unding for Education is the top concern of the New Hampshire legislator currently.

In December of ’97, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ordered the legislature to find some way to pay for education other than local property taxes. This decision is known as Claremont two; the first Claremont decision came in ’93 when the High Court ruled that the state had an obligation to provide an adequate education for its children.

Since Claremont 2, the state has developed a state-wide property tax that is really just a local property tax that the state takes from localities and redistributes across the state. The problem with this is that property taxes are regressive (the poorest taxpayers in New Hampshire pay the highest percentage of their income in taxes), and were already too high to begin with. Another solution is needed, but what is it? An income tax? Sales tax? State gambling?

The Republicans running for governor have an ostensibly better idea, a constitutional amendment that says New Hampshire does not have to adequately educate our children. To be fair, this does not mean that the three GOP candidates do not want to educate children; it just means they do not think the court should be involved. This constitutional amendment could not come into existence until at least 2005 (it needs to pass the legislature and then be approved by the voters). However, and until then, the state, like all other states, because of the current recession, would run a deficit.

To summarize, New Hampshire has two options: raise more money or eliminate the need to spend the money in the first place by overturning the courts’ decision with the GOP amendment. But since the amendment cannot happen immediately, the state needs to somehow raise money in the next three years. Impossible?

“Not if you increase the statewide property tax to fund the education trust fund,” Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Keough told the Concord Monitor.. Oops.

Telling voters in New Hampshire that you are going to raise their property taxes is like telling voters in Texas that you are going to confiscate their guns and sell them to Communist China to help finance a Gay Pride Parade in Dallas. Property taxes are already too high, opponents argue, and regressive to boot. It is not surprising that they are unpopular, and raising them further, even temporarily, as Keough would do, would be a very bad idea politically.

All this is to say that Bruce Keough does not have a good chance of winning. Which is a shame, because at least Keough was being temporarily intellectually honest. That is more than one can say for his GOP Primary opponents.

First, there is Gordon Humphrey, who used to be a US Senator, much like John Ashcroft. The difference is that instead of appointing Humphrey Attorney General, George Bush shunned him at a UNH rally in retaliation for Gordon’s support of John McCain in 2000. The message was clear: Don’t Mess with Dubya. This has nothing to do with education funding in New Hampshire, but it is interesting to note that the Bush family operates like a clandestine mafia outfit. At any rate, Humphrey’s plan for school funding is as simple as it is silly. The government, he says, needs to “pinch pennies until they spit nickels.” ‘They,’ meaning the pennies. Maybe if New Hampshire is frugal enough, maybe there will be enough nickels to buy every student in New Hampshire a pack of Juicy Fruit.

Then there is Craig Benson, who was not a US Senator, or Congressman, or State Senator, or dogcatcher; well, you get the picture. He did used to be wealthier than he is now, which is what happens when you spend a lot of money on your own gubernatorial campaign. Maybe he should hire Gordon Humphrey to pinch pennies.

His plan for school funding is absolutely devoid of substance, although his website does claim that it “meets the challenges of the 21st century.” Like his GOP opponents, he is against a sales or income tax, and he wants a constitutional amendment. Like Humphrey, he wants to cap property taxes based on income, which is commendable. Like Humphrey, he is avoiding the real issues.

Now, I have bashed Humphrey and Benson quite a bit, and maybe that is not fair. Actually, both say they want to target funding for districts that need it, which is a good decision. And, as I mentioned previously, the property tax caps are also a good way to prevent people from being taxed out of their homes.

The problem is that their plans are simply not feasible, because they are aimed at garnering votes more than anything else. People like to hear that the Governor wants to lower their taxes without cutting services. The Republicans claim that capping the money spent on education at $905 million a year and redirecting funds will solve the crisis. They say that cutting the property tax will have a negligible effect. They argue that the problem is the influence that the rich towns have in the legislature, which doles them out as much money as is given poorer towns like Claremont.

Sounds good, right? Essentially, it is a very liberal argument; the rich buying influence at the expense of the poor. Assuming that this is true, and that $900 million is enough (the lawyer for the plaintiffs of the Claremont case says that studies have shown that the actual amount needed is $1.2 billion), the Republican plans still do not make sense.

