How Things Really Work

For more than twenty years parents of students in property-poor school districts have challenged the way Texas pays for its public schools.

Now come the wealthier school districts challenging the system because it takes tax money away from them and redistributes it to the poorer districts.

What are these lawsuits all about, anyway? They are about the quality of public education. But, as it turns out, courts are no better equipped than legislatures to deal with so abstract an idea. Therefore, courts and legislatures have chosen to talk about dollars instead of quality.

Quality and dollars may be first cousins, but they aren’t identical twins.

In 1989, then United States Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos told the Texas Legislature that more money is not the answer to problems in education. That’s not what he thought several years before when, as president of Texas Tech University, he came to the legislature asking for more money. It is amazing how one’s perception of the problem is affected by one’s perspective.

School finance is a dinosaur issue. It is like a dinosaur because it is large, and because it is anachronistic.

School finance is large because it deals with the most basic of governmental, or community, services. Many states, including my own, devote more than half their budgets to education. More than half of our local property taxes go for education. Education is by far the largest industry in the country. In other words, all that is at stake is billions of dollars. How shall they be spent? Who shall spend them?

School finance is anachronistic because it is just about the last governmental service that is paid for in such a way as to provoke economic class warfare. The key words in many of the lawsuits are “equity” or “equalization.” That is because high-wealth school districts can raise money more easily, through property taxes, than can low-wealth districts. In other words, educational effort still depends on local real estate values. Hence the economic class warfare.

Central city and property-poor rural districts are pitted against wealthy suburban districts. The resultant political fights:

• Anglo vs. minority

• Rich vs. poor

• Democrat vs. Republican

are not easy to resolve or pretty to watch.

Then add to the economic issues deeply held and conflicting beliefs about education itself. What about bilingual programs? Should they be transitional, English-as-second-language programs? Or should they teach basic subjects in other languages? If they do the latter, does bilingual education become segregation by another name? Are these students beneficiaries of enlightened education, or victims of a system that condemns them to yet another generation of second-class citizenship?

In deciding how to spend limited dollars, should preference be given to the mainstream student? Or should special allotments be made to students with special problems: physical and mental handicaps, deprived backgrounds, inability to speak English? If special allotments are made, do they encourage schools to put students in these programs for financial, rather than educational, reasons?

What about “local control”? No term in the vocabulary of education is more fraught with emotion than “local control.”

Where “local control” produces excellence it should be strengthened, encouraged, duplicated, cloned, transplanted. But where “local control” is a euphemism for academic laxity and poor administration, it should be eliminated. My fear is that “local control,” in the academic debates of the 1990’s, can become a euphemism for irresponsibility in the way that “states rights” was in the civil rights debates of the 1950’s.

What about governance? What should be the role of school boards? Administrators? Teachers? Parents? Who’s in charge here? Who’s responsible? Who’s accountable? To whom? For what?

For that matter, why should children have to go to school anyway? Why shouldn’t those parents who want to, teach them at home? That way those students certainly wouldn’t be exposed to godless, atheistic ideas like evolution.

How easy these issues are to demagogue!

To be sure, our demagogues have more recently been occupied with abortion and flag-burning, but they can always fall back on local control and Darwinism.

State governments are, after all, fairly mundane, pedestrian institutions. Governors and legislators don’t get to decide major issues like the fates of Saddam Hussein or the Kurds. They don’t get to decide if we should aid Gorbachev or trade with China.

But they do decide other things–like the quality of education in this country. After all, the only thing at stake when legislatures and courts decide the fate of our schools is the future of our country.

Because to many people politics has come to be irrelevant. Politics has come to be seen as more about ideological issues than about making our lives better.

Occasionally a writer comes along who expresses our frustrations so well that a single book can change the tone of political discussion.

“Why Americans Hate Politics”, by E. J. Dionne, is such a book. Dionne, a Rhodes Scholar, now covers politics for The Washington Post and previously did so for The New York Times.

He expresses brilliantly public outrage about the “moralism” of the Left and Right. “Moralism” is another word for self-righteousness and certainly has nothing to do with morality.

As Dionne puts it, “America’s restive middle class is weary of a politics of confrontation that seems to have so little to do with the challenges the nation faces… Paradoxically, by expecting politics to settle too many issues, we have diminished the possibilities of politics.”

