The Bottom Line: Expressions of Opinion

Would a flat tax be fair? Let me see. If we are given Steve Forbes' 17% tax with a $36,000 cutoff, I'm all in favor of it; I personally would come out ahead on the deal. Unfortunately, the government would go broke in two weeks at this level of revenue. What about 25% with a $10,000 cutoff? That would keep the government going; and I feel sure that it would also give a big boost to the guillotine business, once the average citizen felt its impact; I'd buy one, and I know just which necks I'd test it on. How about a compromise -- we start at 23% and $15,000 and work our way down to the Forbes level as the economy takes off and government revenues skyrocket? And when I think of this possibility, why do the words "Laffer Curve" come to mind? We are still paying for Ronald Reagan's enthusiasm for that particular piece of economic bunkum, which, like the flat tax, promised us all pie in the sky. Some of us did indeed get pie; the rest of us only got the bill. Or something.

Our problem is not the tax structure. If we were to revert to the multi-tiered income tax of 1980, the average third-grade graduate could still process his Form 1040 in fifteen minutes, five of which would be spent hunting for an envelope and a stamp. The real problem is the maze of tax credits, deductions, exemptions, loopholes, and various income categories -- a maze that even the IRS doesn't understand. Don't worry about flattening the tax -- flatten these. Then we'll all be happy.

My, my. Netscape's "cookies" feature -- the one that keeps track of your computer's on-line transactions for some companies -- has certainly been getting some bad press in the "Business" section of the Times lately, first from Walter Mossberg (Feb. 27) and now from John Byczkowski (Mar. 3).

Mossberg's quick mention is perhaps less accurate, since he links "cookies" with dumping "plenty of [personal] data" about you to commercial interests; Byczkowski goes into more detail about the system and (accurately) does not mention personal data, but he still alludes to it with lots of references to "you" and "me" as the people who are being followed around by the "cookies" monster.

When you contact a business on the other end of the Web, that business not only does not know who you are, it does not even know where you are; all it knows is that a particular computer (serial number unknown) somewhere in the world has contacted it. Your name, social security number, and sexual preferences are not recorded -- the server at the other end doesn't even know whether you're in El Sobrante or Sri Lanka -- only data about whatever the computer did at that particular company's Web site. The relatively few organizations that use the "cookies" system are simply keeping a running track of what that particular computer has done in their particular bailiwick. They can't even look at what it's been doing in somebody else's jurisdiction; Netscape will return a particular piece of information from your computer only to the address that originally placed it there.

Byczkowski quotes the Netscape product manager as promising to "allow users to control their cookies". This is sort of like promising to let you go out-of-doors occasionally; users already have ultimate control over this particular feature. The "cookies" file can easily be modified by anybody who knows how to use a computer to write a letter -- if you don't like the Microsoft Network recording what you do at their Web site, just erase their particular line from the file. Or, if you don't like the whole concept, at the end of each session on the Web simply pull the "cookies" file into the trash bin -- and trash it. It is, after all, your computer.

Paul Aubin's letter on creationism vs. evolution"ism" (Apr. 7) was interesting, but contained three major fallacies.

Aubin states that "evolutionists would have us believe that [DNA] ... arose by chance processes over the eons." Since evolution addresses the gradual change from one extant species to another, it does not touch upon the origin of the very first piece of DNA, and so would have us believe nothing of the sort. That is the provenance of other disciplines.

Aubin also compares the development of DNA out of primal elements with the idea that "a tornado passing through a junkyard would eventually produce a Boeing 747." The structure of a DNA molecule is not particularly complex -- it is a linear molecule -- and its constituent parts are few and simple -- four amino acids, each one made up of a few each of four or five different atoms. A 747 is, in this sense, much more complex -- hundreds or thousands of working parts, each one different. The chances of these coming together in the proper order is far, far less than the chances of the constituents of DNA coming together, strictly by chance, in the proper order. Even the Wright Brothers' original aircraft was much more complex, in this sense, than any DNA molecule.

And, finally, we might ask just what the proper order of a DNA molecule might be. The structure of an aircraft is very much constrained -- there are only a few ways that you can build a functioning one. DNA suffers from no such structural restrictions. Currently there are some six billion different variants of DNA extant on this planet -- and that's only counting humans; if you add in trees, insects, bacteria, etc., the number increases almost without bound. Ultimately, it is not surprising that something like DNA formed out of the earth's primal soup; it would be genuinely surprising if it had not.

Illegal immigration is not a new problem for this continent; it has been with us since the second wave of Siberian immigrants wiped out the first wave some twenty thousand years ago or so, only to be displaced in its turn. I have never understood why we should suppose that, just because our European forefathers became the latest such wave of undesirable rabble, we should also be the last. History does not stop here, and there will always be more Goths to come through the gate, along with their wives, kids, and the horses they rode in on.

