Vouchers in Court
O n December 11, 2000, in a decision now headed to the Supreme Court, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio, violates the separation of church and state. The program provides tuition vouchers of $2,500 for low-income children to attend private schools. Over fourth-fifths of the students who…
Taking It to the Web
For Coca-Cola, things don’t go better with the Internet. Behind the story of the company’s recent settlement of a $192.5-million lawsuit brought by black employees is a tale of how a few determined activists used the Internet to create a public relations nightmare for the soft-drink giant. When Larry Jones, a former Coke manager, founded…
The Internet Filter Farce
W hat if the baseball could repair the window?” reads the headline of a recent ad for myCIO.com. The copy continues: “The Internet caused the problem. It’s only fitting it should also provide the solution.” As it happens, the advertiser is offering remote management of network security. But the slogan would serve just as well…
Is the New Economy Family-Friendly?
T he passengers on the morning commuter train from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, who look young enough to be carded at happy hour, are clad in shin-length, hip-hugging jeans and trendy pleather jackets, bopping their bleached-blond heads in time with the music from their CDman players. Although they may excel at office foosball and…
Collateral Damage
Carlos Kelly was six years old when, in December of 1991, his mother, Caridad, was arrested by federal agents in Florida for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. “I remember it was, like, me and my stepbrothers and sisters, we was all gathered in the playroom,” says Carlos, now 16. “I told my mom that the Nintendo…
Contempt of Court
T he U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention into the presidential election was and is a scandal. Five right-wing justices used the flimsiest of pretexts to block the Florida vote recount. Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Company are typically unmoved by alleged Equal Protection Clause violations (except when the plaintiffs are whites charging so-called reverse discrimination). In…
The Purloined Presidency
T hinking about how Democrats should treat the new Bush administration, let’s consider what Bob Dole would do if he were in our shoes. A scant eight years ago, after all, Bob Dole was in our shoes. As the Senate minority leader, he headed the opposition to a newly elected president. Bill Clinton chugged into…
Why the Democrats Should Cut Taxes
T he economy is slowing yet the surplus keeps growing. President-elect George W. Bush wants to use both to justify a big tax cut. How should the Democrats respond? (A) Warn once again that a big tax cut will jeopardize Social Security and that a better use for the surplus is to pay down the…
With Friends Like These…
G eorge W. Bush and his advisers, stumbling toward the presidency in the aftermath of a bloody election, believe that early compromise and conciliation (or at least the appearance thereof) are crucial if the administration is to attain any kind of political legitimacy or success. But extremists in Bush’s own party have other ideas: Despite…
Not Your Father’s High School Club
A s the school bell signals the end of another day at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, a sprawling concrete structure two blocks from the Harvard University campus, the kids of Project 10 East gather around a shiny black lab table to munch on chips and clementines and wait for their adviser. Project 10,…
Every Baby a Trust Fund Baby
E state taxes are a problem that most Americans would like to have. Not many do. To qualify, one has to have a nice piece of change–at least $1.3 million for a married couple and, taking loopholes into account, more like $5 million. At present fewer than 2 percent of Americans achieve that kind of…
The Taxonomist
George W. Bush’s transition team and House Minority Whip Tom DeLay may have had an unacknowledged motive to delay passage of the 2001 budget: An idea going around in December was to put off the budget bill until February so that it could be combined with repeal of the federal estate tax. Because budget reconciliation…
It Takes a Tax Credit to Raise a Child
W ith some creative expansion, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) could all but end poverty among working-class families with children and help a lot of middle-class parents as well. The EITC is now this country’s second-largest means-tested program that aids the poor. (Medicaid is the largest.) It goes primarily to families that have children…
Unhealthy Partnership
F ourteen years old and sullen, he came to the hospital on a Sunday afternoon for evaluation of long-standing abdominal pain. As a first-year pediatric intern, I thought of incredible diagnoses: An intermittent twisting of the bowel? A rare parasite? When the preliminary tests came back negative, I told my patient the good news. He…
Caring for Crib Lizards
For a country that claims to love kids, the United States sure seems to dislike parents. According to a 1999 survey conducted by the foundation Public Agenda, only 23 percent of Americans feel that parents are good role models for their children, while fully 49 percent believe that “irresponsible” parents–and not social and economic pressures…
Children First
B ipartisan consensus is a concept rarely associated with the current U.S. Congress. One policy issue, however, has drawn support from both sides of the aisle in recent years: addressing the plight of the nation’s 10 million uninsured children. After all, children are the segment of the population least able to control whether or not…
Families on Call
There are 25.8 million family caregivers in America today. According to a recent study by the United Hospital Fund of New York, they provide the equivalent of nearly $200 billion worth of health care services per year. That’s almost double the annual amount the United States spends on nursing home and home health care. Yet…
