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REASON Express

1) Home Early? Thank Prosperity.
2) Can a Tax Cut Be Worse Than None at All?
3) Coming Soon: Your Personal Evil Score
4) In Search of Perfect Alcohol Labeling
5) Quick Hits

More evidence that prosperity is the best medicine for a wide variety of social ills.

New research by the University of Michigan concludes that children spent four to six more hours per week with their parents in 1997 than they did in 1981.

The gains were recorded for both moms and dads and also across both single-earner and dual-earner families. In 1997, children ages 3 to 12 spent about 31 hours a week with their mothers, a gain of six hours over 1981, and 23 hours a week with their fathers, a gain of four hours.

"A lot of the popular culture has been saying that we're spending less time with our kids and that it's bad for our children, and it turns out we're spending more time with them," said study co-author John F. Sandberg, a sociologist with Michigan's Institute for Social Research.

Sanberg and others posit that the time increase is the result of a change in attitude that has occurred in recent years. Parents expect and demand more time with their kids, they say.

That may well be true, but for those wants and expectations to actually make things happen our loving parents need some leverage. And leverage comes from having plenty of available jobs to jump to should any boss prove reluctant to make time for families.

During the painful recession of 1980-81, most parents were glad they had a job--any job--to leave home for. Fast forward to the relative boom times of the late '90s and employers were bending over backwards to keep good workers.

Gotta go to soccer practice? Great! On-site daycare would save you hours and mean lunches together? We'll make it happen!

And the best way to keep changes like these coming is not with more new government mandates, but with fewer. Fewer regulations to tie down businesses and eat up profits so that mom and dad can go out there and cut the best deal they can. For the children.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A655-2001May8.html

This week's tax talk in Washington reveals two hard realities of policymaking.

First, there is no organized constituency for marginal tax rate cuts and, second, Congress will always couple one bad idea with another, the better to "offset" them.

Reality #1 is demonstrated by the tax plan offered by Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.). It takes President George W. Bush's modest reductions in marginal rates and chops them back even further.

Grassley-Baucus takes the top from 39.6 percent to 36 percent; short of the 33 percent Bush campaigned on. Other rates get similar trims, with the bulk of the tax changes coming in the form of credits and the write-offs that Congress loves so much.

The plan's $500-per-child tax credit would supposedly double by 2010, but even that isn't exactly accurate because it would also cease to be a tax credit. Instead, it morphs into a full-womb grant, as it would also go to those who already pay no income tax and little payroll tax thanks to the earned income tax credit.

The estate tax would stay, although estates up to $4 million in size would escape it by 2010.

In the thanks-for-nothing department comes a proposal to allow much as $5,000 in college tuition to be deducted from taxes. That guarantees that tuition will continue to go up by precisely the amount it is subsidized.

Pretty weak tuff for a tax cut bill. It gets even worse when the likelihood of a second tax bill is factored in.

Because the GOP does not have the gumption to stand up to Democratic bashing on the minimum wage, it is virtually certain that a plan to increase the wage from $5.15 to $6.15 will advance.

The Republican plan to make lemonade out of a minimum wage lemon will saddle the bill with plenty of tax breaks "for business." That includes goodies that would never advance on their own merits, such as accelerated depreciation for commercial real estate, or deductibility for long-term health care premiums.

Lobbyists for realtors and for insurance companies would very much like that. Lobbyists for lower tax rates for everyone couldn't be reached for comment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16854-2001May11.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23274-2001May13.html

Does this country need an "expert" definition of evil that will stand up in court?

A symposium at the American Psychiatric Association convention asked more than 120 psychiatrists to help create a depravity scale that could be used by the courts to judge criminals.

Aggravating factors are used to decide whether to impose harsher sentences, up to and including the death penalty.

The medical community is certainly being helpful in trying to study just what evil is, but there is no evidence the courts and their common-sense definitions need any help.

Juries and judges--absent a few memorable exceptions--do a pretty good job spotting evil and punishing it accordingly. Pretending that only experts have access to a good working definition of evil robs society at large of its own moral outrage.

But researchers into evil are finding interesting patterns.

Dr. Michael Stone of Columbia University noted that "the bulk of evil on a world scale is committed by ideologues and their followers.''

He added that wars and persecutions, from the Spanish Inquisition to the fighting in Bosnia, show people are capable of "bottomless cruelty to those outside the tribe, especially in times of hardship and hunger.''

Conclusion? Avoid hardship and hunger.

http://www.forensicpanel.com

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010511/hl/psychiatry_evil.html

For a long time booze regulators would not allow any mention of the kick a malt beverage might pack. Touting the alcohol level was irresponsible marketing, they said, a line also advanced by the anti-alcohol lobby. Regulators have eased their opposition, and are allowing sensible labels that let consumers know what they are buying.

But now some elements of the safety-first, -second, and -last brigade say that we need even bolder declarations of alcohol content. They contend that non-beer beers--those fruit-flavored malt abominations that now occupy a frightening chunk of cooler space--mask their alcohol content the better to appeal to the young.

"Many of those products have bright, flashy and hip packaging and labeling that attract teen-agers to the brands," said Rep. Eliot Engel ( D-N.Y.) in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission.

Engel and such allies as the Center for Science in the Public Interest want the FTC and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to end the "flashy" labels that look too much like non-alcoholic labels.

ATF officials say they already are sensitive to labels that downplay the alcohol content of the drinks. Or up play it. Or something.

http://www.samhsa.gov/index.html

http://www.charlotte.com/topnews/pub/alcoholpop.htm

"There's no sign of the state or any organized economy. There's no infrastructure, no newspapers, no radio. ... The first contact that these people--who have been chewing coca leaves as part of their culture for hundreds of years--have with the state is with fumigation planes, helicopters, contractors, and advisors telling them to destroy their crops. They don't understand why we are attacking them," Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, on a recent trip to Colombia.

http://nationaldefense.ndia.org/article.cfm?Id=488

A fifth-grader was taken from a St. Petersburg, Florida elementary school in handcuffs after a teacher found drawings he had made of weapons. The boy's school year is probably over and he faces mandatory attendance at another school next year. "There are certain things you don't draw," the school's principal explained.

http://www.sptimes.com/News/051101/TampaBay/Student_removed_from_.shtml

A whole junta's worth of Peruvian generals are facing criminal charges for corruption stemming from their involvement in the War on Drugs. Many were trained by and worked closely with U.S. drug warriors.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64001-2001May8.html

One study finds that some gays are able to change their sexual orientation through psychotherapy or religious counseling; another study says that isn't so. Sparks fly and oxen are gored.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1100-2001May8.html

The White House gets all snippy when a reporter asks if President Bush's admonitions to parents to speak to their kids about drugs extends to the president's own conversations--or lack thereof--with his daughters regarding alcohol.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23587-2001May14.html

The Scene! Check out Reason Editor-at-Large Virginia Postrel's frequently updated observations on current events and ideas. Visit The Scene at http://www.dynamist.com/scene.html

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