The politics of moralism and confrontation are not harmless quirks of a few ideologues. They seriously damage the American political center and the ability of our democracy to make a better life for citizens of this country.

The moralizers now play a big role in picking Presidential candidates in both parties. The moralizers are more interested in “outlawing” something or other they find offensive (abortion on the one hand, capital punishment on the other) than in helping people.

That is why we have not had, since Lyndon Johnson, an effective President who wanted more than anything else to make a better life for Americans. (President Carter, bless his soul, wanted to do that too, but he never found out how.)

The moralizers of the Left, observes Dionne, don’t understand that the taxpayer revolt is not selfishness but a worry about maintaining a middle-class standard of living. Anger at rising crime rates is not racism but a fear that crime is out of control. Very few of us do not know somebody who has been murdered, raped, or robbed in the last five years.

Anger about welfare programs, sometimes racist, is just as often a demand that basic rules about work apply to everybody.

The moralizers of the right, on the other hand, don’t understand that feminists are not selfish souls, but rational people who want to play their part in a changing world.

Believe it or not, Dionne points out, there is common ground here. Feminists and traditionalists agree that the work that mothers and other family care-givers do in our society is undervalued. Both say that tax laws ought to be changed to encourage the traditional family structure by giving a better break to parents. Requiring businesses to give parents leave to care for newborn children would strengthen the family.

Candidate Bush, speaking to women’s groups during his campaign, said he would make child care facilities a major emphasis of his administration. But when the campaign was over, President Bush opposed parental leave and supported lowering taxes–on capital gains, not for poor and middle class parents.

The family values that had seemed so good for the country in 1989 had somehow become bad for the country by 1991.

Actually, support for caring facilities for the children of working mothers was opposed by the Religious Right faction of the Republican Party. Apparently this group longs for the return of a day that never existed: the day when there were two parents in every family and all the fathers worked and all the mothers stayed home.

Fortunately for the country and for the moralizers, their fantasy did not come to pass. Were it not for wages earned by women, says Dionne, half the families in the country would be in poverty. Just think what that would do to welfare costs!

Isn’t it time for the people who want to “get government off our backs” to stop trying to use government to impose THEIR values? After all, consistency and logical thought ought to have SOME place in public policy.

Politics and government are really about education, health, public safety, and transportation. When ideological gridlock starts to interfere with those basic services, many Americans start hating politics.

President Johnson asked one simple question about any new policy proposed to him: “How does it affect the family living on $18,000 a year?”

That’s a pretty good test.

Want to do something TODAY to prevent crime? Something that doesn’t require any more laws, policing, courts, or prisons?

Convenience store owners and other businesses, along with the help of law enforcement, can do just that, according to a year-long study by a student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

The study, conducted by LBJ graduate Nancy La Vigne with the help of the Austin Police Department, looked at business practices and environmental characteristics of 48 convenience stores in Austin. The study showed that criminals choose stores that look easy to rip off.

La Vigne collected information on all aspects of the stores that either made them look like good crime targets or bad ones. Among those were the use of crime prevention measures such as signs, closed-circuit televisions, and automatic door locks. She also looked at the lighting levels, the amount of graffiti and litter, and the physical layout of each store. By comparing store practices to Austin Police Department calls for service data, the study found that stores with certain business practices had high crime rates.

What the study revealed for gas drive-offs should not come as a surprise:

Stores that require customers to pay first before pumping gas have 48 percent fewer gas drive-offs.

Stores with uncovered windows have 84 percent fewer gas drive-offs and 30 percent fewer robberies than stores with obstructed windows.

An increase of just one foot-candle of lighting near the gas pumps will reduce drive-offs by five percent.

An automatic door lock reduces robberies by 25 percent.

Stores with signs saying that clerks can’t get into the store safe have 25 percent fewer robberies.

Stores can discourage all kinds of crime by keeping premises neat and cutting back undergrowth that provides cover for bandits.

These conclusions make good sense. After all, how can a clerk keep an eye on potential gas thieves when the windows are covered and the lighting is low? Likewise, how can cops and neighborhood folks see into the store to know when a robber has a clerk at gun point?

