Wisconsin State Journal from Madison, Wisconsin • 6

A big crack in the system Wisconsin State Journal Wednesday, July 14, 1976, Section 1, Page 6 Either way, you pay Not quite. State Health and Social Services Dept. officials said that since the cost-of-living increase went into effect, about 3,500 persons last month became ineligible for Supplemental Security Income payments and the medical cards. There is a federal program designed to take care of things like this, administered at the county level, but that program operates on a sliding scale and the formulas mean that Barbara Van Hagen will have to come up with the first $120 every six months to qualify for medical assistance to the needy. When you have two sick kids and are cashing checks for only $435 every month, $240 a year is no small amount.

Barbara Van Hagen and the others who wound up with a net loss after their cost-of-living increase owe the people in Washington a great big thank you for nothing. The big, rich U.S. of A. takes care of its own most of its own. Take a look at the federal, state and government organizational charts and you will find squares and circles and bureaus and programs to take care of just about every kind of needy person imaginable.

Even college students are eligible for food stamps. Occasionally, however, Washington, D.C. tries too hard to make everyone happy and things go wrong. A lot of people wind up in the cracks between the boxes and circles. Take the case of Barbara Van Hagen of Oregon.

She is epileptic. She is arthritic. She needs a lot of drugs every month. "It isn't a matter of taking sleeping pills," she said. "If I don't take these drugs, I'll die." She also has two children who are not healthy.

They need special, prescription eye glasses and prescription shoes The legal question of death running the city government is reflected in salaries and other compensation paid employes. To effectively cut government spending, the payroll has to be cut. No one wants wholesale layoffs or dismissals, but a moderate reduction in personnel through attrition is not unreasonable in an economic period where everyone must tighten belts. This was envisioned in the so-called "job freeze" included in the current budget at the request of Aid. Michael Sack, 13th Dist.

The idea was that there must be at least a few city positions that could be eliminated. Good idea. But during the six-month freeze there were departmental requests to fill 74 vacancies and 71 were approved with Soglin's acquiescence. The three not approved included a request for a new position, one to make a part-time position full-time and another to temporarily replace an employe on leave. Sack called the freeze a "bomb." If Soglin and his administration were really serious about holding the line on taxes, they had a golden opportunity before those vacancies were filled.

The job freeze fiasco is a good example of government's seeming inability to reduce itself regardless of the rationale involved in such a reduction. Talking about keeping a steady tax rate is merely an academic exercise as long as government spending increases, bolstered by increased assessments. It boils down to this: City government is spending more, it isn't increasing productivity and we are all paying for it, one way or another. Mayor Paul Soglin has announced that he will try to submit a no-mill rate-increase budget to the City Council. But in the next breath he conceded Chat property tax assessments will iwrease.

This year's assessments increased an average of 8 percent. Jt makes little difference to the property taxpayer if his tax rate is ijicreased or his assessment is iflt'reased. It all boils down to more property tax money to pay for city services. There's nothing new about politicians talking about holding down the tax rate (Jut of one side of their mouths and raising assessments out of the other. Consumer Reports, in an article, "Property Taxes: Why They're So High," said: "Reassessment has become a prime tool local governments use to increase neome from property taxes.

''With voters across the country rebelling at the cost of municipal services, many localities find it politically difficult to raise the tax rate the of tax dollars a homeowner pays for each $1,000 of assessed valua-' tion. But an assessor can accomplish the same end by reappraising property so that the existing rate is applied to a higher base." If Soglin really wants to make the taxpayers happy, he should submit a budget with a reduced tax rate to compensate for the assessment increase. That would be holding the line. No doubt, government is affected by 'inflation the same as any other enterprise but it has shown a marked reluctance to cut back on anything. About 75 percent of the expense of designed for persons in her situation.

She applied for this assistance and was granted it. She got a few extra dollars in increased aid but more important all important she received a medical card which entitled her to free prescription drugs. That's no small item when one is laying down $60 to $75 per month at the drug store. You don't live very well under a setup like that but you can keep body and soul together. Then, Washington tried to help a little more.