Still, we have it in our power to discourage such immigration for the very first time in history. We need only boost our population to about three-quarters of a billion, reduce average family income by some 95%, fill our spacious skies with smog, burn the amber waves of grain to stubble, level the purple mountains' majesty over the fruited plain, dim the gleam of the alabaster cities with human tears -- and, oh yes, get rid of our inefficient, liberal, bureaucracy-ridden democratic government in favor of some benign authoritarian who will make the trains run on time and demand nothing in return but unlimited power, unswerving loyalty and abject submission -- and I feel confident that America's illegal immigration problem will subside to such manageable levels as those currently enjoyed by nations like Bangla Desh.

People come to America for the dream. Destroy the dream and they will no longer come. It's as simple as that.

Thanks to the Times for recent articles about real estate listings on the World Wide Web (Apr. 14), a group of young people working to bring the beauties of Mt. Diablo on-line (Apr. 19), and students using the internet as a research tool (Apr. 21). Hopefully this will go some way toward reassuring Andrew Pohlman (Apr. 11) that the internet is hardly what he considers a "dangerous neighborhood".

It would be naive to claim that the net is 100% free of cybersleaze; pornography and related activities are probably as well represented there as they are in the streets and neighborhoods of, for instance, Pinole, though none of it is, as Pohlman suggests, "unquestionably illegal" -- if it were, the government would long since have prosecuted those responsible. Pohlman, like many others, has apparently been led astray by a barrage of sensationalist articles from the national press and the wire services. Surprisingly, while sexually-oriented materials represent less than one percent of activity on the net -- they are not even mentioned in George Avalos' recent article on a survey of major uses of the net (Apr. 25) -- they seem to have claimed more than fifty percent of the attention of the national media, a situation roughly equivalent to having the Times devote more than half its articles about Pinole to the availability of "Penthouse" at local newsstands and the bedroom shenanigans of a few of the city's residents. It is to the credit of the Times and other local newspapers that their staff writers have tended to take as balanced a view of the internet as they do of Pinole and other communities.

To put matters in perspective: to the best of my knowledge no child has been physically abused, no child has been abducted, no child has been injured, no child has been killed on the internet. Would that we could say the same about the much smaller neighborhood of West County where Pohlman has chosen to raise his children!

Besides protecting his children's "inquisitive natures" from cyberporn, Pohlman is also protecting them from access to museums around the world, on-line magazines of all sorts, the latest news, the Library of Congress, many of the great classic works of literature, information about people and places all over the planet (and beyond), and a host of other materials, activities and sources available on-line. This is sad and perhaps misdirected, since the greatest danger to a child's "inquisitive nature" is not, after all, the possibility of a chance encounter with a picture of an unclothed lady. It is the possibility of being protected right into dullness.

Thomas Sowell (Column, Apr. 29) is distressed because another four years of Bill Clinton would guarantee a "liberal" Supreme Court for decades to come. Maybe so, but it's not clear to me than this would be any worse -- or any different, all things considered -- than the "conservative" supreme court that Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush guaranteed us for decades to come. On the high court, it's often difficult to tell the "liberals" from the "conservatives" without a scorecard. We only need to remember the late Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California with impeccably conservative credentials who was appointed to the court by Republican president Dwight Eisenhower. Warren then demonstrated that not only did he take the usual conservative cant about "the rights of the individual" seriously, but that he also considered blacks, women, the accused and other economically marginal types as "individuals", and based his opinions on this -- and since that time conservatives prefer to remember "The Warren Court" as a synonym for bleeding-heart liberalism.

Sowell also suggests that the Republicans take lessons from Rush Limbaugh about how to get their point across. Limbaugh has done quite well for the past couple of years by virtue of three basic tactics: he packs his audience with "dittoheads" who sit quietly and murmur "Yes, Rush, how true, Rush!" every time he informs them that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength; he has phone calls carefully screened to ensure that the only dissenters who get through are those who are so off-the-wall that they do more damage to themselves than to him; and he absolutely refuses to engage in head-to-head debate with anyone. These are admirable tactics for Limbaugh's on-going monologue, but it is not clear that any candidate, Republican or Democrat, could make successful use of them in the rough-and-tumble of a public campaign.

It is, they say, an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Senator Bob Dole, stumbling into the Republican candadicy for the presidency, is making political hay by urging that recent gasoline price increases be nullified by the immediate repeal of "Bill Clinton's" 4.3 cent-per-gallon gas tax. He could give us an extra seven-tenths of a cent by leaving the Clinton tax in place and repealing the Bush-Dole 5 cent-per-gallon gas tax, but since that was his own tax it is apparently more tolerable. In any case, the price I pay per gallon has increased close to ten times as much as either tax over the past month, and so it is not clear to me that repealing either or both taxes would be of much relief to my pocket book -- the more so since I suspect that the oil companies would grant us about two cents' worth of that repeal at the pump and pocket the difference, all the while blithering on about "The Market". Harold Barrett (Apr. 28) may insist that these pillars of our great Free Enterprise System would never, ever, ever engage in such blatant financial manipulation, but I am less sanguine about their ability to reject temptation.

