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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (May 31, 1993)
31,199] la P at the Jntil Fitti. ; la 8s and / 9, 9 sec- finishers ' l ' smarted the front s r led un- o^le and lampion oversial f the 200- d the rest f runner- tarter. ters were '■ing the 1 race i n fered a it knee in rio s son, Sunday 's team- '85 Indy both es- na nal saw the the number [eels. be a battle The Aggies n the first, 'urth, three n the ninth tart of the irough go- ;s, striking ■o Tar Heel Opinion Monday, May 31,1993 The Battalion Page 5 iw Fedora n as many ng a triple d triple as er five Tar nnvincing A College ghout the rson said, ggressive III e home tse with rte only region- hampi- rmer of me be- and the al State vhen it a Tim > Hein- Trojan s, sur- [ - on Us and i in the run in out of CztMli/AL Cop£. V idiots! i To VeTo /wb7“ To G '«oy M p M [OtoJAtA I 1—JurJe '?3 -J The Battalion Editorial Board Jason Loughman, editor in chief Mark Evans, managing editor Stephanie Patillo, city editor Kyle Burnett, sports editor Dave Thomas, night news editor Anas Ben-Musa, Aggie//Ve editor Mack Harrison, morning news editor Billy Moran, photo editor The Battalion / 100 years at Texas A&M Editorial Criminal code revision Bill needed to keep crooks off streets The Texas Legislature passed a ill Saturday that would double the rison time for violent criminals, ow, it only needs Gov. Ann Richards' signature. The bill requires all violent crimi nals, such as rapists and murderers, to serve at least half of their term, or 30 years, prior to parole. Cur rently, such criminals must serve only one-fourth of their term before becoming eligible for parole. "The people of Texas are tired of being raped and robbed and mur dered," said Rep. Allen Place, D- Gatesville. "This is the toughest penal code that has been written and the punish ment standard (that has) ever been writ ten by the state of However, Richards should not eliminate the whole bill because of one law. It would be like killing a F atient in order to remove a wart. urthermore, the sodomy law is very rarely enforced and is current ly being disputed in the Texas Supreme Court. Texas. The House >assed the pa 113-11, and the Senate had ap- )roved the bill previously. Yet gav rights activists are calling ret gay Richan on Richards to veto the bill because it does not eliminate state law ban ning sodomy between homosexual couples. "If Richards does not veto the anti-gay legislation presented to ier, sne will be supporting hatred and bigotry," said Sonny Hood, spokesman for the Austin Lesbian- ay Political Caucus. Richards should leave the debate about the sodomy law to the judi ciary and concentrate on solving the problems of crime plagu ing the towns and cities of Texas. "The penal code is almost a heroic piece of work by the House and Senate and it needs to go through," said Bill Cryer, Richards' press secretary. The bill includes provisions to: add child molestation to the list of most violent crimes, raise the minimum sentence for capital murder from 35 to 40 years, treat the intentional transmission of AIDS as attempted murder and change the classifica tion of solicitation of a child from a misdemeanor to a felony. This bill would be a great stride toward ending the perception among would-be criminals ot a le nient justice system, providing greater justice for victims and mak ing a safer Texas for us all. The Batt: hotbed of liberal Nazis A&M's student paper aims to please ... no, really! JASON LOUGHMAN Editor in chief H ere begins a new semester of The Battalion, the newspaper that has been described by various readers as either liberal or conservative, communist or fascist. We are, in the minds of some, slav ishly devoted to pinko, left-wing ide ology, and in the minds of others. Re publican zealots. This is exactly as it should be. But whatever perceptions our readers form, we hope they stem from reading the editorials that ap pear here on the opinion page. The text labeled "Editorial" is the only portion of our publication intended to convey the stance of our editorial board on any issue. We write editorials to contribute to that time-honored tradition of the free and open exchange of ideas, a tradition at the heart of any world-class university. Our constant ef forts to seek out the news provide us the necessary infor mation to offer what we hope is an informed and construc tive opinion on a given issue. We understand that everyone will not always agree. Some have even argued that Battalion editorials should re flect the opinions of the student body. However, publishing only popular opinions would mean publishing that which we do not necessarily believe to be true. The day when truth ceases to be a priority at The Battalion is the day its readers should stop picking it up. After all, if we don't believe what we write, why on Earth should anyone else? Just as our editorial board writes editorials, our colum nists write their columns. Their positions, like ours, do not always coincide with the stances of all our readers. Nei ther does the editorial board necessarily agree with the content of any column; hence the boxed disclaimer on each day's opinion page. Last, but in our minds far from least, is the part of the opinion page reserved for our readers — Mail Call. This is your chance to figuratively get up on a soapbox and scream for thousands to hear. Your letters to the editor have made this possibly the most popular section of The Battalion. But we have to get mail to run Mail Call. We never seem to receive enough mail over the summer, so if you ever wanted to see your letter in print there's no time like this semester to write one and send it in. While we hope your ideas as to this newspaper's politi cal identity, whether liberal or conservative, come from the opinion page, we strive constantly to make the news por tion of The Battalion as objective as possible. If at any time you do not believe our news coverage to be unbiased, tell us. I am very concerned about maintaining our credibility and I or my managing editor will be more than happy to listen to any complaints or suggestions you might have. Five English 104 students recently sent us a copy of a re search paper they wrote which they said documented the very bias in our news that we seek to avoid. Though I don't know if, as their paper's title suggests, Benito Mus solini would be proud of The Battalion, and though they drew conclusions about personal motives which did not follow from their data, I am glad they sent it in. If nothing