The Social Security system declared a cost-of-living increase for Social Security recipients. This amounted to about $12 more per month for her just enough to make her ineligible for Supplemental Security Income and the medical card. The cost of living increase resulted in a net loss for her of about $50 a month. An isolated example? manner. In an attempt to circumvent that decision, numerous states made death a mandatory punishment for murder and other crimes.

Holding such statutes that provided standards and procedures by which judges and juries may determine in individual cases whether death is warranted. But standards and procedures are not infallible or even always fair and impartial and what the court appears to have done in practice is to put the question of death on a case-by-case basis, in which the "character" of the defendant may be taken into account. All experience shows that this is bound to result in precisely the kind of unacceptable sentencing supposedly banned in 1972. To take only one example, the convicted murderer capable of hiring a good lawyer and of demonstrating previous good standing in the community will not oftern get the death penalty, however heinous his crime while the poor and vagrant, as has always been the case, will be the summer without yet doing anything about raising campaign money, or, as he suggested, that he has actually returned some contributions offered because he had not yet made a decision about the extent of the campaign budget that would be required? Or was he saying, quite out of character, that he is so sure' of himself that he can quickly raise a bundle for a standard campaign effort later in the season if that appears desirable? The Proxmire style has always fascinated while sometimes it also repels Prisons: New view By Tom Wicker (c) N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK The Eighth Amendment prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment" but it does not say what is cruel and what is unusual.

Honorable men may differ, as the justices of the Supreme Court recently did, on the question whether the execution of murderers is either cruel or unusual or both. After long deliberation, a court majority held that the death penalty, though "an extreme sanction," is not "invariably disproportionate to the crime" of murder and not "without justification" as the punishment. Both are subjective value judgments disputed by others, but on that reasoning the court ruled that capital punishment in "not unconstitutionally severe." In the view of one long opposed to the death penalty, it is this necessary subjectivity that most notably flaws the decision. The decision was limited to the question of death as a penalty for murder. Since even on that narrow issue the court was divided Justices Brennan and Marshall holding capital punishment unconstitutional in any circumstancesthe possibility exists that subsequent cases may rule out death as a penalty for such crimes as arson, rape and first-degree burglary.

The majority opinion also brushed aside as inconclusive the often-propounded argument that the death penalty is a deterrent to potential murderers. It might or might not be a deterrent, the justices said, depending on the nature of the crime, but the evidence was insufficient to establish deterrence as a constitutionally perl missible reason for putting offenders to death. That judgment left only one ground, the court said, for imposing the death penalty retribution, "the expression of society's moral outrage at particularly offensive conduct," a function "unappealing to many" but necessary, in the court's view, "in an ordered society" of laws rather than vigilan-tism. If retribution is the only constitu By James D. Selk which have to be re-prescribed frequently.

They are also hyperactive and need medication. She is clearly unemployable and one would think a prime case for public assistance. And she is getting it. She was scraping by on $410 a month in Social Security payments when she found out about the Supplemental Security Income program, a program tional reason for maintaining the death penalty, the usual arguments of those favoring it have been significantly narrowed, and the possibility remains that this limited justification may not long sustain the ugly business of executions in modern times. Most significantly, it seems to me, the court ruled by five to four that laws making death a mandatory punishment for murder did not meet its test of constitutionality.

Instead of giving juries and judges standards and procedures by which to decide whether or not to impose a death penalty, the court ruled, mandatory laws removed all discretion and reduced everyone convicted of a given crime to "a faceless, undifferentiated mass to be subjected to the blind infliction of the penalty of death." But is not justice, in fact, supposed to be blind? In a 1972 decision, the court held the death penalty as then administered unconstitutional because it was imposed on some offenders, but not on others, in an arbitrary and capricious IT TO LOOK UKE I'M PURSUING YOU QJMV. diligence than almost any other Wisconsin representative in Washington, he does it in his own peculiarly solitary style. Weekend after weekend, year after year, he plods the Main Streets of Wisconsin alone. His own calculations of the numbers of hands he has grasped and the miles he has walked tend to leave the listener incredulous. There is no denying that his peer in that grueling work has not yet been identified.

