy andor from which they draw sustenance We no longer live in a world where economic factors determine the extent of ecological consideration We are now in a world where ecological factors determine the extent of economic opportunity Our whole approach to economy must be rethought I would like to know what policies candidates for national office propose for dealing with the situation in which we now find ourselves JH d MAXINE R FRY Salt Lake Citv WIKSTROM Ogden NotirojBMB 5pyffaf" Public budget-reductio- n JL JStJtY"N X I IJ 4C) J k i Check your mailbox this week AJ L I uargs 1 even more spectacular or ask your sa!espeTon aixM being offeree during this sale! g budget-reductio- n m 'f I -Gore grain-expo- annual losses and cut the value of the company stock in half — and then asks you to allow it to keep running the company" Although both Bush and Clinton decided it was politically necessary to pander to Perot by sending delegations to say nice things about him in a highly publicized forum Clinton made a shrewd political move by including Rohatyn and Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen both "establishment" Democrats both strong advocates of an estment-driven revival of the economy but neither of whom had been prominently identified until now as key Clinton advisers r White said on the show that overall "The Clinton plan would be closer to the Perot plan than would be the Bush plan" He added that the Clinton program "does reorder I think investment priorities too a bit much but I they spend think their priorities are clearly Finally Attack Iraqgate NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE — The Clintoncampaign has finally discovered that George Bush has been desperately trying to contain a major scandal called "Iraq-gate- " It's about time The dimensions of the scandal were outlined by Sen Al Gore Jr in a scorching speech the other day' As Bush prepared to pervert the purpose of a program to provide backdoor foreign aid to Saddam Hussein this is what we now know the president When I look at the Kennecott operation across the valley I am triply amazed: amazed at the size of the operation amazed at the highly visible destruction of the beauty of our valley and amazed that there appears to be nothing being done about it Is the future plan to reduce the entire mountain range to piles of sterile waste? Or if there is some plan to soften those barren lines by grading or at least by planting vegetation why not begin now? If we wait 25 years or 50 years until the last penny's worth of copper has been extracted several things will have happened: People now living in the valley will have spent another 25 or 50 years in the shadow of growing ecological disaster there will be no money available for cleanup because the ore will all be gone and Kennecott will have created one of the world's biggest dump sites I suggest that Kennecott should plan its operations with attention to limiting visual damage that it should prepare plans for restoring the landscape that it should make its plans pubic and that it should proceed forthwith to implement those plans once citizens and state officials have approved them ROBERT LEE Salt Lake City Religion Vouchers In reference to President and fraudulently classifying other documents compounds that corI ruption a criminal investigaImpeding tion into the fraud that cost American taxpayers $2 billion — and in the end unprecedentedly resisting Congress's call for counsel — blows this up into a major scandal In an Atlanta courtroom a federal judge unintimidated by scoldings from the coverup-gen-erreviews raw CIA reports about the swindle and says they undermine Justice's claim that no were involved When a higher-up- s "prosecutor" tries to shut him up on the basis of secrecy the judge asks: "Why should they continue to be classified if they don't affect national security?" That is the same question House Banking chairman Henry Gonzalez has been asking Why has it taken so long to find out for example that the Italian ambassador was asked by Attorney General Dick Thornburgh's chief of staff "Why are we worrying?" The Italian was further reassured that the scandal would be contained in a later White House meeting with the attorney general Justice denies this Quis custodiet? Now that Juscourt-appointe- tice's hand-picke- d - — d "special" counsel has informed the House leadership it is safe in his post office investigation House Judiciary chairman Jack Brooks has lost his zeal Joe Biden of Senate Judiciary has been out to lunch Television news except "60 Minutes" too complicated no visuals That's why it was important for the political opposition to make Iraqgate an issue Gore has his teeth in the scandal Look for it in the debates " J l-p- 0 Bedroom Suites c (j - y— -- u FREE LAYAVAY l I 11 I rtrt"Mr mirror IL L 1 A 11 frame &w MUST 900 tO BRAND NEW! 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