Sulphur Springs News-Telegram (Sulphur Springs, Tex.), Vol. 100, No. 186, Ed. 1 Monday, August 7, 1978 Page: 2 of 10
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• C
2—THE NEWS-TELEGRAM. Sulphur Springs. Tuxes. Monday. Aug. 7. 1978.
‘ —
Sp
v-n
pis’
forum
Jack Anderson
in our opinion
Deaths increasing
at railroad crossings
After declining for the last 10
years, the number of deaths at the
nation’s railroad crossings have begun
to climb again. The increase is creat-
ing something of a puzzle to experts
:ih accident prevention.
Automatic gates protect only
about 25 percent of the public cross-
ings in the United States. Oddly
enough, many accidents occur at
crossings equipped with modern con-
trol devices.
Recent data by safety engineers
note that about half of all crossing
accidents occur when both the train
and the motor vehicle are moving at
less than 30 miles an hour.
The engineers in their study also
found that most crossing accidents
occur during daylight hours and in
clear weather. In about 40 percent of
the cases studied, drivers ignored
flashing lights or drove around auto-
matic gates into the path of a train.
With few crossings in Hopkins
County guarded by gates, it is ex-
tremely important that drivers be-
come aware of the location of rail-
road crossings and be prepared to
stop with little advance notice. And
it is a pretty good plan to proceed
across railroad tracks after it is de-
termined they are clear with enough
speed to allow the car to coast clear
should the engine quit.
Medics offer simple
route to good health
. Want to live longer, feel better
! and save money on your medical
’'bills?
;• The Texas Medical Association is
promoting six health habits that its
members believe can go far toward
achieving these goals.
The list is based largely on a Cali-
fornia study showing that people who
follow the six recommendations lived
7 to 11 years longer than those who
did not. They also tended to feel bet-
ter and, as a result, enjoyed lower
medical bills.
Here is what the medical associa-
tion recommends:
1— Eat three meals a day, includ-
ing breakfast, at regular times and
avoid snacks.
2— Control your weight. Use your
head to fight fat. Remember that fad
diets don’t keep weight off perman-
ently. Diets based on good nutrition
and sensible amounts of food have the
best chance of success.
3— Exercise more than once or
twice a week. If you haven't exercised
in a long time, ease into it. If you’re
over 40 or have heart problems, check
with your doctor before starting a
program.
4— Avoid having more than two
alcoholic drinks daily.
5— Get enough sleep. Eight hours
nightly is a general rule, but individ-
ual requirements vary.
6— Don’t smoke.
The proposals seem amazingly
simple when compared to all the com-
plex equipment and highly trained
personnel used by modern medicine,
but they represent fundamental build-
ing blocks for good health.
As Dr. Mylie E. Durham, Jr., TMA
president, points out, even expensive
masses of modern technology cannot
save someone who is determined to
destroy himself or make life miser-
able by following bad health habits.
Raising the ante
Newspaper Enterprise Association
Interest in gambling may be up
across the country, but action in nickel
and dime slot machines is very far
down.
According to a major manufac-
turer, the small-change slots a few
years ago accounted for by far the
largest part of production but now
represent a rapidly declining market.
The action is at the quarter and
dollar machines these days.
Not even one-armed banditry is
immune from inflation.
Sulphur Springs N««ds
• • • •
• Broader Vocational Education
• County Civic Center
• Better Junior High Facilities
• More Downtown Parking
• Continued Industrial Development
• A More Prosperous Agriculture
• A City-County Health Unit
Tax revolt no passing fancy
WASHINGTON - The
federal income tax began
in 1913 as an amendment to
a tariff bill. To make up
reduced tariff receipts, a
tiny tax was proposed on
large incomes. The bite
was only a paltry one per-
cent. Few opposed the tax;
it didn’t seem important.
Nowadays the citizenry
groans under the complex-
ity of a 6,000-page income
tax code, encumbered with
myriad exceptions and
alternatives. Each of these
exceptions and exemptions
and alternatives is de-
signed to accommodate
the special situation of
some group of taxpayers,
worthy or unworthy, or to
advance some public poli-
cy, such as home owner-
ship.