else, such complaints cause us to reexamine our work and to try even harder to keep bias out of our news stories. The authors of the paper also pointed out one or two technical errors and reminded us that inadvertent mistakes can appear to be examples of conscious bias. Hopefully the thought that The Battalion is subjected to such scrutiny will keep us on our toes. In fact, reader feedback is so important that we want to establish a reader's panel to meet with us on a regular ba sis and tell us what they like or dislike in The Battalion. If you would be interested in a position on this panel, stop by and fill out a short form. The reader's panel will be open to students, faculty and staff from as many differ ent backgrounds as possible, to give us the most complete picture possible as to reader concerns. We are proud of what we do here at The Battalion. The collection of C.T.'s, "dead" C.T.'s, non-regs, Greeks, dorm residents, undergraduates, graduate students, liberals and conservatives, males and females and people of all colors that have worked here in the past have pursued the ideals of good journalism, even if those ideals haven't always been attained. We will do no less. Loughman is a senior journalism major ierun of ■he sixth Jl-Tour- the top ded at 1 ' riple to Id pitch pitch- the All- Harris, tanding Granger -ing R e ' ; will d re- ham- iving :ley's there it is ably ; our t me in ie of rles, College Station poverty: lies, damned lies and statistics A ccording to the Census Bureau, 38 percent of the citizens of Col lege Station are below the poverty threshold, giving College Sta tion the second highest poverty rate in the nation for cities with more than 50,000 in population. This ranking rais es interesting questions about official poverty : statistics. [ The study : prompted an edi- i torial in the April- May edition of j “The Touch- j stone," another | one of its many i efforts to put the "so?" back into social ism. I was nonplussed by the editorial's ! conclusion that poverty rates are affect ed not by College Station's high per- ! centage of typically low income stu- : dents, but by A&M's low-level staff, i probably have higher average in comes than students. The Touchstone editorial did not dis cuss: 1) average student income vis-a- vis average low-level staff income, 2) why student concentrations do not af fect poverty rates while low-level uni versity staff concentrations do, or 3) why low-level staff salaries affect the poverty rate of College Station in par ticular but not those of other university cities. In brief, the editorial fails the standard guffaw test. T. J. Eller, the Census Bureau official who compiled the study, said in a tele phone interview that "poverty rates are higher for student populations because student income level is transitory." That is, students defer higher in come into the future, and the deferred income of college students averages $640,000 of lifetime gain. Ellis candidly acknowledges that the Census Bureau uses a broad yardstick to measure offi cial poverty rates; this results in some anomalous cases like College Station. A matter rarely discussed when the Census Bureau releases official poverty statistics is what precisely these Aatis- tics measure. Studies that compare both income and consumption expen ditures show that the lowest fifth of in come earners have consumption expen ditures three times their income. This calls into question the ability of official poverty statistics to measure actual so cial welfare. In 1990, the lowest fifth of income earners, after adjusting for inflation, had greater per capita expenditure than the per capita income of the the median household in 1960. Furthermore, official poverty statis tics do not measure much of the money spent on welfare for low-income peo ple. In 1990, welfare funds spent but not measured by the Census Bureau amounted to $10,499 per poor house hold, about 2.8 percent of the gross na tional product. The lot of the poor has so substan tially improved that their average liv ing standards compare well with those in other industrialized nations. The av erage poor American has twice as much living space as the average Japanese and four times as much as the average Russian. The poor American now lives and eats better than even most Americans have in this century. Using the stan dard poverty measure, nearly 33 per cent of Americans in 1947 would be deemed poor. In 1970, the average American home had 0.62 persons per room. This figure for poor households in 1987 was 0.56. In 1989, 40 percent of poor households owned their homes, typically a three-bed room house with a garage and a porch or patio. There were overall gains during the 1980's, such as personal income and personal disposable income per capita increasing 16.7 and 17.5 percent respec tively in inflation adjusted dollars from 1980-90. The top one, ten, and 50 percent of income earners paid 25.6, 55.8, and 94.4 percent of all taxes in 1990, up from 19, 49.3 and 92.9 percent in 1980. Unfortunately, most of this is lost on those who swear by high poverty sta tistics. Their contention seems to be that objections to them amount to blindly believing Rush Limbaugh and engaging in right wing bullying. The proposed solution replaces "trickle down economics" with the left's "trickle on economics," in which income is redistributed. I suppose the attraction is the simplicity — or better. the simplifying assumption — of the "solution." But because society can consume only what it produces in the long run, ultimately any solution for the poor (and the rest of us) that does not en courage employment and increased - productivity will probably be fruitless. Dickerson is a sophomore economics major Editortolj appearing to The Battalion reflect the views of the ecfitoaol board. Tbey do not necessarily reflect the opinions of other Battalion staff members, the Texas A&M student body, regents, administration, faculty or Columns, guest columns, and Mail Cali items express the cmiraons of the authors. The Battalion encourages letters to the editor and will print as many as space allows in the Mail Call section. Letters must be 300 words or less and include the author's name, class, and phone number. Contact the editor or managing editor for information on submitting guest columns. We reserve the right to edit letters and guest columns tar length, style, and accuracy. Letters should be addressed to; The Battalion - Mat! Call 013 Reed McDonald /Mail stop 1111 Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843 MATTHEW DICKERSON Columnist