In the Public Interest

When the news broke last month that the Senate Finance Committee had agreed, by a vote of twenty to nothing, on a tax reform bill with a maximum personal income tax bracket of 27%, among other dramatic changes, editorialists erupted with awe and praise. The media relied for almost three weeks on a 30-page summary…

It took a high school student asking President Reagan a question about hunger in America at a White House meeting to put the subject on page one. Mr. Reagan replied: “I don’t believe that there is anyone going hungry in America simply by reason of denial or lack of ability to feed them; it is…

There is an interesting ideology maturing in Reagan’s Washington these days. It is best called “corporatism.” Here is an example. For years Ronald Reagan would speak against mandatory seat belt use laws and mandatory motorcycle helmet use laws. Long before he was president he would give these proposals as prime examples of a meddling Big…

Is this country serious about preventing cancer? Americans who stop smoking are serious. So are mothers and fathers pushing for school containment of asbestos that is exposing their children to risks of cancer later in life. So too are community groups fighting toxic dumps and emissions. But what about our national government and its helmsman,…

Now that David Stockman, Reagan’s former duplicitous budget director, is cashing his $2 1/2 million in royalties for his book: The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed, his critics are having a field day deploring his disloyalty to Reagan. Why, they demand, did Stockman wait until he left office and sign a book…

The response to the Soviet atomic power plant accident by U.S. government and nuclear industry officials has been curiously self-righteous. We are told that Soviet safeguards for nuclear plants are weaker than those applying to the 100 licensed nuclear plants in the U.S. Then we learn that five plants used for producing weapons grade material…

About ten years ego physicist Alvin Weinberg, former director of the Oakridge National Laboratory told me that no one will really know how dangerous a nuclear power plant could be until a meltdown occurs. The disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, at this writing, may come closer to giving Dr. Weinberg…

Two recent reports about upper-class salaries and bonuses illustrate the sharper stratification between economic classes in our country — between those who produce and those who manipulate. The top five General Motors executives each received over one million dollars in salary and bonuses for the year 1985. These astronomical payments come at a time when…

What is the Reagan government waiting for — one major mid-air collision — before coming to its senses and either upgrading the air traffic controller system and staff or reducing the density of air traffic? Since Mr. Reagan fired the illegally striking air traffic controllers in 1981, he has refused to reinstate three or four…

Rarely have I ever observed a more successful statistical hoax perpetuated on most electronic: and print media than that being accomplished almost daily by Jury Verdict Research (JVR) of Solon, Ohio a firm that purports to collect samples of average jury verdicts in the malpractice and product defect areas. During the rising media attention to…