‘Newsman, Reform Thyself’

Regarding David M. Shribman’s “Newsman, Reform Thyself,” Opinion, April 28, 2006: Amen. The New York Sun’s Kolby Yarnell reported on July 8, 2004, that “fewer Americans read literature” nowadays and that the “drop is steepest among the young.”

Isaac Asimov has written that the ideal entertainment device is the printed word. But children don’t read much these days because whole-word-whole-language teaching makes them dyslexic.

Who can take pleasure in that which he does poorly? What fun is it if you’re not sure whether the story says the police have a lot of detectives or defectives, if one is on a trail or a trial, whether the mayor is mad because they’re uniformed or uninformed, whether the historian claims the relationship of two events is causal or casual, or whether the poet on the beach felt a great calm or a great clam?

The nation-wide total of actual Scholastic Aptitude Test verbal scores above 750 dropped to 1,226 in 1991 from 2,817 in 1971 (with the same number of testees – 1 million).That’s a drop of 56% among our best and brightest. The caring newsmen seem to have been hiding under their desks.

CHARLES M. RICHARDSON
The Literacy Council
www.tlc.li
South Setauket, N.Y.

‘The Oil Windfall’

Almost anyone proposing a windfall profits tax would get a long yawn. But when a pundit as sophisticated as Michael Kinsley is putting it forward, it warrants a serious reply [“The Oil Windfall,” Opinion, May 1, 2006].

Mr. Kinsley asserts that “Diverting them [the windfall profits] to the Treasury would have no effect on the incentive to extract more oil from American ground.” This is what Henry George reasoned when he put forth his famous proposal for a “single tax” on land in 1896.

He reasoned, as does Mr. Kinsley, that people just happen to have their land and if they are lucky it becomes scarce and they reap (according to George) unearned profits. Therefore, if the government would raise all its revenue by taxing the income of landowners, there would be no ill effects on resource allocation.

This is Mr. Kinsley’s reasoning exactly, if you substitute oil in the ground for land. But as economists long ago showed, if you want anyone to devote resources to developing the productivity of land by using resources to make it more fertile, find out in what use it is more valuable, etc., you better not tax their profits away because they will have no incentive to engage in these activities.

Ditto for the oil companies: If you want them to use resources to pursue additional supplies of oil to fight the current shortage, taking away their profits can only reduce their incentives to do so.

DAVID M. O’NEILL
Manhattan
Mr. O’Neill is an adjunct professor of economics at Baruch College of the City University of New York.