OUR VIEWS

City Hall math

Birmingham City Council President William Bell is engaged in the same type of political math in his attempt to provide Birmingham city employees with a bigger pay raise than has been proposed by Mayor Bernard Kincaid.

However, unlike the federal budget, which can end a fiscal year with a deficit, the city budget must be balanced. Increased expenditures in one part of the budget must be matched by either additional revenue or cutbacks elsewhere in the budget.

On the surface, Bell's proposed changes to the budget appear to find additional revenue, and they do make cuts in some proposed expenditures.

However, the new revenue is largely illusionary and the cuts appear more aimed at undermining the mayor's ability to do his job than at a fair reallocation of city expenditures — how else to explain Bell's proposed increase in money going to or controlled by the council?

Bell wants the city to do a better job of collecting unpaid fines. If all of those fines were collected, the city would have an additional $23 million. To bridge the gap between when the pay raises would go into effect and the collection of the fine money, Bell would postpone funding some programs — but the council's consulting budget would increase by $550,000 and capital projects favored by the council majority would get an additional $1.75 million.

The basic flaw in all of this is that many of the unpaid fines — some dating back 30 or 40 years — have not been collected for a good reason. The people who owe the money may have moved or died. They may not have the money. Quite frankly, the city should have long since written the older unpaid fines off the books.

Furthermore, depending on how much effort is expended, the city's cost for attempting to collect the money could easily turn out to be be more than the revenue gain.

Even if the fines were collected, this is one-time money. Employees must be paid every year. What happens in future years when there is no longer a backlog of unpaid fines to tap?

Don't get us wrong. The city of Birmingham ought to pay competitive wages to its employees — including the police officers who have been most vocal in their demands for higher pay. And the city should make reasonable efforts to collect unpaid fines.

But the city budget from which employees are paid must rest on real-world math, not the funny numbers that are found in Bell's proposal.

Dime's worth of difference

That day the Democrats took over the Senate. New Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle described it as an event of "extraordinary gravity." Unusual, yes, and a very big deal in Washington, where key staff jobs change, there are new leaders to be courted and new alliances to be formed.

But, from a distance, a Senate run by Democrats with a one-vote margin may not look — or act — much different than a Senate run by Republicans with a one-vote margin. Any true changes of extraordinary gravity may have to await the outcome of the 2002 and perhaps the 2004 elections.

True, the Democrats are in a better position to frustrate President Bush's agenda, particularly his judicial nominees, but they were in a good position to do that anyway when the Senate was split 50-50. There will be moments of gridlock and partisanship but that can happen no matter who is in charge.

The new order started on a polite and even pleasant note. Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert strolled over to the Senate to congratulate Daschle. Bush started a series of intimate working dinners with key senators, beginning with John McCain and Daschle. It was something Bush needed to do. Selling his proposals directly to the public, as he has been trying to do with energy, environment and education, may work during a campaign but it is not how things get done in Washington.

The Republicans did not act on the suggestions of some that they filibuster the reorganization of the Senate to get a better deal on committees and a guarantee that Bush's judicial nominees would be brought to the floor. They would not likely have gotten anywhere.

Daschle hardly takes over a disciplined political machine. His majority rests on Republican defector Jim Jeffords, who is technically an independent, and 12 Democrats deserted him to vote for the Bush tax cut and many of them will do so on other issues.

The template for the Democratic-run Senate is likely to be the education bill. Differences were settled by adding more money and dropping controversial provisions. There aren't too many partisan disputes that can't be resolved by ample applications of money. That's how the Clinton White House and Republican Congress settled their differences.

One of the dirty secrets of bipartisan accommodation is that it is almost invariably expensive, and that is very likely how the new Senate will operate.

YOUR VIEWS

Disappointment is not reason to sue

THE MAIL

Having read a news article about the Vestavia school superintendent defending cheerleader tryouts, I must say that I was struck by the drama of it all. I suppose I feel a connection with the young, obviously talented girl who is involved, as well as with the quandary that Vestavia Hills High School is in. I was a cheerleader for five years; two years at Simmons Middle School and three years at the former Berry High School. I was a head cheerleader for two years. As I viewed it, some girls were tall and could play basketball. Some girls were athletic and played volleyball. I had a loud voice, sharp motions and could jump. Cheerleading was my "niche."

I have great memories from hard-fought football games, post-game pizza at Papa Joes in Hoover and sweltering, summer camps at the University of Alabama and Ole Miss. I can understand why a girl would want to be a cheerleader. It was fun! I obviously wanted to be one, or I would not have tried out six years straight.

