El Toro, Cont’d
Professor John L. Graham has just discovered four old Southern California Association of Governments reports evaluating Camp Pendleton as an alternative airport site. He states that Pendleton is back on the table and represents the people’s choice. He is wrong. The Marine Corps is “unequivocally opposed” to siting an international airport at Camp Pendleton. This official position is not likely to change.
Graham believes the Marine Corps mission of power projection from the sea is obsolete. Those whose business is to wage war when diplomacy fails and international trade fails to keep the peace know better. Unlike in past conflicts, today’s maritime commanders have improved technology that allows them to choose lightly defended or unopposed areas of the shoreline to land troops. That’s why Marines need the beaches at Camp Pendleton. They are the nation’s 911 force and I’ll wager that our Congress wants to keep them that way.
Graham leads the reader to believe that an act of Congress changing the Marine Corps’ mission is just around the corner. Congressman Issa, within whose district Pendleton lies, reports that it is “not in his interests” to respond at this time. It also should not be in Congressman Cox’s interest, whose district encompasses El Toro, not Pendleton. The chances of Congress giving up part of Camp Pendleton for an international airport are slim to none.
It is reassuring, however, to note that Professor Graham agrees new airport capacity is needed. His only problem is where to locate it. He would export Orange County’s air travel demand to at least 40 miles from Irvine. Expanding LAX is OK as long as Irvine doesn’t have to see or hear an airplane. It is OK for the minority populations of El Segundo, Hawthorne and others around LAX to bear the brunt of “environmental justice.” It is OK to let the people in San Diego County deal with Orange County’s air traffic demand.
There is an easier solution, professor. It’s El Toro. It has been an airport for over 50 years and is ours for the asking. Opponents have inundated the public with slick brochures full of misinformation. They claim El Toro is unwanted, unneeded and unsafe. It is time to debunk the theory that if you stretch the truth as much as you can, and as often as you can, the masses will believe.
Brig. Gen. Art Bloomer (ret.)
(Bloomer is executive director of the Orange County Regional Airport Authority, former commanding general of the El Toro Marine base and a former Irvine councilman.)
Tax Cuts
The Big Mo has arrived for George W. Bush. His tax-cut plan is being embraced by Republicans eager to recapture the high ground on “their” issue, and the Democratic minority is finally admitting it can’t win the argument against tax cuts. There’s no denying that this is an important change in the government’s approach to the mounting budget surpluses.
The Democrats’ support for tax cuts is notable: Their preferred cut of $800 billion over 10 years is four times as big as the major Republican tax-cut initiatives of the last Congress, all of which the Democrats opposed. That’s a nice start. But Bush’s $1.6 trillion tax cut is a better start.
Still, even Bush’s tax cut is only 50% of the projected on-budget surplus over the next decade. It’s also quite a small reduction as a percentage of the overall tax burden when compared to the Reagan and Kennedy tax cuts. And it’s only 10% of the total personal income tax revenue that the government will consume over the next 10 years.
Complicating matters will be competing tax proposals from various business groups, which are lobbying for various tax credits and deductions to defray the burden of the corporate income tax. While lowering taxes on corporations is important, it should not be done by complicating the tax code further. If businesses want lower taxes, they would be well advised to argue for lower rates for every company, not targeted breaks for some.
In fact, the preference for simplicity over complexity in the tax code is one of the strongest reasons to favor the Bush tax proposal. In addition to reversing the Clinton tax hikes of 1993, it makes the marginal tax rates flatter across the board, specifically by creating a new 10% bracket for low-income workers, expanding the middle-income brackets, and lowering the overall top rate. Under Bush’s plan, moving from one income bracket to the next will be a less painful tax trip thanks to this “flattening” of rates.
If Bush really wants to keep government within reasonable limits, he could do far worse than to integrate real bracket creep protection into the tax code. After all, if the economy grows as a result of his tax cuts,and there is substantial evidence, based on history, that it will,then Bush needs to protect taxpayers by making sure they don’t get hammered by high future tax burdens as a result of real bracket creep.
But this is only Round One. There’s a long way to go until the Senate schedules debate on Bush’s modest tax plan. That should give the White House plenty of time to prepare for Round Two of tax cuts. There will be a Round Two, right?
Stephen Slivinski
(Slivinski is a fiscal policy analyst at the Cato Institute, www.cato.org,
in Washington, D.C.)
