BLEEDING-HEART CONSERVATIVE SAYS VOTE FOR THE SENIORS TAX

This is one bleeding-heart conservative with a well-honed aversion to taxes who'll be voting FOR the Senior Citizens tax proposal on the ballot this Tuesday. For less than $10 a year to the average homeowner with a car, we can fund a program that will allow our less fortunate elderly neighbors to remain in their own homes far longer than would otherwise be the case.

How do you place a value on the resulting independence and self-esteem that that means?

These people will be frugal with the money generated, and can be counted on to deliver lots of services in an efficient manner. As Jim Grebing's news stories today indicate, other counties (each of them poorer than Cape) have recently passed the tax with good results.

I was on the fence, and not that well-informed, until I took the trouble to study the issue this past week. You should do likewise, and then vote YES on a small tax levy that can do so much for our elderly neighbors.

Another footnote. This is local people helping local people in the finest American tradition. No federal or state boondoggles here, with a vast bureaucracy to support.

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Speaking of federal boondoggles, I continue to be astonished at the number of otherwise intelligent people who decry this country's "lack of an energy policy."

Let's see, when was it that we did have an energy policy? Oh yes: In the late '70s, President Carter persuaded the Congress to pass a massive federal "energy policy" bill that regulated everything and got the government into allocation of supplies.

Result: Shortages, gas lines and skyrocketing prices. The late '70s "energy crisis" was truly manufactured in Washington, D.C. Not even OPEC could have done that kind of damage to our economy. All this helped push us into hyperinflation, rising unemployment and finally, the deepest recession in 50 years. We were years recovering from the catastrophic effects.

In 1980, along came Ronald Reagan to sweep Jimmy Carter from public life, and immediately announce that his administration had no energy policy except the market. Eliminate controls, get out of the business of government allocating supplies, and let the market work, said Mr. Reagan.

Result: Real prices paid for energy fell through most of the 1980s, the booming oil patch of the American Southwest went bust, and shortages and gas lines with their resultant friction became bitter memories. It was like a tax cut every time you pulled up to the pump. Americans were paying less in real dollars at the pump last summer than in 1973. Today, post-war, there is a worldwide oil glut that is further depressing prices.

Further, falling real energy prices meant that component of all prices throughout the economy was dramatically lessened in the '80s. The resultant benefits enhanced American history's longest-ever peacetime expansion with low inflation.

But we need an energy policy to protect the environment, we are told. Oh, yeah? A federal energy policy is really just more government command of our lives, with socialism its true face. And who did more damage to the environment than the socialist economies of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe? Even some ardent environmentalists are awakening to the fact that market economies have always protected the environment better than any command society ever could.

Now, a bunch of reactionary voices decrying the "lack of a federal energy policy" want to take us back to the late '70s.

Me? I like the market. And so do the American people. If only some of our leaders would step forward and answer the reactionaries who are trying to force us back into gas lines, in the name of enacting an "energy policy."