I tried out six years straight, but I only cheered for five years. When I tried out for varsity right before my junior year, I didn't make the squad. Why didn't I make the squad? Because the judges voted that there were 10 other girls who displayed a level of talent that surpassed mine on that particular day. I had previously cheered for four years.

Was I upset? Sure. It hurt to be rejected. Would I miss it? Very much. I had never sat in the stands. What in the world did you do in the stands?

Did my family suffer "humiliation and mental anguish"? Goodness, no! My parents and I had lives to lead and cheerleading just wasn't going to be part of it that year. The only humiliation I might have suffered is if my parents behaved so poorly that they tried to sue the Board of Education to get me on the squad.

It is not an "intolerable situation" to endure disappointment, no matter how hard you have worked. Life is filled with highs and lows. I am none the worse for not making cheerleading that year and only the better for accepting my loss graciously, without bitterness.

In fact it was a good beginning to a never-ending life lesson: life is not all about me. It never has been and never will be. If I may have the privilege of giving some unsolicited advice: Learn this truth early and your happiness won't hinge on your circumstances as you walk the unpredictable road of life.

Kristin Day
Alabama Policy Institute
402 Office Park Drive, Suite 300

Blessing

Armond "Si" Simmons
104 Wadsworth Lane
Pell City

OTHER VIEWS

Jeffords teaches lesson about big tent

By MARTIN SCHRAM
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

They are buildings today.

But back in the spring of 1967, Sens. Richard Russell, D-Ga., Everett Dirksen, R-Ill, and Philip Hart, D-Mich., were hardly figures a reporter would take for granite. They were very much alive and very powerful, in their own ways. And even though they now exist in Washington only as the designated names of the three Senate office buildings, they ought to be recalled not just for the Senate edifices they became, but also for the big political tents in which they figuratively served.

Dick Russell, Ev Dirksen and Phil Hart were Senate powers in days when both the Democrats and Republicans survived and thrived by being parties of big tent politics. Georgia's Russell was one of the Senate's most conservative Democrats, a powerful force in the shaping of America's military. Michigan's Hart was one of the Senate's most liberal Democrats, a powerful force in shaping human and environmental resource policy.

Illinois' Dirksen, meanwhile, was a pragmatic conservative whose success as the leader of the Senate Republicans was due largely to his ability to keep the peace under what was then a necessarily large Republican big tent. Working civilly and often cordially under that GOP big tent were conservatives such as Barry Goldwater, whose 1964 presidential campaign had led to a landslide defeat that taught the Grand Old Party its own big tent lesson, and respected and powerful moderate and even liberal Republicans such as Jacob Javits of New York, Clifford Case of New Jersey, George Aiken of Vermont and Mark Hatfield of Oregon. Indeed, Republicans gained strength and ultimately power in those post-Goldwater years not by playing hardball with the moderates and liberals in their midst, but by expanding their tent's occupancy to include more moderates, such as Sens. Ed Brooke of Massachusetts and Charles Percy of Illinois.

That was then. This is now: In the last days of May, 2001, Jim Jeffords, the always-moderate senator from Vermont, came to the very personal conclusion that he'd had enough of the political insults that had been dished at him by the Republicans who held power in this ever-political town.

Over at the White House, the inexperienced new corps of advisers had tried to do what any former owner of a baseball team should have known was bad form — they tried to play hardball, in an underhanded way, with Jeffords. When a Vermont teacher was being honored at the White House, the senator from Vermont who'd made education his specialty was not invited. Over in the Senate, Jeffords was treated as an outsider within.

So it was that on May 24, Jeffords made an announcement of his own — and it proved to be, for all in the Senate, a very moving event. He announced he was moving from being a Republican to being an independent and would cast his lot with the Democrats. That of course meant that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and his team would all be moving — out of their Senate majority offices and into the minority offices.

In the days that followed, Washington's Republicans assumed the position of pols in a Thomas Nast cartoon — arms crisscrossing their chests, fingers pointing at all others but themselves. President Bush's political chieftain, Karl Rove, worked hard to get out the word that he was not to be blamed, no matter what others in his party were saying. Lott and his disciples did likewise.

So it was that Republican unity was all the rage — which is to say, Republicans were united only in their rage at Jeffords for what they thought he had done to their political power in this political town that respects only power. But in fact, what Jim Jeffords did for the Republicans was one humongous favor. For the underhanded hardballers were on their way toward pitching the Republicans into a political disaster — a too-narrowly focused, too-conservative party that seemed to be telling moderates they had but one political choice to make: the conservative way or the highway.