Most of these changes don’t cost a cent, and those that do are cheap. One security store quoted the cost of an automatic door lock at just $60, which is $83 less than the average loss in a convenience store robbery–not to mention the costs arising from injuries to clerks.

And when, as a veteran Austin police officer put it, “you walk into a convenience store to investigate a call and find the clerk dead on the floor of the back room with his face half blown off”, these easy steps can save more than money, they can save lives.

The convenience store study suggests easy changes that reduce crime. By making stores look better, the message to criminals is that people care and that they are vigilant. And by clearing windows and putting in bright lights, criminals are less likely to think they can rip the store off and get away without being seen.

But the results of the study aren’t limited to crimes of convenience. Many grocery stores, fast food restaurants, liquor stores, and drug stores can benefit from these same recommendations. Neighborhood associations and city planning departments can reduce street crime and burglaries by installing brighter lighting and paying better attention to physical maintenance. Home owners can prevent crime by maintaining their grounds and keeping their yards well lit.

This new angle on fighting crime is becoming more and more common in police departments right here in Texas. In Arlington, Texas, police and city officials tackled a cruising problem by making it more difficult to cruise the streets and offering teenagers a parking lot as an alternative cruising location. And in the Pine Terrace apartments of southwest Houston, management reversed the decaying and crime-ridden trend of the neighborhood by cleaning up the grounds and evicting late rent-payers immediately.

The point is that all of us can take steps to fight crime. It’s just a matter of making it harder for criminals to do their job. As Police Chief Tom Sweeney of Stamford, Connecticut, said, “The real crime problem is all these kids out there that steal every thing that’s not tied down.”

Maybe what we need to do is not lock everyone up, but tie a few more things down.

State governments are not very glamorous institutions. Governors don’t meet with Gorbachev. State senators don’t meet with Saddam. State representatives don’t get to decide if we are going to trade with China and Mexico.

On the other hand, Presidents and U.S. Senators and House members don’t get to decide about the quality of education. (They talk about it a lot, though.)

Education is what state governments are mostly about. Half of every dollar states spend goes for education. When a legislature decides how much to spend for education–and how wisely to spend it–the legislature is deciding the state’s future.

More importantly, the legislatures are deciding the nation’s future by deciding how well the U.S. can compete with the rest of the world over the next generation or so.

That being so, our future isn’t looking so good this week. The Legislature, cheered on by most state officials, is about to make big cuts in education. The Texas House has voted to cut $1 billion dollars out of public education, starting at the beginning–with kindergarten.

The House appropriations committee voted last Sunday to cut a half billion dollars from higher education. That cut will hurt the most rapidly growing universities the most. They are the universities in El Paso, San Antonio, and South Texas that educate many Hispanic, first-generation college students. The cuts were supported by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Both cuts hit underprivileged Hispanics hardest. Early childhood education, pioneered by the federal Head Start program, has proven most effective with underprivileged children. When the House voted to cut out kindergarten, about 40 members, mostly South Texas Hispanics, took off for the Governor’s mansion.

Cold comfort they got.

So much for Democratic reliance on Hispanic voters for statewide majorities. So much for Republican attempts to court Hispanic voters, particularly in South Texas.

The frenzy to cut education is something different from other efforts to “cut out waste in state government.” There are no charges in Comptroller John Sharp’s report of waste, inefficiency, or fraud in education.

The state is simply deciding it no longer wants to make even the modest effort about education it now makes. By most measures of effort in public and higher education, Texas ranks 49th or 50th among the states. And that’s according to studies quoted in the Sharp report.

In the last five years, the state has cut its investment in each college student by 20% in real dollars. So once again, Texas is Number One. But you have to start counting from the bottom.

Not only education, but its first cousin research is a prime target of this year’s insanity. For the past few years, research has been the secret of Texas’ success in attracting the industries of the future.

Texas did not win the battles for the Supercollider near Dallas and national research centers for computers (MCC) and semiconductors (Sematech) in Austin by being a know-nothing state.

The George Bush Presidential Library has gone to Texas A&M. Research centers in physics (UT Austin) and computer science (Rice University) have come to those universities because Texas has thought these things important enough to spend money to get them.