This writer welcomed Proxmire to the state Capitol when he won an election to an Assembly seat more than a quarter century ago. I was surprised and perhaps mildly envious to observe his trim and handsome fitness. One wonders, indeed, if there may not be some small twinge of envy in the electorate aged 60 and- above as he offers his firm handshake in a hundred hamlets and cities later in the summer and in the fall. The senator's physical vigor and utter devotion to his career in politics have doubtless never been matched in this state, although Wisconsin has produced some hearty specimens of the political art over the generations. His unflappable demeanor must also be privately envied by colleagues and rivals.

Yet occasionally the listener wonders. Is it conceivable that this utter realist permitted the calendar to run to mid wok.k MUCH IV ail most frequent victims. "Standards and procedures" make that kind of result no less repugnant. A dissenting opinion by Justice White made the essential point, in quoting an earlier case. "To identify before the fact those characteristics of criminal homicides and their perpetrators which call for the death and to express those characteristics in language which can be fairly understood and applied by the sentencing authority, appear to be tasks which are beyond present human ability." The dissenters were arguing for the constitutionality of mandatory death penalties for everyone convicted of a certain crime.

To others, the palpable inability of fallible human beings to determine fairly who deserves death and who deserves life, no matter what "standards" the same fallible humans might erect to guide their decisions, is reason enough to leave the question of death where it properly belongs out of human hands. contemporaries in politics as well as those on the sidelines who observe the men on the public stage. Perhaps it is appropriate that he occupies the seat of others who deviated from the accepted of their times, including the two La Follettes and Joe McCarthy, whose death brought Proxmire his last chance for political place 19 years ago. Yet there is also a certain charm, as with an almost boyish smile he denigrates a vice-presidential nomination and asserts that he has the best of all possible jobs and careers. a larger capacity for enjoying sadness.

"You can't argue with success" is a foolish, slogan because if you're tempted to argue with it, it's not a self-evident success. For every one person who reads a book in order to think, a dozen read in order to avoid thinking (else why would Agatha Christie be the most popular author of our there is obviously an alcoholism of the mind just as there is of the body. Know ledge of probability theory has never inhibited any statistician from complaining that he holds "poor cards" at bridge. WisconsinlState Journal An Independent lee Newspoper J. Martin Wolmon Publisher Robert H.

Spiegel Editor William C. Robbins Executive Editor William Brissee Associate Editor Helen Matheson Asst. Man. Editor Clifford C. Behnke City Editor Joseph'Capossela News Editor Steven t.

Hopkins State Editor Glenn Miller Sports Editor Donald Davies Sunday Editor Robert Bjorklund Farm Editor Edwin tein Photography Director Proxmire runs casually, confidently The author of a newly published book, Crime and Punishment: A Radical takes an interesting if unorthodox view of the rehabilitation of prisoners: "The failure of planned and organized rehabilitation doesn't mean prisons I serve no purpose. Convicts are not all as saintly as Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean. Some of them deserve to be in prison, but for our good and not for their own good. It is folly to expect any significant numbers of prisoners to come out better I or less dangerous than they went in. "With this exception, prisoners are older when they get out than when they in.

And age makes a big difference. The propensity to commit crimes declines precipitously with ma-, turity. Whether the criminal ages inside a prison cell or at liberty, after the 'Self determination' The people of South Vietnam are now enduring the benefits of "self deter-; Communist-style, as so long and earnestly (and sometimes violently) urged and advocated by poli- tical liberals and leftwingers the world ov er; and as advocated and condoned by the government of Canada; and with the silent acquiescence of the government of the United States. Now that Canadian government, following that ingrained liberal tactic of politicizing every institution, from the Christian Church on down, seeks to i politicize even further the Olympic Games and to use this institution as a device to "self determine" the people of Taiwan into the care and custody of Red China, without regard to "the wishes of the citizens of Taiwan. Such a presumptive act flow naturally from the moral vacuum which supports and con-', dones the policies and actions of the Cuban, Soviet, and Red Chinese oppressors, while at the same time condemning South Africa and Chile the moral vacuum which insists that there is and can be only one China and i Taiwan is irrevocably part of it, while i at the same time supporting the separatist demands of the Spanish Basques.