For Gordon Humphrey’s plan to work, for example, we would have to hope that:

-$900 million is actually an accurate number to pay for our schools.

-Those rich towns suddenly decide not to lobby legislators in Concord.

-Property tax cuts somehow do not equal a decrease in state revenues.

-We ignore the fact that state employees are already underpaid and that increased frugality in Concord is possible only by cutting funding elsewhere or not increasing it where it is desperately needed.

Then again, the Patriots won the Super Bowl, so I suppose anything is possible. What is unfortunate is that the Republicans seem unwilling to deal with the New Hampshire voters with any intellectual honesty. Their ideas are either impractical or impossible, either because the numbers do not work or because implementation would require something that just is not going to come to be (such as the rich towns deciding not to lobby for education funding from the State Legislature, which is run by Republicans, by the way).

In an editorial in the Manchester Union-Leader, former New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Joseph O’Keefe argues that all campaign plans are “essentially dishonest”:

“They are either empty campaign promises (usually a curious combination of lower taxes plus more government services) or simple restatements of the same old positions (income tax, gambling, constitutional amendment) that have failed to yield a majority consensus. Candidates who offer such plans either (1) know they are simply campaign ploys and stand little chance of being enacted into law, or (2) misunderstand the nature of electoral mandates. Voters will not choose a “plan” this November; they will choose a governor. Gubernatorial candidates who think voters are familiar with the painstaking details of their grandiose plans suffer from a bad case of, well, grandiosity.”

At this risk of being grandiose, here are some truths that are easily overlooked by fancy campaign promises.

First, it does not really matter whether or not the Supreme Court rules that we adequately fund our children’s education, because it needs to be done no matter what. Overturning the court’s decision solves nothing, and moral decency cannot be ignored is not a commendable goal. A constitutional amendment overturning Claremont is the equivalent of cutting prison costs by legalizing armed robbery. It brings twisted meaning to the term “supply-side.”

Second, opponents of the current tax system have some good points. The p
oorest 20% of New Hampshire pays the highest percentage of their income in taxes, and the trend continues all the way to the top, where the richest 1% carries the lowest burden. Humphrey wants to cap property taxes at 10% of personal income, which would help out the poorest fifth of the state, which currently pay 10.8%. Yet the next bracket up still pays only 8%. Such a cap would be nothing more than a Band-Aid on a giant flesh wound of inequity.

Third, a sales tax, like other solutions, is a controversial idea. New Hampshire thrives on citizens from Vermont and Massachusetts streaming across the border to shop. Which means the burden of taxation might fall on citizens of those states, which would be good, but they would stop coming, which would be bad. Fourth, one of the greatest problems in school funding is that poor towns do not support bond measures because they are already overburdened with property taxes. Eliminate this problem, and perhaps we might pinch a few pennies and spit a few nickels on the local level.

The most odious argument coming from the GOP candidates, however, is that a constitutional amendment would be the only way to preserve the “New Hampshire Advantage,” in other words the lack of a sales or income tax and yet being surrounded by states that do. Otherwise, New Hampshire would be just like Maine, Vermont, or (gasp) Massachusetts! The argument that a discussion on an income or sales tax cannot happen because that is not the New Hampshire Way completely ignores the discussion of what is best for NH citizens, taxpayers, and school children. Sometimes, it seems as though the state motto should actually be Live Stubborn or Die. But state mottos, like campaign promises, are usually not an accurate representation of reality.

ragically, many Americans know very little about the history of their own country… 78% of (Americans), in a recent nationwide multiple-choice test, identified Abraham Lincoln as “a kind of lobster.” What is the cause of this alarming situation? Partly, of course, it is that our young people are stupid.

-Dave Barry

A comedian wrote these words. Sadly, Lynn Cheney and Joe Lieberman have taken their premise, America’s woeful ignorance of its own history, and turned it into an excuse to attack college students, academics, and anybody with the gall to question America’s involvement in Afghanistan.

