Fort Lauderdale News from Fort Lauderdale, Florida • Page 115

Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, Sunday, May 23, 1982 5G Tax breaks whinDinff ud a dish of social disaster JL J. WASHINGTON At a dinner in Seat tle a couple of weeks ago, a bank official David roder I Waehington Poet Writer Group vide a counterpoint in a reporter's notebook to the all-too-frequent tales of layoffs and bankruptcies. And they point to a risk that could make the recession itself seem relatively benign: an explosive increase in antagonism between the haves and the have-nots in this badly bent economy. Almost every place I have been this year, in the East, Midwest and West, local officials and observers have remarked on the extraordinary patience and fore-bearance of those who are suffering from the economic squeeze. Some polls show that even among those who have lost their jobs, there is a persistent hope that, in the long run, current economic policies will bring the country to a healthier condition.

But in the last few weeks as I have traveled from California to Connecticut, with many stops in between there have been more frequent signs of the tension that is building beneath the surface. For people like myself, who are lucky a quiet little tax break of their own. It is part of the first sharp edge of personal hostility toward President Reagan that I have heard since his election. The comments are scattered, but they are there, indicating that his long-sustained personal popularity may be wearing thin. But more important and more worrisome in its potential is the evidence that this prolonged and severe recession may be twisting the ties of trust and tolerance that hold communities together.

In Dubuque, one of the hardest-hit cities I have seen this year, the Wall Street Journal earlier this month reported on the stark contrasts; When a supermarket opened with 55 jobs, more than 1,400 people applied. But a local company developing computer programs for doctors' clinics had a first-quarter profit gain of 66 percent. There have been more layoffs in my own field journalism than at any time in the almost 30 years I have worked in it. But the JVeip York Times' advertising column reported the other day that advertising revenues are up 41 percent at Town Country Magazine, which has "repositioned recently as a service magazine for people with money," proving, the Times said, once again, the old tagline, "and the rich get richer." The Wall Street Journal headlined another story, "Games, Other Luxuries Sell Well As Slump Slows Sales of Durables." Anothei story reported that more than 600,000 workers are within 13 weeks of losing their unemployment benefits. Meantime, another tax cut approaches on July 1 According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the 31.7 million tax-filers making $15,000 a year or less will divide $2.9 billion in savings; the 162,000 making over $200,000 will split $3.6 billion.

The favoritism to the rich inherent in these flat-rate tax cuts was justified on the grounds that they would stimulate the economy and produce jobs. But since the program was put into place, economic differences and social tensions in America have increased and so has unemployment. That is more than an economic calamity; it is a recipe for social disaster. remarked that two major customers had been discussing the area's economic slump, which pushed unemployment in Washington state to 12.8 percent last month. The customers, she said, "were embarrassed to say it, but they had had a very good year." Her comments triggered a series of similar reports from those at the table.

Yachts were selling briskly, one man remarked. Another told of an investment counselor who had just signed off on plans for a $1.5 million house without a mortgage. Last week, on another trip, I found myself in conversation with a real-estate broker from Greenwich, Conn. "How is business?" I asked. "For houses between $200,000 and she said, "it's kind of slow.

People aren't cutting prices, but they're having to leave their houses on the market longer. For properties over $700,000, it's terrific." These are scattered anecdotes of no significance in themselves. But they pro and on big Items like cars and household furnishings real bargains are available. Meantime, our taxes are being reduced and bankers and brokers compete in offering high interest rates for our tax-deductible retirement savings accounts. But there is a sense of unease if not guilt in our conversations, as with the bank customers who felt "embarrassed" to admit they had had such a good year.

And increasingly, I sense, those who have been run onto the rocks in this economy are getting angry at those who are prospering That Is part of the drumbeat of derision heard everywhere for the members of Congress who last year voted themselves enough to have good-paying jobs with companies that are prospering, this really has been an, easy year. Inflation is down GeorgleAnn eyer Art uchwald Univerael Syndicate Lot Angeles Timee Syndicate The practical approach jtr is working for Seaga Clinton keeps it down to earth in Arkansas comeback attempt fit lack crmond lules Acrimony payments are separation fees THE LATEST CENSUS has revealed there are still more people who are married than there are divorced. The only surprise was how many people are still married, but are not living together. I know one named Marylou. She is a friend, and she told me at lunch the other day that she and Archie had been separated for seven years, but had never been divorced.

