Taxpayer Money

IN a perfect world, no state would spend taxpayer funds to lure corporations -- and jobs. But reality dictates a different approach in which states compete fiercely to hold on to big companies and lure new ones.Maryland officials have handed out some $100 million to businesses over five years. In most cases, the money was well spent, ensuring thousands of jobs for local citizens. In a few instances, though, taxpayers were royally ripped off by companies that took the state's money and reneged on their promises -- or never intended to move from Maryland.

Vision therapy cured son's reading problemI've been following your "Reading by 9" series. "The quiet literacy crisis" article in the Dec. 22 edition of The Sun has been the most relevant article for me. My son, like Alana, had a lot of difficulty learning to read. Since he was well-behaved and able to come up with coping mechanisms, his problem was not detected during his first few years of school.We feel fortunate that he was referred to an optometrist for vision therapy. Vision therapy helps our son to store visual images in his brain which help with reading and spelling.

Sauerbrey comments praised and pannedHurrah for gubernatorial candidate. Ellen R. Sauerbrey. She calls for withholding state education aid to local schools if they fail to crack down on disruptive students.I would go one step further. Parents of disruptive students should be fined or made to pay extra local or state taxes. After all, every time a teacher takes time away from teaching students who want to learn, taxpayer money is wasted.Students can't learn in a disruptive classroom. To handle troublesome, interrupting youngsters takes plenty of individual or small-group supervision or counseling and that costs the taxpayer money, money, money.

WASHINGTON -- Money. It's the high-octane stuff that runs American politics, and in this election year the largest sums are fueling the presidential contest. Indeed, President Clinton and Bob Dole have already spent more than $50 million, and there's still a half year to go."Follow the money" remains good advice for those wanting to know what's happening in politics. But few things are harder to comprehend than campaign finance.Ever since reforms were put in place in the mid-1970s in response to the Watergate scandal, the rules and regulations of campaign money have grown to resemble the tax code both in volume and fiendish complexity.

Anne Arundel County Council members said yesterday that they were misled by a public works administrator and are threatening to reverse their decision to spend $200,000 to replace thousands of street signs. The councild ordered the changes.Lisa Ritter, a spokeswoman for County Executive John G. Gary, disputed his testimony almost immediately. Although she did not testify, Ms. Ritter told a reporter that the federal government is only considering rule changes that could require that larger traffic signs be made with a more reflective paint.

Good Use of TaxesI am married and currently working at home with our two young sons (ages 2 and 4 1/2 ).My husband and I depend on public television and radio for music, information and entertainment and education.Up to now, our children know only Big Bird, Barney and Mr. Rogers and are spared the violence and aggressive advertising of commercial television's Power Rangers, Gobots, X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.We listen to classical music and jazz throughout the day, not because we are "cultural elites," but because we all enjoy it and have no use for loud disc jockeys and commercials every two minutes.

WASHINGTON -- Lockheed Martin Corp. has launched a lobbying campaign to kill House-passed legislation that would block the Pentagon from using $31 million in taxpayer money in a $92 million bonus package for top executives of the nation's largest defense contractor.The corporate giant and senior Pentagon officials were caught off guard last week when the House approved an amendment to prohibit payment of the federal share of the bonus package, which critics called "corporate welfare at its worst."

Helium Stockpile Isn't Just Hot AirThe article Aug. 22 about the helium "pork barrel" illustrates an important change that must be made within the federalgovernment if we are to have our tax money better spent and control the deficit.This is a prime example of the need for the line-item veto. Although I have not been one of President Clinton's strongest admirers, I do believe he is sincere in his conviction to achieve more fiscal responsibility in the government.However, when shameless, self-serving and powerful members of Congress such as Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas recruit a group of weak-thinking novices such as Kweisi Mfume and Albert Wynn of Maryland to blackmail the president by saying, "If you want your bill to pass, you must give this pork," we're never going to solve the deficit problem.

The challenger says the longtime incumbent misused taxpayer money tosend two newsletters to constituents who technically aren't yet members of her district.The incumbent says her Democratic challenger is making much ado about nothing to avoid talking about the issues.The law says it's OK for U.S. Rep. Beverly B. Byron, D-6th, to mail newsletters to about 30,000 Howard County residents who were addedto her district during redistricting last year.The newsletters were sent to 252,000 households in Novemberand January, a Byron aide said.

Emergency Nurses' Complex RoleAs an emergency nurse for over 25 years and an active member of a local Volunteer Fire Company for 11 years, I take exception to several inaccuracies in Steve Childers' letter (Nov. 29) to the editor. Knowing both sides of the story gives me a better perspective on what is happening.First, it is obvious that Mr. Childers has a somewhat limited exposure to what occurs in an emergency department once he has delivered his patient and left. The patient may be in the ED for several hours and is usually one of many in need of critical care.