The wife of the Vice President is the founder of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA); Joe Lieberman serves on its National Council. This past November, ACTA released a report entitled “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.”

The gist of the report is that while the American public has done its part in supporting the President and the war effort, college professors and students (especially at “elite” colleges) have failed their country by questioning the military action and adopting a “Blame America First” attitude. This assertion is ostensibly supported by a bizarre list of one hundred and fifteen “Campus Responses” to the terror attacks of September 11.

The report borders on absurdity at times, and is more likely to inspire laughter than it is hatred for the academic left. Yet the danger of what it represents should not be underestimated. Although academics guilty of making unpatriotic comments are not named, discovering their identity is no difficult chore. One such offender is identified as “Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.” I did a little research, and it took me less than one minute to discover the man’s name (Strobe Talbott).

While the report is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, its most notable feature is the extent to which the authors stretched the facts in their search for “proof” of the treachery of America’s professors and college students. Here are a few examples:

*Apparently, 115 is a magic number, because to reach it, the authors of the report did something very odd. Campus Response #33 is “‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.’ Student sign at Harvard rally.” So, Lynn Cheney’s organization may not like Gandhi; in that case, the inclusion is understandable. But they are hard pressed to explain Campus Response #50: “‘An eye for an eye makes the world blind.’ Sign at University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill.” Luckily for ACTA, redundancy isn’t a crime.

*Campus Response #19 is interesting. “[We should] build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls,” states a speaker at Harvard Law School. Here, the use of the word “simply” seems to denote that the speaker is not necessarily opposed to military action. Is it un-American to favor building relationships to other peoples?

Yet while some of the Campus incidents are laughable, the actual written report demonstrates the rhetorical mischief of the authors. While advocating a renewed focus on American history in the nation’s schools and colleges, the report quotes Lynn Cheney to make a reprehensible argument. In it, she declares, “‘To say that it is more important now [to study Islam] implies that the events of Sept. 11 were our fault…’”

This statement clearly demonstrates Ms. Cheney’s own ignorance of history. Twice in the 20th century, America went to war without proper knowledge of the culture and history of its enemy.

In ’45, there was only one individual in the State Department who could speak Korean. Says Dartmouth Government Professor David Kang: “[L]ack of language/knowledge truly hurt our efforts in Korea.”

In Vietnam, America underestimated the resolve of a people who had been fighting for independence for all their lives; the State Department overestimated Vietnamese ties to the Kremlin and to Communist China. In Paris, a young Ho Chi Minh had implored then President Woodrow Wilson for help in securing self-determination for his people, only to be summarily ignored. Nobody realized that the Vietnamese leader viewed himself as the George Washington of his people, and idolized America.

These were OUR mistakes, and they were mistakes of ignorance. It came as no surprise that after September 11, the CIA admitted that it was horrendously lacking in Arabic speakers. Ms. Cheney criticizes UCLA for adding 50 new Islam-related courses in the wake of the attacks, but does she truly believe that America can infiltrate al-Quaeda with blonde, blue-eyed, Southern Californian French majors? What she and her cohort fail to understand is that diversity is important, because America does not live in a vacuum. We have learned the hard way that ignoring or dismissing the rest of the world as the report suggests will not make it go away.

While the road to hell may be paved with good intentions, it is a long road. Sadly, the road to McCarthyism is far shorter, and all too easy to traverse.

George W. Bush campaigned for the Presidency on two central themes: tax-cuts and bipartisanship. Of course, he had other ideas, but most of them were unpopular, so strategist Karl Rove made sure that Dubya didn’t talk about those.

As it turns out, Bush is delivering on his promises of tax-cuts and bipartisanship, except without any actual bipartisanship. Working with Democrats is fun when they are conservative Democrats from Waco in the Texas legislature, but not when they include pro-choice African-Americans from Harlem, gay Jews from Boston, and female environmentalists from California.

Somehow emboldened by his 537-vote margin of victory and a deadlocked Senate, Bush decided he wouldn’t need any bipartisanship, and passed his $1.6 trillion tax cut through the House with the unanimous support of the 219 Republicans present for the vote. Democrats, opposed to the tax-cut for reasons ranging from its unfair slant towards the rich to the fiscal insanity of the numbers Bush has proposed, remained sufficiently united to lower the amount to $1.35 trillion with the help of a few moderate Republicans in the Senate.

