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Show Calling Mission Control -- Hello , Control? I ControlP-CONTROL- DESERET NEWS ERMA BOMBECK ??-' It Leaves Me Cold SALT LAKE CITT, UTAH We Stand For The Constitution Of The United States As Having Been Divinely Inspired 20 A EDITORIAL PAGE The other day as I watched the rain lashing my sheets on the clothesline, I heard a disc jockey report, the chances of precipitation THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, 1969 today are No Simple Answers To Utah Tax Problems Fifteen years ago Utah was credited by outside experts tax strucwith having, as one of them put it, a to with and restraint. its ture, developed economy But the time has long since passed when Utah could take bows for its tax system. To keep state operations in the black, e Utah has resort sd to the use of windfalls, surpluses built up during and immediately after World War II, borrow-- . Ing, and to increased taxes. Except for 1967, each of the past six Utah Legislatures has imposed major tax hikes. With Utah lurching from one fiscal crisis to another, the state finds itself in the unenviable position of reacting to emergencies when we should be anticipating problems and coming to grips with them before they arise. Just where the state may be headed was spelled out this week by the Utah Foundation when it warned that on the basis of present trends the state could end the next decade $317 million in the hole. The Foundations projection certainly provides ammunition to those calling on the federal government to share its income tax revenue with the states. But even revenue sharing doesnt seem enough to bail Utah out. Under the $1 billion-- a year initial revenue-sharin- g program that P.esident Nixon Utah would recently proposed, get $6 million. Beyond revenue sharing, the Utah Foundation notes, the state faces such alternatives as holding increases in operating programs below the rate of increase of the past five years; reducing, eliminating, or postponing proposed building projects; speeding up the collection of existing revenues, such as the sales tax, from quarterly to monthly; more borrowing; and higher taxes. e Theres a practical limit to the revenue windfalls that Utah can reap. Moreover, with Utah no exception to the taxpayer revolts sweeping the nation, there is likely a political limit to how high taxes can be raised. Realistically, Utah likely will have to resort to a number of the alternatives outlined by the Utah Foundation. Ideally, however, Utah should aim for a stable tax structure by which increasing needs for state services are met with increased revenue generated by the growth of the economy. Elusive though that ideal is, it would be sheer folly to stop striving for it. well-balanc- t. one-tim- snacks and mail and wrote a front-pag- e the weather box. story everyday Every afternoon when I called the weather bureau I had the feeling I was breaking up a floating crap game. The weather for tomorrow . . . stammered a man rustling bits of paper. During the lull I visualized him going to the window sill and looking to see whether the wicked old witch came out of her house or the little Hummel children. If that didnt satisfy him, hed 'check the glass swan with the green water that filled up the swans neck as the humidity ... changed. Then hed ask the janitor if his corns ached and finally before ttuking to me hed make a spot check on how many men had their cars washed. Perhaps I was being too harsh on him, but one day on a tour of the bureau I glanced in his closet and saw a large black unbrella. Why an umbrella? I asked. The sun is shining. Congress can act speedily when it wants to (remember fast the lawmakers raised their own pay?) But when it chooses to drag its feet, Congress is a master of delay. Take, for example, electronic voting, the system that can vastly speed up the slow, laborious method of taking a vote of Congressmen. On Jan. 10, 1921, the Thompson Voting Machine Company announced in a letter to stockholders it was ready to install an electronic system in the House that could ll count votes in less than a minute. Forty-eigyears later, the House of Representatives still is debating the issue. Meanwhile, many state legislatures have installed electronic voting machinery. This machinery records in seconds votes which require up to 45 minutes to record by The amount of time Concould have over the saved gress past 48 years staggers the imagination. Must another 48 years go by before Congress catches up with the 20th century? roll-ca- ll roll-ca- ht roll-cal- l. Love Education-Wi- th f Tearing a child loose from his home environment and sending him into a foster home in a completely new culture takes faith and love on the part of his parents. It also takes faith and love on the part of the foster homes going to the trouble of helping to educate the young strangers in their midst. That was abundantly evident this week as the first Indian children began arriving at their foster Utah homes for the new school year in the Churchs Indian Student Placement Program. This j ear between 4,000 and 4,500 Indian students will be placed in Church homes for the school year. Since its inception in 