By contrast, the czars of
Muscovy in the pre-bu-
reaucratic age had no in-
strument capable of col-
lecting revenue that was
either efficient or discrimi-
nating. And their prospec-
tive taxpayers were of the
usual sort - sneaking into
hiding at tax time, burying
their potatoes, disguising
their occupations, pretend-
ing pauperism.
But the czars had their
needs, and they were not
rulers disposed to take no
for an answer - even when
tMaWTHefe.
\Vc't<e S\ll
TWTofysr
Ifle ^ar
confronted with 50 million
shirkers. They proceeded
by issuing successive
edicts that had the effect of
permanently fastening
each peasant, and his des-
cendants, to one plot of
land i where he could be
gotten at, in one immut-
able status so he could be
categorized once and for
all, and in a fixed bracket,
so there could be no fina-
gling around.
If the wretch could not
pay, he had to borrow the
money by selling himself
and his descendants into
bondage under the nearest
landlord. For the lack of an
Internal Revenue Service,
the czars turned nine-
tenths of their subjects into
serfs, and the rest into
serf-keepers.
The Internal Revenue
Service has its critics,
nonetheless, who question
whether the taxpayers in
modern America have
been brought into bondage
with a finesse so unobtru-
sive that they may not
have noticed it. The Tax
Foundation reports that
the average American now-
works more than four
months of each year to
earn enough to pay his
taxes, a situation that
prompts the critics to point
out that the serfs labored
only three months a year
for THEIR masters.
The crude attempts of
the czars to raise revenue
often provoked bloody
resistance. Internal Reve-
nue perpetrates the same
atrocities peaceably and
effortlessly; it extracts
8400 billion a year from the
American people, largely
through the mail. For
years, all the taxpayers
complained about was the
complexity of the forms,
but now they are making
themselves heard.
For two years before the
tax revolt exploded in Cali-
fornia with a resounding
vote for Proposition 13, we
warned that tax resistance
was simmering beneath
the surface. The public is
angry, we wrote, at an
income tax system that
has become incomprehen-
sible. The annual ritual of
rendering unto Ceasar has
become so encumbered
with regulations that it
takes an attorney or an
accountant to fill out the
average tax form.
The public is also angry
at a tax system that dis-
criminates against the
middle classes. The poor
are granted exemptions,
and the rich are provided
loopholes. The inequities
have been covered up by
the sheer complexities of
the tax laws.
But the middle classes
have caught on. Tax-
fighter organizations are
today moving to rally this
pervasive but unorganized
anti-tax sentiment around
revolutionary measures
that would permanently
restrict state and federal
spending. In a dozen
states, taxpayer move-
ments are in various
stages of agitating to
change state constitutions
to place rigid limits on
future spending, often by
limiting it to a fixed per-
centage of private income.
Other state legislatures
have passed resolutions
petitioning Congress to
adopt a constitutional
amendment that would
abolish deficit spending
and put the Treasury on a
pay-as-you-go basis. The
federal bureaucrats, if
apprehensive, doubt that
such restrictions will ever
come to pass. In the con-
flict between the desire for
more public benefits and
the resentment at having
to pay for them, the Wash-
tiff
ington consensus is that
expanded services will in-
evitably win out.
The bureaucracy offers
an inexhaustible catalog of
services — its metronome-
like delivery of millions of
benefit checks, its irriga-
tion of thousands of huge
agri-farms, its space shut-
tles, its highways extend-
ing to every horizon, its
numberless installations
all with regularly waxed
floors, its medics-at-the-
ready with inoculation
guns at 10,000 locations.
But many government
projects have been gener-
ated more to provide jobs
for bureaucrats than ser-
vices for citizens. It is also
difficult to measure the
performance of the
bureaucrats, to determine
either excessive cost or
concrete achievement. In
private business, a stand-
ard of competence is fur-
nished inexorably by the
profit factor. But the gov-
ernment bureau, with no
such automatic arbiter,
can always claim that a
poor result could be im-
proved upon with a bigger
staff and more money.
The bureau chief is
rewarded, not for effi-
ciency that cannot be mea-
sured, but by the number
of people he has under him.
