IS ANSWER TO LA RIOTS MORE FEDERAL DOLLARS? YEAH, RIGHT!

Are you sick to death of the glib pronouncements offered by so many on the national news media about "the root causes" of last week's rioting following the Rodney King beating case? Are you as sick as I am of liberal commentators who are certain that "Reagan-Bush budget cuts" are the root of the problem? Columnist George Melloan offers a powerful antidote to the fashionable media cliches and to the widely prevalent nonsense.

"No doubt many people really believed the glib pronouncements (on network TV news/comment shows) that the outburst had its roots in Ronald Reagan's repeal of the War on Poverty.

"In fact, Ronald Reagan and the Democratic-dominated Congresses of the 1980s did not repeal the War on Poverty. It still is expanding, pretty much in accord with the grandiose LBJ design and certainly at far more cost than even the free-spending LBJ could have imagined. In real dollar terms not counting the enormous rise in Social Security costs in the 1980s federal spending on social programs increased 20 percent during the Reagan years.

"George Bush has continued the expansion. On the very day of the worst rioting there came a routine announcement from Washington that 25.4 million Americans are receiving food stamps, a record ... The president's proposed budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers federal housing assistance programs, was up 14 percent from the year before. Spending for community and migrant health centers, health care for the homeless and other health services for the poor was boosted 21 percent, to $7.6 billion.

"American states, as well, have continued heavy social welfare spending to the point of wrecking their budgets. New York, California and Florida, among others, are facing increasing financial difficulty, in part because they have nearly exhausted their capacity to tax industry and the well-off for the support of large groups of unproductive people.

"The U.S. War on Poverty hasn't been curtailed, it has simply failed. Instead of eliminating poverty, it has subsidized it, at a public cost ranging into the trillions. The poverty lobby in the U.S. desperately claims that there is nothing wrong that more money won't cure, and that is the message being trumpeted around the world ....

"America now is supporting a very large welfare population characterized by unwed mothers and idle teenagers, who turn easily to crime and hooliganism. The police in major cities, including Los Angeles, have in effect lost control of the streets to gangs that have grown prosperous on drug money. These hoodlums roam at will, fighting with each other over turf and intimidating decent people of all races who come into contact with them. Their depredations keep their neighborhoods poor. Businesses steer clear of crime-infested neighborhoods for reasons made abundantly clear last week. And yet radical chic politicians and commentators justify the actions of these young toughs on grounds that they are engaged in `social revolution.'

"Amid the images of youths black and white enjoying an orgy of wanton crime in Los Angeles last week, there were other images. CNN was professional enough to occasionally shift the cameras away from heavy-breathing pundits and politicians to ordinary working people, black and white, caught in the maelstrom. They weren't complaining of police brutality, but of the unconscionable slowness of the city's mayor, California's governor and President Bush to bring sufficient power to bear to regain control of the streets. ..."

National columnist George Melloan

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I pause to note one fact about the Los Angeles riots that must not go unnoticed.

The weekend before last week's not-guilty verdict, L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates issued a public warning to his community. Gates said that authorities had better be prepared for widespread violence in the event of an acquittal of the officers on trial in the Rodney King beating case.

For his trouble in issuing this warning, all the trendy media voices, together with assorted political "activists", immediately denounced Chief Gates as a racist.

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Readers Beat Watchers

A study of 3,000 high schools in Mississippi and North Carolina found that those who read newspapers perform twice as well in current events tests as those who watch television newscasts. The study by the Southeastern Education Improvement Laboratory studied students who watched TV news in their classrooms. They did no better on current events tests than pupils who had not seen the broadcasts.

excerpt from Missouri Press Association Bulletin