The fact is, Bush’s tax cut (which just officially passed through Congress) and bipartisanship are mutually exclusive. Bush has refused to compromise, yielding only when moderates in his own party, such as Jim Jeffords of Vermont, have forced him to make concessions. The only Democratic support for Bush came from conservative Democrats, and even these senators still favored the slimmed-down version of the tax-cut. Never one to let facts stand in the way, Bush claimed that his dealings with Jeffords demonstrated a different kind of bipartisanship: working with members of his own party who disagree with him. Jeffords was so clearly unimpressed with Bush’s talents that he bolted from the G.O.P shortly afterwards.

Bush, aware that Americans want bipartisanship, and that he has been rightly painted as extreme by Congressional Democrats, desperately tried to regain the center. But instead of compromising, Bush did something far more interesting.

“The President’s $1.6 trillion plan should be a floor, not a ceiling,” Congressman Dick Armey of Texas told CNN in April. According to Armey, Bush’s tax cut is too small. Bush, however, stuck to his guns, insistent that what the country needed was a $1.6 trillion cut, no more and no less. Suddenly, instead of looking like the Reaganesque, government-hating conservative that he is, Bush looks like a moderate.

Of course, then there’s the question of why Bush wants a tax-cut. Clearly, he feels that the American people deserve it, although apparently the wealthier amongst us deserve it more. But during the campaign, Bush gave another reason for why we need his cut. It is true, he admitted, that today America is as prosperous as ever. (Although he claims it is not Bill Clinton who is responsible, rather it is the hard work of the American people. Apparently they weren’t working very hard when Bush’s father was in office.) However, Bush claimed that not everyone was benefiting, and that the hard-working middle-class especially were losing out. Therefore, this was to be the perfect time for a tax-cut: the economy was strong and we could afford to use our surpluses to help out those who are struggling.

However, now that the economy is hurting a little, Bush has suddenly turned into Ronald Reagan. A tax-cut, now he claims, is the best way to save the economy. In short, first we wanted the cut because the economy is good, and now we need the cut because the economy is bad.

Another important issue here is Bush’s recently proposed budget. Passed almost strictly on party lines, the $1.9 trillion plan for 2002 attempts to do the impossible: increase spending while cutting taxes. “There’s a bit of a disconnect between the rhetoric and the numbers,” added Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group. “A very real possibility is that when all is said and done, they’ll end up using the Social Security Trust Fund.”

Not even included in the budget, which is non-binding, are close to $400 billion in funds for Pentagon-related expenditures, including Bush’s national missile defense plan. “Do the numbers add up?” asked Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), “Not even close.”

And don’t think that Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the White House don’t know this. They do. They also know that by pushing their agenda of tax cuts and increased defense spending, they are forcing Democrats into a bind: either accept social spending cuts, or be accused of wasteful deficit spending. Never mind that the Democrats are the ones protesting for fiscal sanity by forcing Congress to accept a smaller tax cut. Never mind that the Republicans are (or were, thanks to Jeffords, but too late to stop the tax-cut) the party in power and thus should be held responsible for any deficit that is incurred.

Bipartisanship, it seems, is not a priority for Bush. Perhaps he did not intentionally omit bipartisanship from his agenda, but more than likely he did, because Bush is simply an arrogant man who believes he can do as he pleases. Jim Jeffords recently showed him otherwise.

ormer Vice President Al Gore had a truly brilliant moment near the end of the 2000 presidential election campaign. It began November 2, when then Governor George W. Bush said the following to a group of supporters: “[Bureaucrats] want the Federal Government controlling Social Security, like it’s some kind of federal program. We understand differently, though.” Gore responded quickly by blasting Bush for the gaffe, hammering in his belief that candidates for the Presidency should know that Social Security is a federal program.