The more bodies he can
accumulate, the higher his
grade. The internal drive
toward expansion - and
against all “reductions in
force” - has been irrever-
sible in the past.
But an angry populace is
now determined to cut
down the number of ser-
vices the government per-
forms and the number of
bureaucrats who perform
them. Any candidate for
public office who defies
this mood may not survive
the next election. This
could be grim news for the
Democrats who are associ-
ated in the public’s mind
with government spend-
ing.
But Democrats and Re-
publicans alike, mean-
while, are beginning to un-
derstand that the tax re-
volt must be taken
seriously and accomo-
dated before it gets out of
hand.
The Almanac
•City Beautification
• A Better Airport
• Auditorium Facilities
• Minimum Housing Standards Code
• Improved Streets & Drainage
• Cooper Reservoir
• Enthusiastic Citizens (Always)
By The Associated Press
Today is Monday, Aug. 7, the
219th day of 1978. There are 146
days left in the year.
Today’s highlight in history:
On this date in 1945, the
Soviet Union declared war on
Japan, seven days before the
Japanese surrender in World
War II.
On this date:
In 1789, the U.S. War and
Navy departments were
established.
In 1912, a Progressive Party
In search of a cause
ST. PAUL, Minn. (NEA) - They made their mark at a
very early age, as the young but savvy leaders of the major
protest movements of the 1960s: Tom Hayden, Sam Brown,
Michael Harrington, Paul Booth, John Lewis, David
Mixner.
Their issues tumbled onto the national stage in rapid
succession during that turbulent decade: The “war on
poverty,” the civil rights movement in the South,
opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Most of the organizers of those crusades still work full-
time for various organizations, public and private,
committed to reordering social and economic priorities —
but compelling issues now are few and far between.
The veterans of those earlier struggles recently gathered
at Concordia College here, for a brief look back at the ’60s
and to seek a new agenda of “issues for the ’80s.”
The ’70s have produced significant successes, but they
invariably have been confined to the tedious, complex and
little-noticed field of community organizing.
The country’s most respected and successful grass-roots
organizer probably is Wade Rathke, head of Little Rock,
Are., group called the Association of Community Organ-
izations for Reform Now or ACORN.
IN WASHINGTON
Martha Angle and
Robert Walters
Under Rathke’s leadership, ACORN has established
thriving community-based groups in dozens of cities and
towns in 13 states. Its membership now is approaching
20,000 families.
Yet even Rathke displays signs of discontent. “The
questions are becoming more difficult in this business,” he
says. “The bigger and older the organizations get, the
more subtle and sophisticated the attacks.”
Bert DeLeeuw, head of a Washington, D.C. group called
the Movement for Economic Justice, notes that “during
the last five years, no grass-roots organization has built the
movement, the issue that transcends everything else.”
Brown, now head of ACTION, the federal volunteer
agency, is especially blunt in his assessment: “American
liberalism, the liberalism that most of us grew up and
fought for, is out of touch with the nation’s mood.”
Those comments were made during the annual meeting
convened here by the Washington-based Conference on
Alternative State and Local Public Policies, a national
coalition of community leaders and state and local public
officials.
Determined to regain the initiative, the more than 500
activists attending the four-day conference reached a
consensus on potential new issues for the years ahead. The
list includes:
• Development of alternative energy sources, with
emphasis on solar energy. (Hayden now heads the
California Campaign for Economic Democracy, which has
worked almost exclusively on that issue.)
• A broad-based attempt to reduce the concentration of
power in the private sector, ranging from local challenges
to utility company rates to a national effort aimed at
making corporate boards of directors more accountable to
the public.
• A parallel drive to reduce the influence of the major
institutions in the public sector, the increasingly unrespon-
sive governmental structures at the federal and state
level. Their functions would be assumed by neighborhood
and community-based government units.
• A tax reform campaign, emphasizing not only tax
reductions but also a drastic overhaul of the current
system, designed to increase the tax burden on the wealthy
coupled with redistribution of more income to the poor.
The issues are complex and controversial, and there is
no guarantee of success. Carol Bellamy, president of the
New York City Council, offered perhaps the best summary
of the activists’ current dilemma when she referred
wistfully to the 1960s:
“It was a time of special certainty. We knew our goals
and we knew our friends and enemies. I wonder if we shall
ever be so sure of ourselves again.”
{NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE ASSN.)
Convention in Chicago
nominated Theodore Roosevelt
for president.
In 1941, Soviet planes carried
out their first bombing raids
against Berlin in World War II.
In 1942, U.S. Marines landed
on Guadalcanal in the Pacific.
In 1957, a federal grand jury
in New York indicted Col.
Rudolf Abel as a Soviet spy.
In 1960, the Ivory Coast
became independent of France.
Ten years ago: Former Vice
President Richard Nixon was
nominated for president on the
first ballot at the Republican
National Convention in Miami
Beach.
Five years ago: President
Richard Nixon’s lawyers told a
federal judge in Washington
that the doctrine of separation
of powers would be violated if
White House tapes had to be
turned over to the Watergate
special prosecutor.
One year ago: Air traffic
controllers went on strike in
Canada, paralyzing the
nation’s regular airline service.
Today’s birthdays: Out-
fielder Steve Kemp of the
Detroit Tigers is 24 years old.
Writer and publisher Maia
Wojciechowska is 51.
Thought for today: An
investment in knowledge pays
the best interest — Benjamin
Franklin, 1706-1790.
Berry’s World
© 1978 by NEA. Inc
c
‘They LAUGHED when I took up jogging!'
Eyeing Inflation’s Causes
by U.S. Senator for Texas
JOHN TOWER
WASHINGTON—Inflation is no longer an economic
indicator charted only by sophisticated observers of the
world’s money markets.
These days, inflation is a household word and its ups
and downs have to be reckoned with by everyone—con-
sumer as well as businessman.
To most Texans this summer, watching inflation’s baro-
meters has become just about as important as watching the
West Texan horizon for rain clouds.
The reason is inflation has risen again to alarming rates.
That spells bad news and more belt tightening ahead when
cutting back already has become a way of life for many.
Rising prices, brought under control by late 1975, are
gaining a full head of steam again. Latest figures indicate
that inflation by the end of the first four months of the
year skyrocketed to nearly 10%.
And just as the return to nearly double digit inflation
was as unexpected as it was damaging to the economy,
predictions by the Administration that it will recede in
coming months have no credibility.
Quite simply, no one—and least of all government—
has been able to come up with a magic formula to hold
inflation down. At the moment it seems to be steering its
own course.
Some of the most alarming indicators have centered on
food prices. In this critical area, inflation has gone wild.
Its doubtful that if you’ve set foot in a grocery store, you
are unaware of the problem. For the record, though, in the
first four months of the year, grocery prices jumped 18%.
That of course means that the family’s bread winner
who paid $60 for food last December now will be devoting
$70 of the weekly paycheck to the shopping basket, and
yet will be getting no more for the dollar.
That is a particularly irksome development for families.
The biggest spur to inflation, of course, is the Federal
government itself, which continues the very practices and
policies it points to as the reason for inflation, government
spending chief among them. The Federal government’s
deficit this year is nearing $60 billion and the Adminis-
tration’s budget request amounted to a half-trillion dollars.
It’s small wonder that taxpayers have so little faith in
government’s promises to hold the line on inflation. That’s
a little like the Anopheles mosquito denouncing malaria.
Several developments may change all that though.
Proposition 13 has forced a new awareness of the need
for government to set spending priorities and then stick to
them. Otherwise taxpayers won’t think twice about setting
the priorities at the voting booth.
Another requirement is broad-based tax reduction.
Many of us in the Senate have fought to enact legislation
providing for a 33% across-the-board tax reduction. It
would return a measure of buying power to individuals,
stimulate economic growth, and hasten the creation of
productive jobs.
These will help enormously. But before inflation will be
brought to its knees, Uncle Sam must admit that up to
now, government has been part of the problem, not part
of the solution. K
ite
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Keys, Clarke. Sulphur Springs News-Telegram (Sulphur Springs, Tex.), Vol. 100, No. 186, Ed. 1 Monday, August 7, 1978, newspaper, August 7, 1978; Sulphur Springs, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth816094/m1/2/: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hopkins County Genealogical Society.