"How come?" "Because if he gets a divorce he won't have any excuse not to marry the floozie he's living with." "Do you mean to tell me Archie is using you to protect himself from having to marry somebody else?" "That is exactly what he's doing. I heard from friends that he keeps telling everyone that I won't give him a divorce. He portrays me as some kind of vengeful ogre who refuses to give him his freedom." "And he doesn't pay you for that?" "Pay me?" "Of course. He's using you so he doesn't have to make another permanent commitment, and you should be compensated for it." "How do I do that?" "You have to ask for Acrimony." "Is there such a thing?" "Well, the courts don't recognize it, but that doesn't mean you can't ask for it. I should think you would be entitled to $1,500 a month from Archie in Acrimony payments, as long as you stay married to him.

That's a cheap price for him to save himself from another marriage." "How do I get him to pay it?" "You go to him and say 'Archie, unless you pay me Acrimony I'm going to tell your girlfriend I'm willing to get a divorce any time you want "He'll blow his top," Marylou said. "Let him. But when he cools down he'll realize it's cheaper to pay you than to get a divorce and marry somebody else. Don't you see where-Archie is coming from now? He has the best of both worlds. I'll bet you every time he tells his girl what an obstinate dragon lady you really are, he's laughing all the way to the bed." "Do you think $1,500 is enough?" "You could make a deal with him.

For $1,500 you'll just keep silent. But if Archie wants insurance, you could ask for $2,000 a month, in which case you'll promise to go around and tell everyone that you'll only give Archie a divorce if you want to get married again. And if he wants to pay the full Acrimony fee of $2,500, you could announce you were converting to Catholicism and Archie could only get a divorce over your dead body." "He'll accuse me of blackmailing him." "It's not blackmail. It's marital support. If he wants to keep you as a wife for his own nefarious purposes, he has to support you as a wife." "Suppose he misses an Acrimony payment?" "Then you put out the word that you are going to start divorce proceedings.

If he really doesn't want to get married again he'll beg, borrow or steal the money to keep you from going through with your threat." "Do you know anybody who is collecting Acrimony now?" "I know at least half a dozen women. They were all treated as doormats until they asked for Acrimony. One lady I know gets $3,000 a month, and all she has to do is send her husband a registered letter everv 30 duvs tplline him that nnrW nn itcover Chicago Tribuoo-New York Newa Syndicate KINGSTON, Jamaica When you ask Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga the difference between his charismatic predecessor Michael Manley, who nearly succeeded in destroying the country, and his own technocratic regime, he says some things very much worth listening to. "Manley starts with a textbook ideology and tries to bend the country to that," Seaga said, sitting in his lovely office in the prime minister's mansion. "I start with what makes the people tick, with what motivates them self-improvement, rewards.

Then I ask, how can you build that into an economic system? You see what they can do for themselves and their own, and you try to help them achieve their higher goals. "I am traveling along the route that Jamaicans themselves feel and want to do, and I'm simply trying to enable them to do better, while regulating enough to see that nobody runs away with the cake in the meantime. This, instead of starting with a textbook case and trying to make the society bend." He paused. "It won't bend, anyway." In those simple but telling words, you have outlined in stark contrast the two basic ideologies that today are competing in the Caribbean. Manley was the lean, handsome, aristocratic master orator who loved to posture in the international corridors of modish Marxism.

That he nearly destroyed his country with infantile economic management still doesn't faze him. He was, he once said in one of his moments of ideological extravagance, going to "go to the mountaintop" with Fidel Castro. Unfortunately for the economy, he was not talking about plowing crops up there. Seaga is another case. It is popular to call this attractive man and fine speaker President Reagan's special type of Caribbean leader popular to consider him a rightist technocrat who is putting Jamaica's house in order again, a quintessential patient plower of valleys.