Still, there is one way that the government could influence gas prices, and all without interfering in the market at all -- though it is a way that neither Dole nor Clinton has mentioned yet. Millions upon millions of barrels of crude are bottled up in Iraq by sanctions, five years after the Gulf War. Pop the cork and let that oil out, and watch gas prices drop. But, you say, we need to keep those sanctions in place to drive the evil Saddam Hussein from power. And just what effect have they had on S.H. during that five-year period? None -- their success can primarily be measured, according to figures published in The Times in February, by the deaths of some half a million Iraqi children from starvation and disease since the war. Here we have a chance to do a good turn for a lot of Iraqi children -- and for ourselves at the same time.

Somehow, though, I don't expect that either Clinton or Dole will consider this as an option.

Let me add my cheers about the restoration of phonics in our school system to those of Marge Donovan (Readers' Forum, May 31) and others, with the proviso that mine will be somewhat muted. Phonics is not, after all, a panacea, and in fact won't do some few of the things that whole-word teaching does.

What phonics will do is get kids reading earlier and quicker. Even if there are numerous violations of the sound-to-letter correspondences in English, it's usually fairly easy, once you have learned those correspondences (and their most significant exceptions), to puzzle out previously unmet written words and relate them to spoken ones that you already know. Unfortunately, Donovan's beliefs notwithstanding, this doesn't work very well for the child going in the opposite direction, from the spoken to the written word (after all, her stock of known written words is relatively small), which is why, even in an era when phonics were taught, we spent half an hour a day for six years or more studying spelling.

The other problem is that the basic unit of meaning is the word, not the letter. A child learning to read letters is in danger of, at least occasionally, losing sight of the forest for the trees. In fact, one of the major tasks in rapid-reading courses is to "cure" some of the bad habits that phonics-teaching leaves in children, "mumbling" (pronouncing the words as you read) being the most obvious of these.

Reintroduce phonics, by all means. But let's make sure we know exactly what we're going to get before we discard the whole-word system entirely.

It is admirable of Gene Scott (June 23) to defend the rights of folks such as Marge Schott and Jimmy the Greek to utter half-baked and nonsensical pronouncements; as Scott points out, it is precisely to protect people with such minority ideas that the First Amendment was created. It would be even more admirable if Scott were to add to the list of those protected by the First Amendment "The Establishment Media" and "the liberals," who also have the right to point out that such pronouncements are indeed half-baked and nonsensical. But Scott goes just a bit overboard when he starts defending the content of those pronouncements, and in doing so rewrites history to defend Adolf Hitler.

I'm not sure what Schott said this time to arouse everyone's ire, including the association of baseball owners -- not a notoriously liberal organization -- which suspended her from active dealings in the baseball world for two and a half years. In the case of Jimmy the Greek, however -- and, by the way, The Greek was a Las Vegas bookmaker, not "a TV commentator" -- his silly explanation for apparent black predominance in some sports showed little knowledge of blacks, less of the history of American slavery, and none at all of the time (many generations), conditions (isolation of the stock being bred) and dedication required for selective breeding to produce any results at all, a set of ignorances to which Scott apparently subscribes.

And now we come to Adolf Hitler. Here is a man who was pond scum when he first stood on a soap box in Munich in 1922 and delivered remarkably Buchananesque speeches blaming everybody else, including non-Aryan German citizens, for Germany's problems. And he was pond scum in April, 1945, when he took the easy way out and abandoned to its fate the nation he had led to utter ruin. The most admirable facet of his career, in fact, was his consistency. Yes, he "cranked up the factories," creating many new jobs by putting Germany on a war-preparation footing, building tanks, planes and guns that would be used to ruin Europe. Yes, he "put most of the unemployed back to work" -- at least if they were male and "Aryan" -- by the simple expedient of making more jobs available through the exclusion of women and numerous ethnic and political minorities from the work force. Yes, he was "responsible for countless public works," including the burning of the Reichstag and the destruction of the fragile democracy that had been struggling to mature in Weimar Germany. And yes, he built the autobahns, "one of his crown jewels," a system of military highways not available to the average German of the time who in any case didn't even have a car -- and who was so anxious to get one that he pumped half his income into Hitler's "volkswagen" scam, from which con game he never recovered a pfennig, even if he survived the war to an era when, under another government, the car actually got built. The best thing that can be said about the early Hitler regime, in fact, is that it did not yet have death camps -- though they were already on the drawing board.