Just in time, the Republican leaders got the message. Even as we speak, they are patching and stitching, working to expand their ideological pup tent into a tent big enough to house a real majority.

Martin Schram can be reached
c/o Scripps Howard News Service
1150 15th St. N.W.
Washington, DC 20071-9200

A code of silence abets what we're doing to children

By GEORGE WILL
WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP

One such code stifles discussion of the crisis of parenting, and particularly of mothering. Witness the reflexive rejection of recent data suggesting a link between aggressive behavior and time spent in day care.

But Mary Eberstadt, an unstifled social scientist, demonstrates in her essay "Home-Alone America," in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review, that we are far advanced in a vast experiment in mother-child separation that is "essentially off-limits to public debate."

The crisis of parenting has three components — the ubiquity of divorce, still-increasing illegitimacy (one-third of all American children and almost 70 percent of African American children are born out of wedlock) and the entry of women, including those with young children, into the work force. Even 70 percent of married women with preschool children under 6 have some sort of work-force participation.

The near-normality of divorce causes Americans to place this mass phenomenon "beyond public judgment" in an age famously averse to "judgmentalism." Judgments about illegitimacy and the normality of mothers in the work force take one into the minefields of feminism.

Today's regnant utopianism, feminism, continues modernity's project of emancipating mankind from necessity, including nature. Feminism aims to break the bonds of anatomy and deny that biology is in any sense destiny. Hence feminism's doctrine that gender is marely a "social construct" serving male power, and that roles that relate to gender and inhibit men and women fromleading identical lives are indefensible "inequalities."

Nevertheless, for decades more and more parents have been spending less and less time at home, and many measurements — those pertaining to mental problems, child sexual abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, educational backwardness and more — show that child well-being is in "what once would have been judged scandalous decline."

Divorce and illegitimacy produce single-parent homes which, because work often is not optional for single parents, often are absent-parent homes. And although many women must work because of material needs, such needs, says Eberstadt, "do not begin to account for our contemporary rate of maternal absence." The rate was much less when America was much less affluent; most women now working say they would continue even if their families did not need the income, and that preference rises among higher income groups.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, whose book "The Time Bind" is subtitled "When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work," says: "The emotional magnets beneath home and work place are in the process of being reversed."

According to one study, between 1960 and 1986 parental time with children fell 10 hours per week among whites, 12 hours among blacks. Another study reports that between 1965 and the late 1980s, the amount of time the average child spent interacting with a parent declined 43 percent, from 30 hours a week to around 17.

Recently, yet another study reported some improvement, but not in single-mother homes. The fact that many children need help and supervision with homework connects parental absenteeism with the mediocre performance of American students.

In 1994 the Census Bureau estimated that about one-fifth of children age 5 to 14 — 4.5 million of them — were "latchkey children," defined as those who "care for self" outside of school. One study finds that children home alone for 11 or more hours a week are three times more likely than other children to abuse alcohol, tobacco or drugs. And as home-aloneness has increased, so has sexual activity, and sexually transmitted diseases, which infect 3 million teenagers a year.

One study reports that from 1975 to 1986, substantiated cases of child sexual abuse increased tenfold (13,000 to 130,000). Federal data show a 350 percent increase between 1980 and 1997. Even allowing for more rigorous reporting laws covering physicians and others, children are much more apt to be sexually abused by a cohabiting male than by a biological parent, and absent mothers provide opportunities for predatory males.

What accounts for a threefold increase in teen suicide rates during the rising affluence of 1960-1990?

Given that the average adolescent reportedly spends more than three hours alone every day, more time than with family and friends, the rates likely reflect, writes Eberstadt, the effects of "endemic isolation on a chronically melancholic adolescent temperament."

If, as only tha ideologically blinkered will deny, these grim correlations reflect causation, the worst is yet to come for home-alone America. Concerning which, reticence is destructive, even lethal.

George F. Will can be reached
c/o Washington Post Writers Group
1150 15th St. N.W.
Washington, DC 20071-9200

LOOK BACK

50 years ago, 1951:

Two years after indictments by Jefferson County Grand Jury, state drops 41 flogging charges against 18 men. Action follows sixth acquittal in eight trials. One case was mistrial.

25 years ago, 1976:

Nuclear Regulatory Commission says Tennessee Valley Authority will henceforth use feather to test for air leaks at Browns Ferry nuclear power plant. Test candle is blamed for 1975 fire at plant.

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