1954, this unique program has been responsible for helping to educate thousands of Indian children. Many of these already are holding useful jobs in society, and what the total impact may be on reservation life can only be guessed at. But one thing is clear: Love and education can go a long way in helping one to expand his horizons. That goes not only for the Indian youths participating in the Student Placement Program, but for all young Americans. Collector's Item When was the last time you had a silver dollar jingling in ' your pockets ? It was probably so long ago that youve almost forgotten how satisfying it was to heft the weight of a dollar that looked and felt valuable because it was. Each dollar contained a dollars worth of silver. Circumstances conspired to make the silver dollar a collector's item. The U.S. Treasury stopped minting them in 1935. Then along came the silver shortage of the 1900s, and speculators started hoarding coins, particularly silver dollars. At the same time, the ranks of coin collectors swelled from 2 million a decade ago to some 8 million today. And it became popular to collect coins by the roll or bagful. To alleviate the resulting shortage, the U.S. Treasury one with no silver wants to bring out a new silver dollar in it. And there's a chance that the proposed new dollar might honor the late President Eisenhower, which could aggravate the shortage instead of reducing it. Remember how hard it for months was to get the new John F. Kennedy after they were first issued because Americans kept them as half-dolla- rs souvenirs? If the new silverless dollar is to honor anyone, let it be and taxpayer who American the has bravely struggled to collect a few coins of the realm only to pee inflation make them les worth collecting. long-sufferi- wage-earn- er I saw it on radar and it looks like a lulu, she persists. Right after dinner Ill roll the car windows up, I assure her. You act as if the weather is some kind of a joke, she scolds. Frankly, child, a hurricane scares me half to death. If we get a hurricane in Ohio, Aunt Ethel, well all be scared to death. My lethargy on the subject of the weather reminds me of a TV commentator a few weeks back who was filling for the weather girl. He took a pointHigh temperatures and humidity will plague the Northwestern part of the United States and landed his pointer smack dab on Vancouver, British In er and said, Columbia. I bet Aunt Ethel difference. iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiu Field Day For Spacedogglers one-tim- how toaster. On second thought if youre near a window jump! I P e r s onally, think the new percentage system is a Weathermen cant lose, no matcop-outer which way they call it. Im suspicious of scientific predictions anyway. When I first went to work on a newspaper it was as a copy girl. I hustled well-fitte- d 48 Years Of Dawdling 30 per cent. to I wanted grab the phone and say, Hey, Mac, if you're near a window the odds just went up. I He smiled knowingly and said, life. of my carry it every day The publics interest in the weather is fantastic. I have an aunt who considers it second only to death notices. She calls me up regularly and warns, Theres a high pressure storm system building up in the Gulf of Mexico. Thats real interesting, Aunt Ethel, but its not like Im sitting out under a tree in a wet bathing suit, repairing the WASHINGTON Rep. George P. of California, who as chairman of the House Space Committee rides herd on space spending, forced the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to pick up the tab for congressmen junketing to the recent state dinner in Los Angeles. conceivably Although congressmen could finance the trip all by themselves with their new $42,500-a-yesalary, Miller insisted that all 32 members of his committee and their wives be ferried by Air Force jet for the dinner honoring the moon explorers. But Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird proved a spoilsport. Facing growing resistance to high defense costs, Larid informed Miller he would not spend Pentagon funds for such spacedog-glinthough he could make a jet available if somebody else paid for it. Miller then put the bite on NASA, which needs fcis friendship for. spending authorizations. NASA had to agree to pay ler ar g for an Air Force jet transport. That merely adds to NASAs accumulating bill for the moon shot celebration. $3,522.22 KC-13- 5 A luncheon for NASA workers in Houston last week cost around $2,800. NASA chart- ed a United Air Lines jet at $19,342.80 to send some 115 space bureaucrats and their wives to the Los Angeles dinner. Worst of all, the White House is sticking NASA with most of the tab (estimated at around $75,000) for the state dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. A footnote: Lairds refusal to give the House Space Committee a jet follows his firm policy against non- - military use of the military. Laird turned down a request by Gov. John Love of 3 NaColorado, host of Hie July di- The President's Lady the Nixon Administrations over finally having a woman in a top rank job in Helen Delich Bentley as chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission, intervention by Republican