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With the first hundred days of the Contract with America now a part of history, I figured it was time to read the contract.
Actually, I just read the short versions of its 10
provisions. The full text of the bold plan by Rep. Newt
Gingrich, Rep. Dick Armey, and the House Republicans to
Change the Nation
teems with convoluted prose like
This provision of our bill repeals the significant
facilities test and exempts real estate agents and
community board members from liability for monetary damages
in lawsuits if they acted on a good-faith belief that the
community was exempt.
The above is part of the Fairness for Senior
Citizens
provision, and if I understand it correctly,
it allows for segregated housing by permitting certain
communities
to prohibit children, or indeed, any
resident under age 55.
Permitting real-estate developers to forbid children in
residence is a curious way to acknowledge the central
role of families in American society,
but this
provision does acknowledge the central role of the
real-estate industry in financing Republican campaigns, and
you can't have everything.
The Contract teems with similar contradictions. It's okay to live off the government and hustle some extra money on the side if you're retired. But not if you're on welfare. Hey, welfare is welfare, whether it comes from the Social Security Administration or the county department of social services.
It's good for middle-class moms to stay home with their children, but it destroys the moral fiber of welfare mothers to stay home with their children. Either stay-at-home moms are a social benefit or they aren't, and you'll never determine which from the Contract.
Another fun one to figure out is the provision that members of Congress live by the same rules as the rest of us.
So how many of them turned down their public-financed health-insurance so that they could live like the rest of us -- shelling out plenty every month for insurance that probably won't cover anything anyway, or waking up in a cold sweat when a child coughs at night?
How many of them turned down one of the most generous pension programs in the world, to spend their sunset years living on Social Security?
Apparently there are some circumstances when it's best not to live like the plebeian rabble, but I didn't see the exceptions in the Contract.
Then there's the National Security Restoration
Act.
For starters, it implies that we once had something
called national security,
which was in excellent
condition but has deteriorated, and thus needs to be
restored -- kind of like an antique rocking chair you find
at a garage sale.
We will be secure, the Contract assures us, if we are
prepared to win two major regional conflicts
simultaneously.
When has the U.S. ever been capable of fighting two
major regional conflicts simultaneously
? Just fighting
one, in Vietnam, took up more budget and manpower than the
nation was prepared to spend indefinitely. Restoring
here means expansion,
not restoration.
The Contractors promise to ban unfunded mandates
-- that is, federal regulations which impose increased
expenses on state and local governments.
But then they've got the Taking Back our Streets
Act.
A state has to impose a minimum sentence of at
least 10 years for violent crimes that involve possession
of a firearm. That's a mandate from the feds; where's the
money?
Well, it might come from the grants for prison
construction based on truth in sentencing.
To qualify,
states must meet arcane formulas based on percentages of
convicted violent offenders who go to jail, length of time
served, etc.
That is, the Contractors say they trust the states to do right, but when you look at the fine print, they're busy inflicting new burdens and requirements on state governments.
In the America of the Contract, states can be trusted to feed the hungry, but not to operate courts or prisons. Are state and local governments more efficient, or aren't they? The Contract implies one thing in some places, and another in others.
Fortunately, there aren't many implications one way or
the other in the Job Creation and Wage Enhancement
Act.
Outside the title, I found very little about
wages, enhanced or otherwise, and absolutely no mention of
Dick Armey's proposal to repeal the minimum-wage law.
Anyway, the Contract folks kept their word, and got a vote in the House for each provision during the first 100 days of the 104th Congress.
And I can't wait for the second 100 days to commence.
We'll probably get things like the Domestic Security
Restoration
(block grants for guards at gated
communities), Enhanced National Resource Recovery
(greater subsidies to corporations engaged in logging,
grazing or mining on public lands), and Dollars and
Cents Legal Reforms
(avoid trials altogether and award
the verdict to the side with the greater net worth --
pretty much the same results as now, but at considerably
less time and expense).
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