But Seaga not only has done reasonably well with the country's economy this first crucial year and a half, he is showing himself to be a leader quite different than expected. For one thing, while Manley was a kind of fuzzy Marxist who basically told the people what to do, Seaga cares about and listens to the people. His programs are built around them, not done for them in his name and for his grandiosity. Second, this dark-haired man with the finely etched nose and the sober manner turns out to be not really very rightist at all. "We are a mixture of approaches," he said of his party.

"Economically, we would be closer to your Republican Party. Our social approach is nearer your Democratic Party view. We mix the two." But the plower again he always insists that you first have to pay for any program. With all the attention on "saving" Jamaica from Marxism and economic collapse, what many people have not perhaps seen in Seaga is the very cultured personal man. He knows much more about Jamaican cultures than Manley did; he did anthropological research in the slums when younger.

Asked what has been easiest and hardest about this difficult 18 months in office, he says it's been the economy: "We turned around the economy faster than I thought, but only turned around. What has been more difficult has been to cope with the continued cutbacks in the bauxite industry." The larger and quintessentially ideological question that Seaga poses, in black-and-white contrast to Manley, is: Should a leader speak for the people or let them speak for themselves? Seaga is doing many other countries, particularly those in the Caribbean, a favor. Because of Jamaica's special experience with near-Marxism, he has had to give new contours to workable democracy here. LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Hillary Clinton Is known here these days as Hillary Clinton.

That would be unremarkable enough if it were not for the fact that two years ago she used her maiden name in both her private life and her professional career as a lawyer. But that was before her husband, then Gov. Bill Clinton, was defeated in one of 1980's most surprising upsets. Clinton and other Democrats here believe he lost in large measure because Arkansas voters felt he had gone uptown on them that is, put too much distance between himself and his constituents in various ways, many of them trivial, A married woman using her maiden name is still not the usual thing here. "There was a general feeling," Bill Clinton says today, "that I was out of touch with people.

They felt I was not one of them anymore." In striving for a comeback, Clinton has not made the same mistake. "If I win," he says, "it Is because of the efforts I have made to go back and convince the people that I am a native son who cares about them which I am." By most measures, that has been a successful effort. Clinton is the heavy favorite to win the Democratic gubernatorial primary next Tuesday, perhaps big enough to avoid a runoff June 8. And he is at least a nominal favorite to defeat Republican Gov. Frank White in the Nov.

2 general election. There was, to be sure, a lot more involved in Clinton's defeat than the notion that the 34-year-old governor had gotten too big for his britches. The Ronald Reagan tide ran strongly across Arkansas. Clinton was closely identified with Jimmy Carter, which became a serious burden for him after Carter reversed a previous commitment early in 1980 and announced he was sending more Cuban refugees to northwest Arkansas. Among other things, this made Clinton's speech on national television at the Democratic National Convention a subject of derision rather than home-state pride.

"That speech at the national convention was devastating for me," Clinton says now. Longtime political allies chastised him for even appearing on the same platform as Jimmy Carter. An issue at home crystallized the resentment. Clinton had approved increases in automobile license and title transfer fees. The increases were minimal $12 a year on the average for license plates.

But, says one Democratic activist here, "it just convinced people that Bill wasn't listening to them." The "car-tag issue" was serious enough so that even before he declared his candidacy this year, Clinton ran a television commercial in which he told the voters that "I'll have to admit sometimes I did lose the forest for the trees. "For example, you criticized me for raising the car license and title transfer fees. When I became governor our roads were in terrible shape and I did support an increase in those fees, but it was a mistake because so many of you were hurt by it and I'm really sorry for that." This year the cost of car tags and the number of Cuban refugees are the least of Arkansas' problems. Unemployment runs consistently above the national average, reaching 20 to 25 percent in some counties. Interest rates are hurting farmers and small businessmen.