However, Gore later correctly identified the real problem with Bush’s mistake. It was not that Bush had experienced a slip of the tongue and said something that was untrue; Bush does know that Social Security is a federal program. The real problem, Gore said, was that this comment demonstrated perfectly the views of conservatives like Bush who oppose every federal program in existence, regardless of success or popularity. A slip of the tongue can happen to anyone in the most innocent of circumstances (e.g., Gore’s claim that he invented the Internet), but it is what these gaffes show about the gaffer’s true self that is important. In short, Bush’s comment does not make him stupid; it makes him dangerous.

As usual, the media is a large part of the problem. When Bush asked, “Is our children learning?” the press roasted him for “stupidity.” But that comment hardly shows that Bush lacks intelligence; no one is suggesting that he truly does not know how to conjugate the verb “to be.” What it means is that he lacks communication skills, skills that are necessary for the presidency. Again, this focus on humor and superficial falseness detracts from the bigger issues lurking behind Bush’s jumbled words. When a candidate makes a serious verbal gaffe, the most it can cost him is popularity or votes.

However, when the President of the United States makes these mistakes, the ramifications can be far more powerful, and this makes Bush dangerous to our nation’s security. “Yes we do [have an obligation to defend Taiwan],” Bush recently told Good Morning America, “and the Chinese must understand that.”

On the surface, this seems like a fairly innocent statement. After all, our allegiance to Taiwan has been quite clear, from its emergence as the symbol of anti-Communist China in ’49 to Bush’s decision on April 24 of this year to sell Taiwan what the Boston Globe called “the most extensive weapons package in a decade.” Why then, should we not promise to defend our allies against Red China?

The problem is simple: what if Taiwan is attacked? With Bush’s declaration, the United States would be left with two very unpleasant options: reneging on their promise to Taiwan, or entering into a war with China$mdash; World War Three, if you will. According to the Boston Globe, Bush’s statements were “a sharp break from a 22-year policy of calculated ambiguity in spelling out how the United States would react to an attack on Taiwan.”

Here, it seems, Bush’s mouth has put him in a predicament that a sense of humor and a Texas accent can’t fix. As his comments hit the press (the very same press that he wisecracked his way through to the oval office), reaction was strong. Everyone from the Communist Chinese to Republicans on Capitol Hill appeared stunned by Bush’s words.

“I don’t think there was an intent to make explicit what has been implicit in US policy for 30 years,” a Republican aide in Washington told the Boston Globe. “Sometimes the subtleties [of the China policy] are lost on people.” When asked if Senate Republicans knew of a potential policy change on Taiwan in advance, the aide replied, “I don’t think his staff knew.”

On a practical level, Bush’s comments may be fairly harmless, despite claims from one Chinese analyst that they were “more serious than the [recent U.S spy plane] air collision.” There does not seem to be a logical reason for China to invade Taiwan in the near future, especially considering that they have not done so in the past half-century. What is disturbing is that Bush seems to be out of the loop, a man simply not prepared for the Presidency.

And so once again, we have Bush making a ridiculous statement, only this time a far more harmful one. And again, the implications behind the statement are as damaging as the statement itself.

Communication is the key to a successful White House. Jimmy Carter was miserable at it, and suffered the consequences. Ronald Reagan was good at it, and reaped the benefits. Thus, there is really no way Bush can win here. If one believes for a moment that the President’s comments were in fact a sign of a change in policy and not a horrible mistake, then why did his aides not know about the change? This lack of communication is far more troubling than the slip of the tongue that most people take the statements to be.

If one is to believe the Chinese, Bush is trying to antagonize the Communist State. “It seems to me that [the United States] prefers tension with China to cooperation,” Chinese Academic Yan Xuetong told the Globe. If one is to believe Washington insiders, Bush goofed. Democrats claim Bush is either trying to change, as Senator John Kerry put it,: “a policy that has been in place for 30 years…with implications I believe are serious,” or his speech troubles are becoming a liability. GOP spin-doctors claim the President never said anything of significance, as evidenced, they claim, by his later, more refined statements on the subject.

Who is right? The fact is, it does not matter. With Bush, Americans are left with two options: he is incompetent or dangerous. Unfortunately, when you are the leader of the free world, the two go hand-in-hand.