European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - June 26, 1985, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Page 10 the stars and stripes june columns comments Carl Rowan Reagan revolution will not bring fairer tax codes with his usual High pressure president Cragen called it americas tax and a new american a revolution it is and much of America will Sec it As economic but i still applaud the president for making americans focus on a tax system that Jimmy Carter called a disgrace and Reagan said is so unfair As to be i applaud the proposal to raise the personal exemption to a meaning that a married couple with two dependents would have to earn before they would pay any this is How it ought to be in a society where the concept of ability to pay is the poverty level for the family of four is and any tax where the concept of ability to pay is the poverty level for that family of four is and any tax Reform peddled As populist must embrace the principle that tax Laws ought not further Burden those who already live on the fringes of but do not take the above paragraph to mean that i believe that the Reagan revolution is going to produce tax codes that Are noticeably fairer than what we the distribution of income in this society has not changed much Over the last and there is no reason that the Reagan scheme is going to alter anything let alone revolutionize the in 1947 the lowest 20 percent of american families got percent of the nations income in 1983 that lowest fifth got a piddling percent of the in 1947 the richest 5 percent of american families got percent of the income in 1983 that richest 5 percent got percent of the these census Bureau figures indicate that Middle class families have benefited a bit at the expense of the poorest and richest but that nothing has changed the Reagan plan would help the poor on one but penalize them on the i cannot figure out Why a populist Reform would tax compensation for the reduce drastically the value of the deduction for childcare which is so important to poor working or tax employer paid health insurance premiums at a level that hurts Low income families much More than High income it Hast sunk in with the average citizen yet that under the Reagan he wont be Able to deduct the income taxes he pays to his state and the real estate taxes he pays on his the interest he pays on his car loan or his instalment Congress is going to hear from a lot of Midwest and Eastern governors who oppose the end of deductions for state and local including new York Mario who claims that the president is offering a sneaky Way for the Reagan administration to raise about million to reduce its horrendous deficits with James Kilpatrick you a Sulci a Hess greater if filing one if 5y joint return Ite out being perceived As raising which brings up another reason for my Lack of enthusiasm about reagans this country needs More revenues to wipe out crippling budget Defi the american people Are not in Reagan admits that a lot of individuals and corporations Are not paying any Why should the con Gress put itself through All sorts of ideological submit itself to assaults by a zillion and wind up raising no More Money with which to wipe out the country most pressing economic problem Reagan Doest believe in taxing which is Why in his speech he delivered Only one not exactly revolutionary remark about imposing a mini mum tax on but considering the conces i see nothing in the Reagan plan that will cause corporate leaders or Rich investors to weep in their a lot of people will be asked to embrace the not on the basis of any revolutionary but because it is an Einstein supposedly wont need an accountant or a lawyer to fill out a form 1040 dont expect to see hordes of suddenly jobless accountants and lawyers lining up at your neighbourhood poverty food or the inter Nal Revenue service to have fewer experts and then complications in the new the concessions already and others certain to be will ensure that Good accountants and lawyers will go on saving a lot of Money for people with a lot of Money to and average dont Rush out and spend a single Dollar that you think youre going to get out of the Reagan tax c news America Syndicate what messes pornography commission will Tell us attorney general Edwin Meese completed appointments the other Day to his new 11member commission on por after six Public hearings around the the commission is to file its report in june we will not know a great Deal More then than we already know what we now know is that the country is awash in forms of pornography that Dwarf any tides we have known in the Back in after a year of re i wrote a the smut Ped those were the Days of Twentyfive years much of the Racket was concerned with a mail order you could get 10 dirty pictures for the dirty pictures were crude Blackland White snapshots of Ajie kid at High through underground connect a few sexually explicit films could be a score of Nudie depicting breasts and buttocks could be purchased at the Leazier teenage boys got their kicks from smuggled copies of Sunshine that was about the size of the attorney generals com Mission will find a far different picture the supreme court has thrown up its hands in an Effort to write coherent guidelines for enforcing Federal Laws in the obscenity it is not fair to say that anything but it is True that almost anything the exploitation of children will draw a prosecutors Atten otherwise the weary attitude is that scarce resources of Law enforcement can be better employed in other behind this dispirited View from the prosecutors office is the monumental difficulty of getting convictions under the anti obscenity the first Amend ment to the Constitution forbids abridge ment of free speech and free the supreme court has held that obscenity is not protected by the but what is obscenity Justice Potter Stew in a famous said he  define but he knew when he saw that is not enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable the trouble is that the crime of pub Lishing and distributing obscene materials is not like other ordinarily a prosecutor starts with the fact that a crime has been and the question who committed it in obscenity we know who published the Magazine or produced the the question was it a crime for the past 10 or 15 years i have been advancing the idea that la enforce ment officers Are spinning their wheels in trying to get at this problem under Laws against they ought rather to be using Laws against by shifting their the cops would avoid complicated questions of constitutional statutes against prostitution raise no such did the defendant engage in sexual acts for pay yes or no in the area of rated movies and evidence should present no As Newsweek Magazine remarked not Long in these productions Only the acting is those of us who live by the press Al ways Are made uneasy by any official investigation that touches upon the the history of obscenity censorship makes our apprehension some of the Foremost novelists of this from Theodore Dreiser to James Gould have suffered attacks from Over zealous the commission presumably will say that it has no concern with such High toned stuff it is after the really vile but How do you draw constitutionally a Clear line let us wish the commission Well in its sordid one of its assignments is to gather evidence of the effect of pornography on no empirical studies Are common sense suffices to Tell us that the effect is bound to be in an rated love is the one four letter word that never is Young people who see these calisthenic performed with no sense of Beauty or affection or will find promiscuity society has a right to protect its moral fabric from the stains and rot of messes commission will Tell us that the Racket in porn is that organized crime is behind much of the that sexually explicit films and magazines constitute a purulent infection in the body we know All will the commission Tell us what effectively can be done about it c Universal press Syndicate