The depression in the home-building industry is striking at the heart of the timber industry that employs 40,000 workers in Arkansas. There is obvious concern about Social Security in a state in which 14 percent of the people are over 65, a proportion second only to that in Florida. "This state has its back to the wall," says Bill Clinton. As a result, Clinton has focused his campaign on the need to provide for jobs and attract business. So far, it seems to be working.

Public polls here give Clinton about 55 percent of primary voters, far ahead of former Rep. Jim Guy Tucker with about 25 percent and former Lt. Gov. Joe Purcell with 10 to 15 percent. Clinton's own surveys show him under 50 percent but with an undecided of about 17 percent that gives him a realistic potential for avoiding a runoff.

Surveys made for both parties here show Clinton leading White in the general election campaign. If Clinton makes it, he can expect another round of stories about the boy wonder of Arkansas politics with a future that seems to have no limits. And he can expect those Invitations to appear on network television and perhaps even to address another Democratic National Convention. But this time Bill Clinton has learned one of the hard lessons of American politics. Never take the home folks for granted.

They are the ones who put you there. conditions will she grant him a divorce. "The only thing you have to be careful of is when you get a visit from the 'other woman' and she begs you to give your husband up. I know one wife who gave in, and instead of getting $2,000 a month in Acrimony, she was only awarded $750 a month in alimony, and since her husband had to marry the other woman he claims he can't even afford that." It's us against theni, and Rostenkowski is not us WASHINGTON The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by hostile Indians who are closina in for the kill. It looks John often United Feature Syndicate telescope.

The deficit is large not because taxes are too low but because federal spending is out of control! If Rostenkowski and his fellow Demo-crats are serious about wanting to de-' crease the size of the federal deficit and there is no evidence they are they should be looking for ways to slash the federal budget, not ways to increase our taxes. High taxes got us in the messwe're in, and higher taxes will only make the mess worse. A final thought: When a congressman from the Eighth District of Illinois, who represents 429,120 citizens, uses the word "we" to mean the federal government and not the best interests of his constituents, it's time for his people to have a long, heart-to-heart talk with their man in ue Service complaining about this new law. A report in The Wall Street Journal says: "Newspaper people say they can't recall an Issue in th-past decade that has stirred such a steady outpouring of letters and phone calls." Thirdly, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Milton Friedman says of the Reagan tax cuts: "What tax cuts? The so-called tax cuts simply prevent an un-legislated tax Increase as a result of inflation, or offset the legislated increase In social security taxes." Rostenkowski says that in order to reduce the deficit revenues "must be raised somehow" and thus the '83 tax cut must be canceled.

But the congressman is looking through the wrong end of the You and I can't afford having more of our own hard-earned money to spend next year? Well, no this isn't what Rostenkowski means when be says "we." What the congressman means when he says "we" is the federal government, not you and me. Because of what he calls "the hemorrhage in the economy" and "huge budget deficits," Rostenkowski believes the federal government can't afford our tax cut. Now, there are several fascinating and outrageous things about the congressman's position: First, as regards last year's tax bill, Rostenkowski was the one who started the so-called "bidding war," which dirtied up the president's "clean" tax legislation. forced special tax breaks for the oil 1. dustry and refundable tax-credit subsidii for certain favored corporations.

Arid be like curtains for the masked man and his faithful Indian companion. The Lone Ranger speaks: "Well, Tonto, it looks like we've had it." Tonto turns slowly, a slight smile parting his lips, and he replies: "What do you mean "we," white man?" I thought about this old joke as I pondered a recent interview of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in US- News and World Report magazine. In this interview, Rostenkowski is asked why he is so strongly in favor of repealing President Reagan's 1983 tax cut. He says: "Because we can't afford it.

I see it as repealing something that the taxpayers have never enjoyed. "We" can't afford a tax cut in 1983? also sponsored a SO percent cut in corporate tax rates. Secondly, in the House, Rostenkowski was one of those wno helped sneak though an amendment that allows members of Congress to take tax deductions of up to $19,000 or more an-nually for their Washington living expenses. More than 10,000 letters of protest have been received by the Internal Washington. r.

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