Direct funding for 59 research centers, including the state’s primary medical research programs, is threatened by these proposals. Competition for federal and private research dollars is fierce. The money goes to institutions with the best proposals prepared by the best scientists and engineers. The “best” are the few hundred winners of the prizes and the medals. With these high-caliber people in our universities, we earn money and get the best students.

As Peter Flawn, former president of two Texas universities, points out, without that money we will quit being a growing center for research and development. Then we will lose the businesses and industries that depend on R&D. Then we will have lost our ability to compete. We will have lost the researchers and the laboratories that house our successful research programs.

In short, we will have lost the game.

There is a certain weird, bi-partisan logic to all this. Let’s keep public education for disadvantaged children in Texas so bad that they can’t get a good job in a factory or office.

That’s all right, because the jobs won’t be here anyway.

Leadership, anyone?

Two weeks ago in this space I pointed out that, on some guncontrol issues, the National Rifle Association cannot make up its mind. Sometimes the NRA is for criminal record checks and waiting periods to screen out felonious prospective pistol packers and sometimes it is against them.

But sometimes the NRA is consistent. Whenever there is an issue between armed robbers and policemen, the NRA favors the criminals. Moreover, the NRA, generally thought of as a right-wing group, likes to rewrite history just as much as the left-wing “politically correct” forces on some university campuses.

The NRA said I was wrong in saying that the NRA opposed the bill banning armor-piercing ammunition (known as coiller bullets to police). The NRA, through its spokesman Weldon Smith, says it not only supported the ban, but drafted the legislation and helped pass it.

Not quite.

Cop-killer bullets were originally designed for the police. But police stopped using the bullets because they ricochet, endangering police and bystanders. By 1982, when legislation was first introduced to ban the bullets, the only people using them were criminals who wanted to kill policemen wearing bullet-proof vests.

Nevertheless, the NRA opposed the ban on coiller bullets, charging that the issue was a “media-made hoax.” For some strange reason, policemen whose lives were threatened by the bullets, did not agree.

Many police chiefs testified for the bill. In 1984, the Reagan administra-tion proposed a compromise bill that would outlaw the manufacture and importation of cop-killer bullets. Finding themselves backed into a hole, the NRA gave in and said they wouldn’t oppose the administration’s bill, but they would continue to oppose any bill that banned the sale of cop-killer bullets.

But the bill Congress passed did ban the sale of armor-piercing, or cop-killer, bullets. The NRA now says it supported the bill. The NRA is wrong, again.

The NRA now denies, in letters to the editor and to me, that it opposed legislation banning plastic pistols–guns made from polymer or ceramic that have a few small metallic parts. So small, in fact, that they don’t set off the metal detectors in airports and government buildings. They are potentially dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists.

In 1987, the U.S. Senate considered a bill to ban plastic guns. When asked to take a stand on the issue, the NRA said they could not support a ban on plastic guns because there were no such guns so they weren’t a realistic threat. They also said the bill was a back door effort to ban thousands of guns that already existed, even though the bill specifically exempted all legally owned guns.

More than half a dozen people testified before the Senate that prototypes of this gun existed and that the technology was available to produce them in vast numbers. Senators also heard from police officers, the U.S. secret service, and airline representatives who testified that the proliferation of these guns would create dangerous security problems.

Faced with this expert testimony, the NRA decided that plastic guns did exist, but that they had legitimate hunting purposes and shouldn’t be banned.

Unlike some issues before congress, this time Senators on both sides of the aisle were bound and determined to prevent a problem before it became one. The only way to insure that these weapons would never get into the hands of terrorists and assassins was to ban them before they hit the market. And that’s what Congress did.

So the NRA is right. Thanks to the wisdom of the U.S. Congress–and no thanks to the NRA– plastic guns cannot legally be made or sold in the United States.

The shocking news that a college president in Rochester, NY, has worked for the CIA has started the latest wave of controversy over “political correctness” on the nation’s university campuses.

Apparently co-operating with your government gets you in a world of trouble in some places. So, as a college professor, I had better confess that I, too, have been guilty of the same sin.

But it’s worse than that. My wife, Diana, actually worked for the Agency for two years. We have talked this over and decided that, before the “thought police” get here, we had better make a clean breast of the whole matter.

So here it goes. I’ll start at the very beginning.