congresswomen was necessary to overrule a White House aides decision against her. Though she made no public protest, Mrs. Bentley the highly respected maritime editor of the Baltimore Sun has been treated shabbily by the Administration all year. After writing Mr. Nixons position report on maritime affairs in late 1968, she was promised the post of Maritime administrator but was passed over. She was next promised a high position in the Transportation Department but was vetoed by Secretary John Volpe. Finally, the third promise of the Maritime Commission chairmanship was axed by Peter Flanigan, Mr. Nixons powerful patronage chief in the White House. Flanigan, who has a low opinion of women in government, ordained that Mrs. Bentley could be a commission member but not its chairman. That would have been final had not it been for the intervention of four Republican congresswomen Florence Dwyer of New Jersey, Catherine May of Washington, Margaret Heckler of Massachusetts, and Charlotte Reid oE Illinois. Visiting the President July 8 to request some female appointments, they specifically pleaded Mrs. Bentleys cause. Mr. Nixon, who had been unaware of the runaround given her, then overruled Despite tional Governors Conference in Colorado Springs, for the usual contingent of servicemen to chauffeur honored guests. Mario's Wallaceite Friend Just at the moment when Mario is trying to convince Democrats he is no reactionary, he has been privately offered help in his campaign for mayor of New York by George Wallaces chief cheerleader in Congress. Rep. John R. Rarick of Louisiana, stripped of his seniority by the House Democratic caucus because he backed Wallace for President last year, put his stamp of approval on Procaccinos politics in a personal letter of July 25. I want to let you know that I am one Democratic member of Congress who recognizes you, wrote Rarick, "as the duly elected nominee of the Democratic party of your state and city. Describing Rarhimself as a lifelong Democrat, ick added: I not only recognize your candidacy but, should you feel it would be advantageous to your victory, I will be happy to appear in New York and campaign either for or against you whichever will be more helpful. Rarick is best known in Washington for cluttering up the Congressional Record with racist propaganda. Two days before writing Procaccino, he inserted in the Record an article from the Pro-cacci- er far-rig- JAMES J . KILPATRICK two-tim- much about him. The most stunning statistics that emerged from J. Hoovers Edgar recent report on crime in 1968 have to do with recidi-- v i s m. In one sense, the figures Sir. Kilpatrick c o ntain nothing new; criminologists have been saying for years that most crime is the work of men who have committed crimes before. Nevertheless, the cumulative patterns of a five-yea- r investigation carry a sobering impact. In 1963, the FBI set in motion a nationwide study of careers in crime. In that year, 18,333 persons were released from the federal criminal justice system. About a thousand of them were acquitted, or dismissed before trial; the rest were offenders released on probation or parole, or after serving ttieir full time in prison. The grim fact is that by the end of the the fifth calendar year, 63 per cent of the 1963 class had been arrested again. The thousand who had been acquitted or dismissed formed the worst single fraction: ninety-on- e per cent of them were back in trouble within five years. The figures merit a close look. These human beings included roughly men qnd 1,400 women. Concentrate for just a moment, if you will, upon the 1,331 men under 20 who were released from federal custody in 1903: Almost 18.333 16,900 i three out cf four were charged with new crime before 1968. Half of them were under arrest by 1964. good is accomplished by our present penal system? Confinement may punish the offender for his crime against It accomplishes little else. society. Seventy-fou- r per cent of those who were released from federal prisons in 1963, having served their full time, profited little from the experience: They were arrested again within five years. Sixty-on- e per cent of those let out on parole men and women thought to be better risks were soon back in the toils of the law. What Plainly, an enormous job of rehabilitation needs to be done, especially with the younger offenders. As other parts of the 1968 Crime Report make clear, the in the United States crime problem increasingly is a problem of the young. Law enforcement officers made 5.6 million arrests last year, apart from traffic arrests. Nearly 1.5 million were arrests of youngsters under 18. These youths were responsible for almost half the serious crimes reported murder, rape, robbery, burglary, assault, and grand theft. The figures offer a terrible indictment of our whole society its homes, its schools, its failing discipline, the declining influence of the church. The figures also point damningly so far as recidivism is concerned to thp poor job that is done by our system of criminal justice. If the federal patterns are typical of state patterns (and there is no reason to suppose otherwise), the penal machinery does not function to keep a boy straight. It