Considering Divorce
Between 1960 and 1982, the divorce rate in America tripled. By now many researchers have investigated the effects on families and children of this sweeping change. Considerable speculation has been generated as well. But there has been little agreement. To some divorce is a quick fix to marital discontent sought by narcissistic parents and its…
Decent Child Care at Decent Wages
I magine yourself a single mom with a one-year-old and a three-year-old and a job with a not-so-hot wage. You go down to your local child care center and are quoted a price of $13,500 per year. That would take half your pay and leave you without money for rent. So you look around for…
America’s Children
I t’s no accident that politicians kiss babies. America is a nation that professes to love its children. Yet the policies we have in place to raise the next generation are those of a nation that kisses children off. This special report offers a tour of the horizon. In the opening piece, Janet C. Gornick…
Support for Working Families
F our decades of steady growth in femaleemployment have gone a long way toward closing the job gap between women and menin the industrialized countries. One of the most striking changes in Europe andthe United States has been the rise in employment among mothers with youngchildren. Nearly 85 percent of U.S. mothers employed before childbearing…
The Vote Counts
It’s a lead-pipe cinch that this year’s election reform panels, hearings, briefs, and reports will feature many attempts to summarize neatly the American experience with voting rights. Most of these sketches are likely to be wrong. If you read The Right to Vote, you will know why. The standard history of voting in America goes…
Shut Down the College
E ven the best political systems cannot eliminate corruption, venality, and civil strife, but they are supposed to limit their sway. Enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the American electoral system was designed to do that, yet the recent presidential election has revealed serious weaknesses in the way a president is chosen. The country appears to…
The Betrayal
N othing about the 2000 election matters nearly as much as the ugly means by which it was brought to an end. Throughout our history, with the terrible exception of 1860, every party has been able to live with the victory of an opposing candidate for president. One reason is our confidence in a legal…
Papa, Don’t Preach
A ccording to the Voter News Service numbers, Al Gore beat George W. Bush among 18- to 29-year-old voters by a mere 2 percentage points (48 to 46), a gigantic drop in this age group from Bill Clinton’s 19-point margin over Bob Dole in 1996 (53 to 34) and 11-point margin over George Bush the…
Did Roe v. Wade Abort Crime?
C rime is down across America. The nation’s crime rate has been dropping for the best part of a decade now, and everyone is keen to take the credit. New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani claims that zero-tolerance policing is responsible; former California Governor Pete Wilson credits three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws; President Bill Clinton says gun control and…
Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back
The final numbers aren’t in yet, but we may soon be calling this the first $4-billion presidential election in U.S. history. (About half as much was spent by parties and candidates a mere four years ago.) With most of the campaign money coming from special interests, the need for comprehensive reform intensifies. A new wave…
Toxic Media versus Toxic Censorship
O n the October 23, 2000, issue of TAP, Wendy Kaminer argued that political calls for regulating “toxic media”–like violent movies or profane rap albums–can lead to dangerous censorship and repression. But what if there’s a legitimate public interest in monitoring the cultural products kids consume? Michael Massing says that Kaminer’s argument is typical of…
Thirteen Days in 145 Minutes
W hen I learned that Thirteen Days, the new movie dramatizing the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, would follow events through the eyes of Kenneth O’Donnell, John F. Kennedy’s appointments secretary–who would be played by the movie’s headliner, Kevin Costner–I had strong misgivings. In 1997 I had transcribed and edited (with Philip Zelikow of the…
Cockeyed Caravan
T he new movie by Joel and Ethan Coen, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a picaresque comic strip “based”–as the credits inform us with the filmmakers’ trademark brand of knowing tongue-in-cheekiness–“upon The Odyssey by Homer.” Set in the Deep South during the Depression, the movie does borrow certain figures from the ancient Greek epic…
Leave No Child Behind?
I f there’s one thing most Americans agree on, it is the ideal of giving all children a fair opportunity to succeed in life. Government programs such as Head Start and election-year slogans such as “Leave no child behind” invoke the time-honored metaphor of a contest that every child has a chance to win. The…
Why Bad Reforms Won’t Give Us Good Schools
School reform has become a major industry since the Reagan era, when the 1983 report A Nation at Risk judged U.S. schools to be so mediocre as to endanger the economic future of the country. Mayors and presidents, corporate leaders and small-business owners, parents and taxpayers have said again (and again and again):…
Do School Vouchers Improve Student Performance?
W ith George W. Bush’s assumption of the presidency, a campaign to provide vouchers for private schooling may gain new life. The idea of public funding of private schools is not new, nor does it belong exclusively to conservative free market reformers. In the 1960s and early 1970s, academics on the left, such as Christopher…