Diana and I first met each other through Lt.JG Donald Morris, USN. Donald and I were in Naval Intelligence at the time. He later went to work for the CIA. His job was giving grief to Soviet (KGB) agents in Paris, Berlin, Kinshasha, and Saigon.

He baby-sat KGB defectors in Washington and thereabouts.

When Donald retired from the Agency, he took up an even more disreputable trade: he became a newspaper columnist.

But our crimes are more than just guilt by association. We were actually personally involved in trying to help our country.

I plead guilty to having helped channel Agency funds to provide scholarships so that Third World, mostly African, students could go to a journalism school in West Berlin in 1963. What was the American interest in that?

What better way to show a student from an uncommitted nation the difference between Communism and Capitalism than to see first-hand the difference between East Berlin and West Berlin?

Like many offenders against political correctness, I hoped my deeds would go undetected. But it was not to be.

My sins were exposed and documented by Senator Frank Church of Idaho in 1967. Senator Church held hearings that exposed many U.S. intelligence operations, making public disclosures that will harm this country for years to come.

As a result of those hearings, other Western intelligence services understandably refused to share information or sources with us. One United States Senator single-handedly did more to damage our ability to know our enemy than the KGB ever did.

The tale of my politically incorrect errand-running for CIA doesn’t end with the role of conduit for CIA money. I was in Moscow with an American group in 1959. We stayed at the Roosia Hotel, a 2,000-room horror that was still under construction.

The hotel was so new that our folks in Washington didn’t yet know which rooms were bugged. So I dutifully reported the numbers of the rooms in which our group stayed. Big-time stuff.

But the worst is yet to come. In 1965, President Johnson chewed out Admiral William F. Raborn, then Director of Central Intelligence.

In an effort better to understand his demanding superior, Admiral Raborn asked the CIA librarian to get some books about the Texas Hill Country, which did so much to shape Johnson’s philosophy.

The librarian called bookstores in Austin and Houston and explained the kind of books he needed and why. Not surprisingly, the incident made for an amusing story on page one of the Washington Post a few days later.

The CIA wanted to find out if the story had come from within their shop or from the overly candid calls the librarian had made. They asked me if I could find out. I said I would try.

So I called Larry (Lonesome Dove) McMurtry, who was then teaching at Rice and running the Houston bookstore the Post had mentioned. I asked Larry to help me pick out a book for Diana’s forthcoming birthday.

He chose a $14 first edition of poetry by William Butler Yeats. I thanked him and then asked him about the Washington Post story. He laughed and said he had told the Washington Post’s Houston correspondent about the CIA call.

Then I went outside where the CIA people were waiting and set their minds at ease. The next day they presented me with a check for $14 which they insisted I accept. Diana was one of the few people that year whose birthday present was picked out by Larry McMurtry and paid for by the CIA.

Heavy-duty stuff.

So much for my James Bond adventures. What did Diana, an editor by trade, do for the spooks? She and some other ex-English teachers and newspaper types translated the stuff CIA economists wrote into English so ordinary folks could understand it.

She has a similar, but even tougher job these days: editing this column.

What is the National Rifle Association’s position on pistols? Do they want people to have to wait a few days to buy a pistol? What about criminal background checks on gun buyers? What is the right answer? That depends on who you ask and when you ask them.

The NRA has waffled a lot on these issues for the last several decades, particularly on waiting periods and background checks. In the mid-seventies, the NRA published a firearms control pamphlet in which they said “a waiting period could help in reducing crimes of passion and preventing people with criminal records or dangerous mental histories from acquiring guns.”

The NRA is hardly alone in waffling on gun control. When Lloyd Bentsen beat George Bush for the United States Senate in 1970, Bentsen made a campaign issue of a pro-gun-control vote by then-congressman Bush. In 1988, presidential candidate George Bush made an issue of Massachusetts Governor Dukakis’ support of gun control. Bentsen, of course, was Dukakis’ running mate.

What goes around comes around.

By the early 1980s, the NRA took a strong stand against criminal background checks, charging that they were an invasion of privacy and diverted police from real crime to paperwork.

Congress is now considering the Brady Bill. The Brady Bill is named for James Brady, once press secretary to president Ronald Reagan. Brady was crippled for life by a pistol wielding would-be assassin of Reagan.