keeps him crooked instead. Society pays a heavy cost for this failure. The FBI studies indicate that criminals increasingly tend to make careers of crime. They move from state to stated- s This Is Teaching? Teacher John Holt has given us another insight into the educational future in his latest publication, The Underachieving School" Holt says, "Abolish compulsory school attendance, perhaps giving children 50 or 60 authorized absences a year. I say that the schools have no right to demand a child's attendance unless they are in fact helping him, that the burden of proof is on them to show, at any time, that they are in fact ... helping. Get rid of all grades, exams and marks. There is no reason, except to relieve our own anxieties and insecurity, that we should constantly know what children are learning, or even that they are learning. Teacher Holt goes on to say that we should abolish the fixed, required curriculum. I dont believe in teacher-judge- d learning. I believe in children learning with our assistance and encour-- , agement the things they want to learn, wheu they want to learn them, how they want to learn them, why they want to learn them. , And then to add to our youngsters progressive ' education, educator Holt maintains we should stop the usual reading teaching: I feel that children would learn to read better and more easily if they were not taught I think that in many more cases than not, it is the act of instruction itself that impedes learning and nowhere else more than in the field of reading. The trouble with John Holt, and others like him, is that they should be writing science fiction and not educational publications. And worse yet is that some people will take Mr. Holt seriously, and those of us who object to this type of education will not raise our voices, and so we will continue to lose the educational battle by default. -T- Flanigan. AYLOR TURNER Provo Cacophonous Music At Root Of Crime: The Repeater Recidivism has come to be a lot like the weather. In the field of crime and e punishment, everyone talks of the loser; but no one ever does iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii anti- smoking campaign is a leftist plot rected against the South. Mil- even know the LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Herald of Freedom charging that the INSIDE REPORT By ROWLAND EVANS and ROBERT NOVAK didnt I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Pacific Northwest, and in the East. On Sundays in these places one may hear legitimate, real music s at nearly any time- - on any number of FM stations. " of those arrested for burlast on had been arrested year glary By contrast, in Utah one cannot get a note of' some serious criminal charge before; 36 decent music on an FM station until evening, and , per cent of them had records in three or even then the notes are few and far between. more states. The patterns were almost What does one get in Utah? A ceaseless barrage as pervasive in terms of assault, rape, of the cheapest sort of rock and popuiar junk, caand robbery. At the root of Americas cophonous to the trained ear and mind and debilitatof all things moral and decent. Ironic, isnt it, criminal jungle are a relatively small ing in the very state of the 50 which claims first place number of hardened repeaters. We ought in the promotion of decency? either to lock them up for life, or devote I think its way past time that the truly intensive efforts toward making them become responsible members of so- denizens of this state woke up and took notice of the fact that their minds may be filled with piety ciety. and decency in formal meetings, but in reality FBI Director Hoover makes few seem mostly to embrace the tawdry and recommendations. He is like Sergeant they when it comes to personal taste. Surely Friday: Nothing but the facts, maam. there is a yet unplumbed irony in this fact. Serious Well, the facts are terrifying. crimes are increasing in every part of -K- EITH MOORE the country, far outstripping the growth 3091,4 S. 13th East in population. Undermanned police departments are clearing a smaPer perThe repeaters of offenses. Skills centage repeat, and the picture gets worse every We could avoid many irksome troubles and year. Meanwhile, we talk about it. When do we do something about it? hardships if we would allow the virtues which the Master exemplified in His daily life and in His Three-fourth- Of Getting GUEST CARTOON dealings with those about Kim, to keep pace with the development of the skills of getting. But it seems that as we acquire and perfect the skills of getting, we make room for them by dropping the teachings of the Master and give ourselves over to the leadership of the devil. And so, our vision of eternity is shortened to the present program of getting, and we fail to see the quagmire of misery and suffering that our trail is leading us into. Delicious living was condemned by the Master. -I- I. 1 ASA FOWLER St. George 'New Federalism' "Come to think ot it, comrade, who is minding Berlin?" Th Philippine HerH Old socialism will now be known as New Federalism, but, as Will Shakespeare once noied, a rose by any other name still smells. THOMPSON -S- UNNIE ' Richfield s ' |