KINDER'S COMMENTARY: CONTRASTS ABOUND IN THE NATION'S SHIFTS ON CULTURAL ATTITUDES

In ongoing notes from the culture war, this week offered a dramatic contrast. Which side do you want your government on?

What was it, three weekends ago, that somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million men converged on the mall in Washington, D.C., to confess their shortcomings as husbands and fathers, banish racism, worship God and declare their intention to do better?

In his daily fax update to Dr. James Dobson and other readers, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council offers the following pithy summary of Clinton administration initiatives since that historic weekend. "Let's see now," Bauer writes. "In the aftermath of the Promise Keepers event just three weeks ago, the Clinton administration has resurrected the child care debate [over whether the federal government should get into the child-care business], celebrated gay sexuality as exhibited on ABC's "Ellen," vetoed the partial-birth abortion ban and called for a global ban against the right to life. The common thread in each of these actions is [ITAL] separating children from their parents " (Emphasis original.)

Bauer is correct when he says what most parents really want "is more time with their children, more earning power and lower taxes." In the face of this, liberals such as the Clintons, who have cheered on the growth of government all these years and now want to grow it a lot more, claim that the answer to the real problems parents face with day care is for the government to step in and run it, or subsidize it, or both.

Back about 1950, when my parents' generation were starting out to raise their families, the average American family paid just 2 percent of its income in taxes to the federal government. Today that figure is about 25 percent and, when all levels of government are counted, it is over 40 percent. This a scandal. It is morally wrong.

There is nothing wrong with any supposed day-care "crisis" that couldn't be fixed by major, across-the-board tax cuts for all working Americans. The cost of government and its demands on families' pocketbooks has at least three dimensions. There is an economic dimension, a time-for-family-activities dimension and a moral dimension. If Republicans begin again to make the moral case for such tax reductions, they can seize the high ground and change the subject from Hillaryoid It-Takes-A-Village visions of government-run day care.

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News on the welfare reform front continues to amaze. "Since last August," says U.S. News and World Report, "when President Bill Clinton signed a GOP-sponsored measure to `end welfare as we know it,' the number of Americans on cash assistance has plummeted by 1.7 million, by far the biggest one-year decline in the history of welfare. The new law, plus previous state ... efforts and a booming economy, have plainly prompted this free-fall."

Look for more free-falls ahead as millions more recipients get the new signals.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.