Show The Herald Journal Logan Utah Sunday September -- 20 1987 (j Mock disasters in county- ought to be publicized - We hope to see the Cache County Sheriff's Office provide more publicity prior to the next "disaster” the department schedules in Cache County Last Tuesday the office surprised a number of who happened to be listening to police scanners sheriff’s officers unexpectedly launched "disaster” This event the sheriff referred to it as a “real-lif- e simulated” drill was of course a training exercise But some people didn’t know that and that produced some confusion — embarrassment too we suspect — that could have been prevented We will quickly point out that the people from the sheriffs force the Logan City Police Dept Utah Highway Patrol and emergency medical personnel at the Logan City Fire Dept and Logan Regional Hospital who participated in the drill performed very well And that should be reassuring to those of us whose lives may someday depend upon their expertise We likewise have no bone to pick with the type of drill that was held Certainly our public servants must be trained and real-lif- e exercises such as the one Tuesday are a good method of providing "hands-on- ” training But the general public should be made aware of such "disasters’1 before they are actually triggered We think a formal press release from the sheriffs department to the newspapers and radio media in the area a day or two prior to the exercise would have been sufficient In this case our reporter Tim Gurrister was told the day before a "mock disaster” was going to take place and he should have realized the significance of what was about to take place As it was he didn’t in part because officers were reluctant to talk about the drill because they apparently feared advance publicity would spoil the realism of the event Nevertheless we will take our fair share of the blame on this count The bottom line however is this: Exercises of this nature deserve better publicity in the various media than the one Tuesday received Sheriff Sid Groll has suggested such publicity might hurt the realism sought in these exercises but in our view - V Big Labor has another bad proposal WASHINGTON - Forty yean ago Virginia’s House of Delegates was graced ana enlivened by a lantern-jawe- d country lawyer from Nelson County He had a favorite line Whenever the Byrd organization would resurrect an especially offensive bill Robert Whitehead would take to the well of the House to raise a stentorian cry: "It's the same old 'coon with another ring around its taiL” Big Labor is back in Congress this year with its same old 'coon It is known as the "common situs” or "double-breastin- 1 g” bill The construction unions managed to get trough Congress in 1976 President Ford killed it with a veto The unions tried again in 1977: the bill failed in the House They tried once more in 1986 Orrin Hatch of Utah managed to stop it in the Letters to the editor Sports Senate To the editor: Now the bill has pissed the House (by a 7 vote of on June 17) and has cleared People are pretty much the same all over If the team is a Senate subcommittee A Senate version winning they are there with their pride in hometown teams and is poised to go to the floor hurrahs Let the team lose and they cuss the coach get drunk The bill is flatly indefensible It bears a and make threatening calls to those believed to be responsible for fraudulent title: Ostensibly it is a bill "to the losses If some of the people here in Logan who are so inclined would increase the stability of collective take the trouble to attend the "coaches” luncheon in the Walnut bargaining in the building and construction Room at USU on Mondays at the noon hour they would learn what industry’1 On the contrary the bill would destroy a it’s all about and get a shot of the understanding it takes to lose win or and coaches the team delicately balanced system of labor relasupport The coaching staff does not "blame” anything or anyone but tions that has worked for many years It n conthemselves for what happens They accept the responsibility and would dragoon millions of unions their into workers out struction in which screams to look forward against building the support system the stadium and fires up the team to their best performances will It would result in staggering increases in Come to the luncheons a few times and see for yourself construction costs The public would suffer but what else is new? These unions Isabel Katana operate on a rule established by the robber Logan barons a century ago: The public be 227-19- non-unio- damned In theory the legislation is intended to close a loophole in labor law by which VA issue To the editor: The US Congress now is giving serious consideration to legislation which would establish the Veterans Administration agency (VA) as a Cabinet-levIf enacted this measure will elevate the administrator of the VA to the level of secretary thereby enabling our nation’s veterans and their survivors and dependents to have their concerns represented at the highest level of the executive branch On the basis of size alone the VA belongs in the cabinet The VA directly and indirectly impacts virtually every American agencies — family It already is larger than most Cabinet-leve- l Education State Interior Labor Commerce Transportation Energy Justice and Housing and Urban Development The agency has an annual operating budget of more than 627 billion and administers the largest health care system in the free clinics 117 world — including 172 hospitals 229 VA ranks 16 the In addition and domicilaries homes nursing second only to the Department of Defense in number of personnel And if statistics aren't compelling enough consider that the VA has as its mission the provision of medical care to our nation's veterans and is the first line backup to the Department of Defense during times of national emergency Consider also some of its innovative programs which affect millions of Americans — such as the GI Home Loan and the GI Bill Programs — which have improved the economy and have provided educational and training opportunities The VA is the largest trainer of health care manpower in the US — with nearly half of the physicians in the US today having received all or part of their training through the VA In fact if you counted all the Americans who received medical health care personnel it probably attention from would cover virtually every American family g research program — Further the agency's of Health — is to National the Institutes size in second only AIDS crisis and the the to confront mysteries of working Alzheimer’s Disease with the same intensity it used to find the cure for tuberculosis and develop the heart pacemaker In addition the VA administers America’s largest vocational rehabilitation and training programs which have led to job opportunities and employment for disabled el out-patie- nt VA-train- award-winnin- ever-increasi- vctcnnii Insurance policies offered by the VA would qualify the agency See LETTERS on page 31 James i Kilpatrick A Conservative View construction companies get away with This is a practice by which a single