When we survey what lawmakers accomplish in their annual ransacking of the taxpayer, we see that they always succeed in two major things: increasing the reach of the government in question and paying back investments made in their political careers by those who fund them. As Mencken pointed out decades ago, "The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty.

Walking through a blighted East Baltimore neighborhood on a recent snowy morning, Del. Talmadge Branch pointed at an empty, boarded-up warehouse on Biddle Street and shook his head. The building should be a multimillion-dollar gym called Hoop City, he said. Children from the neighborhood and members of nearby Israel Baptist Church should be dancing and practicing karate in its studios and kicking soccer balls on indoor courts. That was the vision Branch sold to his pastor at Israel Baptist and the pitch he delivered to colleagues in Annapolis seven years ago. It seemed like a good idea then, and state lawmakers secured $800,000 in two state bond bills to pay for the gym. The administration of then-Mayor Martin O'Malley got on board, buying the building for $200,000 in taxpayer dollars in 2002, selecting Ronald H. Lipscomb as the developer.

Last week the government dispatched more of your money into the abyss. Through its "Term Auction Facility," the Federal Reserve lent banks $63 billion - nearly half the cost of the entire savings and loan bailout from the 1980s, or what it takes to fight in Iraq for six months. Who got the money? At what rates? What collateral did they put up? How will the proceeds be spent? The Fed isn't saying, and it's fighting attempts to shed light. The Treasury Department, distributing its own bailout billions, is almost as clammed up. Never has the country spent so much taxpayer money, so quickly, with so little disclosure.

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the U.S. Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received. The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the U.S. military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash.

YESTERDAY, WE ANALYZED GOV. MARTIN O'Malley's proposed budget. There was a heavy response on our Web site, baltimoresun.com, much of it quite emotional. Here's a sampling: Michael, of Baltimore, wrote: This budget is a bloated piece of garbage. Why does spending have to go up EVERY YEAR? Do people's wages go up every year? No. Bill, of Catonsville, wrote: I would love to know what the raises are or will be for state employees, starting with O'Malley, this coming fiscal year. I would also like to know how much of the increases for our "investment" in education are for teachers compared to salary and benefit increases for administrators.

Baltimore's City Council shot down portions of a proposed charter amendment yesterday that would have made it easier for City Hall to spend taxpayer money - but that would have reduced public advertising requirements and independent oversight of that spending. On a unanimous vote, the council advanced a significantly watered-down version of the legislation, which was introduced by Mayor Sheila Dixon's administration. Though supporters vowed to resurrect the most controversial portions of the bill at a later date, the recent debate gave Dixon's leading mayoral challenger a ready-made opportunity to raise ethical questions from her time as City Council president.

WASHINGTON --Virtually every measure of the performance of Iraq's oil, electricity, water and sewer sectors has fallen below pre-invasion values even though $16 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has been disbursed in the Iraq reconstruction program, government witnesses told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. Of seven measures of infrastructure performance presented at the committee hearing by the inspector-general's office, only one was above pre-invasion values. Those that had slumped below those values were electrical generation capacity, hours of power available in a day in Baghdad, oil and heating oil production, and numbers of Iraqis with sewage service and drinkable water.

Levees in New Orleans weren't the only barricades breached by Hurricane Katrina. The flimsy restraints that Congress was trying to impose on its budget process earlier this year collapsed within moments of the first angry critique of federal failures in protecting the Gulf Coast and assuring a speedy rescue of the victims. In their rush to spare themselves blame, the lawmakers quickly approved more than $60 billion in emergency relief money and expect to approve at least $50 billion more within weeks - all of which will have to be borrowed because the federal budget is in the red. What's particularly dismaying is that Congress seems to have learned nothing from the catastrophe and from the deep flaws in its pork-barrel procedures Katrina exposed so clearly.

WASHINGTON - The Central America Free Trade Agreement debate is heating up, and one part of the proposed pact has not received the attention it deserves - an overlooked section that offers further evidence why Congress should emphatically reject CAFTA. Chapter 9 of the agreement covers government procurement and establishes a rule of "national treatment" in government purchasing. This means that under CAFTA, each participating nation must treat goods, services and suppliers from the other CAFTA nations in a manner that is "no less favorable" than it treats domestic firms when awarding contracts.

After a messy, public battle for power at the port of Baltimore ended with the resignation of its chief executive this year, frustrated lawmakers and port interests urgently debated how to separate politics and waterfront business. There were private grumbling, State House hearings and a proposed bill to cut some of the port's ties to the administration of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. but no consensus. Now, a recently completed report commissioned by the state, at a cost of $300,000, offers advice on running the port more like a business and less like a state agency.