Nations and their leaders, who acknowledge no higher moral authority than the philosophy of secular humanism, can ultimately only set the stage for chaos and anarchy. L. C. Johnson, Oregon. County building An editorial in the U.S.

News and World Report states that "silence" on the part of the average citizen is in great part responsible for the decay of honesty in government, business and a decline-in character of the general population. It is in this vein which I feel called to speak out regarding our county government and its wasting of funds. -I refer to the location of the County Today's passage of years he is less dangerous. Aggregating the figures for crimes included in the FBI's crime index murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and auto theft 84 percent of all arrests involve people 29 or younger. Persons 34 or younger account for 89.1 percent of all arrests for these crimes "By holding people in prison until they are in their thirties, then, some pe6ple are rehabilitated.

But not by prisons. They are rehabilitated by getting older "Some people who have committed very serious crimes of violence should be given incapacitating sentences to protect everyone else The author? Aryeh Neier, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Dept. of Social Services and proposed move of the Developmental Disabilities Board to that facility. As a TB sanitorium it was inadequate; as an office building it is inadequate and located so that those who use its services can't get there.

The idea of spending a huge sum to build an outside elevator is the last straw. The sale of that property would provide funds to purchase Wolff Kubly or Sears buildings, would place services in an accessible location to buses and have no architectural barriers for those who use them. Then all these agencies would be under one roof and close to hospitals, the university for student assistance, Dane. County Mental Health and its programs and transportation. Carol McKy, Madison.

Administrator pay I note with interest your article that yet another of Madison's top school administrators has resigned his position here for a better paying one elsewhere. It should be quite obvious to our board of Education that our school administrators are underpaid in comparison to other similar sized systems around the country. If quality education is to be maintained in Madison, we cannot afford to continue to be reluctant to pay our administrators top dollars. George Schmidt, Madison. Israel's action I wt)uld like to comment on Israel's daring rescue of the hostages.

The whole world should be proud of Israel's prompt action, which no doubt saved a good many innocent lives. As far as repercussions in the United Nations is concerned, this rescue should alert the UN to the need of strong international laws to control hijacking. Earl M. Leland, Madison. Some thoughts at large By John Wyngaard With a casualness and confidence that would be the envy of any professional politician, Sen.

William Proxmire came home the other day to tell his constituents what everybody knew. He is running for re-election to the United States Senate that he unblushingly loves, even to the extent that he would scorn a nomination for the vice-presidency in the unlikely event that it was offered to him. He calmly relates what some listeners at the press conference find difficult to believe that he has not yet begun to collect a campaign fund. If he feels some solicitation is required, he will hold the total down to what any professional political estimate in these times would be a modest sum. It depends, he explained, on what the Republican organization and its donors do for the putative Republican nominee, Stanley York.

He continues with quite respectful remarks about the younger Republican who is taking on the task of challenger that four others have undertaken during the last 18 years with distinctly indifferent consequences. A Proxmire news conference is a comparative rarity. Although he cultivates his constituency between elections with more Capitol Games By Sydney Harris Watching the aniics of the current crop of presidential candidates reminds me of the late Adlai Stevenson's melancholy remark on that subject, to the effect that "by the time you reach the point that you can be nominated for the presidency, you are no longer worthy to hold that position." However diverse their talents, temperaments and differences, all great achievers have one trait in common: they never bother to look around and compare themselves with other men, but are content to run their own race on their own terms. Some people would be really miserable if they weren't endowed with By James Stevenson PLKTFOR-M FIGHTS--A FlRsr-BAW-OT victory Ho PR.o&ts, TM IrOKIVCfUTIOfJ IS -fao 1976 lot Angeles Time.