employer creates two or more subsidiaries one of which is union n the others Most of these corporate structures are entirely legitimate A few of them — no one denies it — are sham creations set up "double-breastin- g non-unio- to evade collective bargaining re- sponsibilities No such remedial legislation is needed The problem is not pervasive Under existing law the National Labor Relations Board may determine that the shams constitute an unfair labor practice The board has not hesitated to use its authority What would the pending Senate bill do? It would effectively apply to virtually every construction company in the nation with even one unionized operation By a tricky redefinition of the term "single employer” the bill would compel every suen contractor to impose a union shop on all his subsidiary workers The bill would rewrite the existing law on prehire union halls so tht certification or decertification elections (if any were held) could be stacked and rigged in the unions' favor The faceless construction workers — the non-unio- n carpenters steamfitters plumbers bricklayers — would have no opportunity to vote yea or nay on whether they wished to join the union None of the protective provisions of existing law would apply And watch the union dues roll in! electricians Notice if you please the brazen terms of the Senate bill It would embrace "any two or more business entities" performing the same "or similar” work in the same “or in different geographical areas” This is a finely woven net All that is required is that these entities "directly or indirectly” have "substantial common common management or ownership ' common control” Grammarians will note the exquisite care with which that definition is Coq posed In the ’Senate bill the adjective "substantial” modifies only "common ownership” Any degree of common management or “control” would be sufficient to trigger the press-gan- g provisions In the bill that passed the House this section was rewritten so that "substantial” applies uniformly the language about “the same or different geographical areas" was made a little more obscure but the basic purpose of the bill to butter up the building altered in the slightest It is easy to understand the hunger of the construction unions Forty or 50 years ago the industry was highly unionized Then the unions began to They demanded and won wage scales far above the average Of greater importance they began to Impose work rules that limited productivity and boosted costs Contractors began to fight back By 1973 roughly 40 percent of building workers were union members Today it is estimated that only 25 percent belong Thus this devious bill The House amendments notwithstanding it is the same sly old ’coon that lovers of individual liberty have treed before It just has another ring around its tail self-destru- 0 1917 ct Universal Press Syndicate Democrat supports value added tax President Grover Cleveland a man after Ronald Reagan’s heart and of his generation used to decry the perennial federal budget surpluses It was those darned surpluses which were causing unemployment and impeding prosperity The only cure was to cut taxes and balance the budget and if that sounds familiar in a changing world it should be a comfort that some things stay the same Balanced budgeteer though he was Cleveland might have found Ronald Reagan's insistence on a constitutional amendment to require balanced budgets a trifle detrop Nevertheless the Democrat Cleveland and his modern day successors are as enthusiastic over budget balancing as Ronald Reagan and the Republicans who by the by have only fitfully embraced the idea in their long history Thus the two parties seem only to divide on how this is to be done Reagan accuses the Democrats and quite correctly of harboring a chromosome Like people with other kinds of genetic disorders they frequently try to hide it although three years ago Walter Mondale came out and admitted he wanted to raise taxes Despite the unpleasant consequences not au Democrats have learned to keep their mouths shut about this idea Take for instance Democratic presidential candidate 109B sometimes referred to in the as former Arizona Governor Eiblic prints tax-increa- se Babbitt Like a vampire on a full moon night his ‘ genetic heritage got the best of Babbitt the other day when in full view of the voting public he rent his garments event Nicholas Vbn Hoffman Syndicate columnist bared his chest to the multitude and came out in favor of the VAT The VAT stands for the value added tax It is widely used in high-ta- x European societies and has been proposed and rejected often enough before here but not lately Elected politicians love it because it is an invisible sales tax The tax is levied and collected not at the point of sale but at each stage of a product’s being made and brought to the point of sale Thus for example iron ore is taxed when it is extracted taxed again when it is shipped to a steel mill taxea again after it is heated and mixed with other ores to make steel taxed again when it is rolled into sheets and in au the other processes along the way to turning it into an automobile all of whose other parts are taxed in the same way The VAT can be invisibly applied to everything you buy or use and at no time in the process do you ever see a ticket which says amount is the federal tax You vaguely know you’re paying a tax but since you don't know when or how much when the prices go higher you blame that on greedy business people or on inflation whicn Americans seem to regard d not as a degredatkm in the value of money but as a meteorological such-and-su- man-cause- 9 a natural effect like Hurricane Harry The VAT has the advantage of allowing legislators to raise taxes without fear of being made to pay for it at the next election At one time the automatic government paycheck deduction had something of the same effect Prior to that time people who owed income tax money had to sit down once a year and write out a check Even though this annual leaching took place in the spring the politicians hiving Sliced tax day as far away from election possible tax payer resentment had an inhibiting effect on tax increases But over the years the system has gone awry Making out one's tax returns is now so infuriating and so complicated that even with payroll deductions there is nothing automatic about April 15 The vAT would once more make taxes automatic Indeed the adoption of the VAT would probably presage the decline of the use of the income tax It is more difficult for tax payers to cheat the VAT than it is the preposterously complicated income tax whose provisions aren't even understood by those who write them One of the ugly little drawbacks of the VAT is that the lower your income the higher the proportion you pay in taxes Well once a year the unfortunates could be afforded a chance to claim a rebate They will of course have to fill out IRS as amended This will take three working days if they can do it at all At least Marie Antoinette would give the wretches cake Babbitt would let them choke on paper work 0 1917 King Featurci Syndicate Inc low-inco- 100-766-- B |