Letters

From the March 1995 issue

Budget Bunkum

Apparently Dave Barry ("All I Think Is That It's Stupid," Dec.) does not fully understand "budget cutting" in Washington. He said, "If we're spending $853 trillion on some program now, and next year we spend any less, that's 'budget cutting' to them."

He has got it all wrong! If we're spending $853 trillion on some program this year, and the agency asks for $983 trillion for that program next year, but Congress gives them only $973 trillion for that year--that is budget cutting in Washington!

Stanley A. Cohen

Bethesda, MD

Whose Body?

There's more to why radical feminists oppose reproductive technology than Wendy McElroy reported in "Breeder Reactionaries" (Dec.). In defending abortion, feminists argue that the fetus is a part of the mother's body and therefore her property. Their assertion becomes obviously false when mother and offspring are living miles apart. Today, children are conceived in vitro and kept as embryos in cold storage tanks. Artificial wombs are in the works, and if the theory is correct, men will be able to carry a child to term. One day, technology will enable a child to live outside the woman's body for the full nine months of prenatal development.

The "woman's body, woman's right" defense of the choice to kill by abortion
is bound to fall as reproductive technology becomes sufficiently sophisticated. Today's feminists are well aware of their crumbling foundation.

Doris Gordon

National Coordinator

Libertarians for Life

Wheaton, MD

Presidential Prevaricators

Thomas W. Hazlett's December column "Clintonomicus" gives the mistaken impression that Clinton's economic advisers are principled individuals who stood up and voiced their concerns over Clinton's health-care price controls. Bob Woodward may have accurately described Laura Tyson and Alan Blinder's opposition to price controls during closed-door policy meetings, but after 565 economists (including Mr. Hazlett) sent President Clinton a letter in January calling on him to eliminate price controls from his health care program, Tyson and Blinder publicly denied that plan contained price controls and claimed that the economists were "misinformed" and "had not read the proposal." Ms. Tyson publicly asserted the absurd notion that there were "fundamental economic differences" between price controls and price caps.

Less than two months later, at a policy luncheon where reporters continually quoted passages from the health care bill, Tyson finally showed what the National Journal called "a glimmer of intellectual honesty...she allowed that 'there are controls' in the section of the plan that requires regional alliances to establish a fee schedule for services to patients who choose a fee-for- service insurance plan."