The Brady Bill requires a seven-day waiting period to buy a pistol. When the U.S. House of Representatives was considering the bill in 1988, the NRA opposed a waiting period. In an effort to kill the bill, the NRA abandoned its earlier opposition to “gun control” laws and supported instant background checks at the point of sale–requiring an expensive and non-existent federal computerized system of criminal records to be created and be accessible by gun dealers.

Talk about invasion of privacy!

Of course, the NRA’s real objective was to pass a measure that would be impossible to implement. It would take at least ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and install such a system.

More recently, the NRA supported legislation extending Oregon’s 5-day waiting-period to fifteen days. And here in Texas, NRA supporters advocated Senator Gene Green’s concealed weapon bill, which would allow citizens to carry guns around with them after undergoing a background check. Is the NRA schizophrenic? Why it is ok to conduct background checks for up to 30 days under the green bill–for concealed permits–but not for handgun sales?

This year the NRA is against the Brady Bill because it only requires a waiting-period but not a background check. In an effort to compromise, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell attached an amendment to the bill requiring a background check and providing federal money for states to update their criminal records databases. Yet the NRA remains opposed to the revised gun control bill.

The NRA’s flip-flopping has been going on for decades.

The NRA used to be a fairly benign group interested in teaching people about gun safety, target shooting, and hunting techniques. But somewhere along the line the association leaders went crazy. In the early 1980s they opposed the nation’s law enforcement officers who were working to outlaw the armor-piercing ammunition that police affectionately call “cop-killer” bullets. By 1986, they opposed a ban on plastic pistols, weapons that don’t set off metal detectors in airports and government buildings. And even after several mass murders with assault rifles triggered the introduction of bills in congress to ban their sale, the NRA remains opposed to this legislation. What do legitimate gun owners need with weapons that kill cops and aid terrorists?

The NRA has dug itself into a hole. Several times this year the NRA has supported both waiting periods and background checks. To be sure, its support has been designed to delay and weaken bills when their passage seemed inevitable.

After decades of battling gun control advocates, the NRA has become one.

At lease the NRA no longer takes an automatic position. In fact, the association’s positions revolve faster than the chamber on a Saturday night special.

The Brady Bill won’t make the streets safe overnight, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the NRA was for the cops and not for the robbers?

By the end of this decade Texas will be the home of two incredible new scientific machines that will advance human knowledge in very different ways, both seeking to get a little closer to the moment time began.

A new kind of telescope, gathering information more efficiently than any before it, will stare into the universe from a mountain-top in West Texas.

Below the prairie just south of Dallas, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world will ram together the elementary particles of which the world is made at incredible speeds.

Both machines will be looking back to when the time after the Big Bang was measured in 1/100ths of a second.

Each machine is a significant scientific breakthrough in its own way.

The telescope is the first of a new breed designed to gather light instead of look at stars. You can’t take a picture of Saturn’s rings or Halley’s Comet through this telescope. You can’t point this telescope up and down. It moves around in a circle, at a constant elevation of 65 degrees.

The fixed angle is one of the reasons this telescope costs about one-tenth of what a telescope of traditional design costs. This arrangement avoids the expensive engineering needed to handle the varying stresses of gravity on the mirrors and the telescope tube.

The other reason that this telescope is so cost-efficient is that it relies on 85 mirrors, each a meter (about 39 inches) in diameter, focused by computers. A conventional telescope would have to have a single 340-inch mirror to gather the same amount of light.

That conventional telescope would cost over $100 million. This telescope will cost less than $10 million. That’s smart science.

Today’s astronomy isn’t about looking through a telescope at Venus. It’s about gathering and analyzing light. Light analysis (spectroscopy) tells astronomers what a star is made of, how hot and how heavy it is, and which way and how fast it is spinning.

The most valuable commodity in astronomy is time on a telescope. This new design will use that time more efficiently than does a conventional telescope. It will measure the distances to hundreds of galaxies every night. Observations will be coordinated by computer. The telescope will examine each target object as it goes by, analyze the light, and forward the observations to the appropriate astronomers–who will be doing a lot more of their sleeping at night than they now do.

The unique design came from astronomers at Penn State University, which is a partner with the University of Texas in this scientific venture.

Six hundred miles to the East, under some of the richest farmland in Texas, physicists from all over the world will be using the most powerful machine in the world, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to ram protons together at incomprehensible speeds.

The SSC will accelerate these cores of hydrogen atoms up to energy of 20 trillion electron volts, more energy than anyone has ever put into a particle of matter. The protons will collide every 1/1,000th of a second. These collisions will produce smaller, more fundamental particles than have ever been detected.

The technological advances that can be expected from these new discoveries can scarcely be imagined. The electronic world as we know it came from advances in knowledge made on much smaller machines early in this century.

The SSC is a roughly circular tunnel 54 miles in circumference. It will be from 50 to 250 feet below ground. Aside from a road over the top of the tunnel and buildings to house the engineers and scientists, the Ellis County countryside will be largely undisturbed.

The SSC was put in Texas because Texas had the foresight and the courage to put together a package better than all the other states who competed mightily for it.

In 1987, the legislature created the Texas National Research Laboratory Commission to bring the SSC here. Bonds totaling $1,000,000,000 were authorized. Voters approved the second $500,000,000 by 62%–the highest percentage of any proposal on the ballot.

The SSC is currently estimated to cost $8.2 billion. The construction will bring about 15,000 jobs (9,390 direct, 5,700 indirect) to the area.

Texas will become a world center for the study of high-energy particle physics when the SSC, to be staffed by 500 to 1,000 scientists, goes into operation.

The protons swirling beneath of Ellis County may seem infinitesimal, and the galaxies swirling high over Jeff Davis County impossibly remote. But they hold secrets of knowledge that will make possible a better world.

“Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself,” Albert Schweitzer once said. Prolonged pain destroys the quality of life, erodes the will to live, and sometimes drives people to suicide.

One of the most common causes of severe, unrelieved, intractable pain is cancer. Modern medicine can cure some cancers and dramatically extend life in other cases. Medicine can also relieve the pain that so often goes with cancer, if we will just let it. Freedom from pain is the difference between extending life and prolonging it.

Strange as it seems, millions of people all over the world suffer needlessly from cancer pain, not because doctors do not know how to relieve the pain but because often they will not.

They frequently do not relieve pain because they often are unwilling to prescribe morphine, or at least not enough of it to do any good. And sometimes when they do prescribe enough to relieve the patient’s agony, nurses won’t administer the medication or make the patient beg for the relief the doctor has ordered.

Why? Our society is so concerned about the abuse of drugs that we sometimes do not realize the difference between legitimate use and abuse. Doctors may be afraid that the patient may become addicted. They may also be afraid of losing their medical licenses. Texas has already amended its Medical Practice Act to correct that problem, though further amendments may be needed.

Texas begins next Saturday to focus attention on the terrible problem of pain and how it can be better treated. Governor Ann Richards has proclaimed next Saturday, June 1, as “Freedom From Cancer Pain Day”.

The Texas Cancer Pain Initiative has its first meeting in Austin on that day. The TCPI is a group of professional health care organizations concerned about eliminating needless suffering. The TCPI has been founded through the efforts of Dr. C. Stratton Hill, Jr., director of the Pain Service at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer in Houston.

The group includes the Texas Medical Association, the Texas Nurse Association, the Texas Cancer Council, the Texas Pain Society, and the Texas Division of the American Cancer Society.

TCPI will be primarily an educational organization. It will try to make people more aware of the difference between the medical use of narcotics to relieve pain and the abuse of narcotics that is so common in our society.

The first such group was founded in Wisconsin. Michigan, Vermont, and Arizona have followed. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has endorsed the movement.

What are the medical problems involved in prescribing narcotics for the relief of severe pain? Can patients become addicted?

Very rarely.

The psychologically healthy patient who takes a narcotic to relieve pain is quite a different case from the addict who takes it to alter a mood, to become euphoric.

Morphine is the safest, most effective painkiller known for constant, severe pain. But even in countries where it is legal, like the U.S. and Great Britain, doctors may prescribe doses that are too small or too infrequent to help because of the fear of addicting patients.

But studies show that patients taking drugs for pain do not rapidly increase their tolerance for the drug, as addicts do. They do not have withdrawal symptoms–do not crave the drug when it is discontinued.

When narcotics are prescribed to prevent pain, rather than to cure it after it has set in, they can be used in smaller amounts. Smaller amounts can be used to control pain around the clock without producing mental clouding and other side effects.

Texas law now recognizes the difference between a cancer patient and a street addict. Two years ago the Legislature passed the Intractable Pain Treatment Act, assuring that no Texan requiring narcotics for pain relief should be denied them because of a doctor’s fear of losing his license.

Texas law is now similar to federal law in that it recognizes the legitimate medical use of narcotics to relieve pain.

The goal of the Texas Cancer Pain Initiative is simply to rescue people whose lives are now being ruined by pain. It can do that by taking away the cultural and legal barriers that stand between a patient and an end to agony.

After all, a physician has a duty to relieve a patient’s pain and suffering. That’s what the doctor swore to do in the Hippocratic Oath.

On July 1, a month and a half from today, the Governor’s Task Force on Revenue will report on the condition of the state’s finances and recommend changes in the state’s taxes.

Nobody knows what those recommendations will be, but the information presented to the task force shows that some changes are clearly needed. Texans’ taxes are low compared to those in other states, but the tax structure doesn’t keep pace with the needs of a growing population. Moreover, the increased reliance on sales and property taxes puts an unfair burden on homeowners and businesses who are least able to pay.

Texans pay below the national averages of state and local taxes. In 1989, Texas ranked 48th in per capita state taxes: $822.46. The national average was $1140.98. Over half of those state taxes were sales taxes that are not deductible from the federal income tax. State income taxes are deductible.

Texans paid $1563 each in combined state and local taxes, ranking 34th among the 50 states. The national average was $1892. In local taxes, however, Texans paid $741, almost the national average of $745.

Texans have an unenviable distinction among local taxpayers across the country. Local taxes in Texas have increased more than in any other state in the past few years. These increases have happened for two reasons, both beyond the control of country, city, and school district officials.

As public school costs have increased, school districts have had no choice but to take up more of the burden by raising property taxes. Also, virtually all the metropolitan counties are under court orders to build new jails.

The term “property tax” is misleading. “Property” doesn’t pay taxes. People do. Property values, and therefore taxes, often go up for reasons the property owner has nothing to do with. A homeowner’s income may go down, or a business may lose money, but property taxes can go up.

T’aint’t fair. Of course, limiting school property taxes reduces “local control”. Those who are first to complain about high local taxes are generally the biggest advocates of “local control”. That’s the way life is. You can’t have it both ways.

The corporate franchise tax is another tax that is not fair. As the name implies, it is a tax only on corporations. Other forms of business enterprise, such as partnerships, go free.

When the tax was passed 75 years ago, corporations were almost the only way business was done. Today, many service businesses are partnerships, and services are the fastest growing part of our economy. Real estate ventures, law firms, and accounting firms, for example, are exempt from this tax.

Like the property tax, the franchise tax is a tax on capital and therefore discourages investment in Texas when we desperately need it to attract new industries and jobs into the state.

One bright, competitive, part of the tax picture in Texas is that we are beginning a three-year phaseout of the sales tax on industrial equipment. That tax is yet another way in which our present tax system hampers growth by discouraging investment.

If our present tax system slows growth by making Texas less able to compete for new jobs, and makes it difficult for Texas to provide the quality education and other public services employers and employees demand, how should it be changed?

We should put a limit on property taxes, repeal the corporate franchise tax, and substitute an income tax that is deductible from the federal income tax. Such a tax, like all others, is unpopular. It can only be justified by asking which tax people like more. Do Texans want even higher property taxes? Definitely not.

Do they want a higher sales tax, when the combined state and local rate (8.25%) is already the third highest in the country? No. High property and sales taxes mean that those Texans least able to pay already pay more of the (low) cost of government than in any other state.

Or maybe Texans want poorer schools. Or more felons on the street because there is no room in the jails or prisons. Nobody believes that.

It’s time for Texas to have a rational tax structure that encourages growth and is based on ability to pay, but only if the anti-business, anti-growth taxes we now pay are limited or repealed.

(Hobby was appointed to the Governor’s Task Force on Revenue by Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock. All figures are from data prepared by the Comptroller’s Office or the Legislative Budget Board.)