Tilting at Windmills.

• Author: PETERS, CHARLES

Nader's Monks * The Louisiana Sell-Off * The Next Revolution Red Barns in Iowa * Red Faces at the Post and Times

ONE OF THE MOST ASTONISHING developments in America's primary and secondary schools in the last 30 years has been the explosive growth in drug use by the pupils. I'm not talking cocaine or heroin, I'm talking about legal drugs, notably Ritalin. It is the best known of the drugs prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. In a Washington Post op-ed Lawrence Diller estimates that four million children are taking Ritalin and one million Prozac or similar drugs. Laurence Zuckerman of The New York Times estimates the users at three to five percent of American schoolchildren. In Britain by contrast, he reports that the figure is "fewer than one percent." One can't help suspecting some pharmaceutical companies in the American wood-pile.

BILL BRADLEY HAD LED AL GORE in New Hampshire public opinion polls for months, but when Gore finally won the primary by a 52-48 margin, the pundits almost acted as if Bradley had won instead of hailing Gore for a come-from-behind victory. Why? One reason is that Gore had, in the 10 days before the primary, overtaken Bradley in the polls and in some for a few days at least he was ahead by a margin greater than he ultimately won by. The other reason is that reporters love a horse race and they don't like to see any candidate anointed too early. They therefore tend to build up the second-place finisher and to disparage any victory less than double-digit. Bill Clinton was helped by this tendency in 1992. It has even affected history. Many people think that Eugene McCarthy won the New Hampshire primary in 1968 and that George McGovern won it in 1972. Actually Lyndon Johnson won in 1968 and did so, incredibly enough, with write-in votes. Ed Muskie beat George McGovern but most people remember that Muskie lost because he cried in the snow. The reason McCarthy and McGovern are remembered as the winners is because that is the impression the media wanted to give.

TWO TRENDS TO WORRY ABOUT on Wall Street are the increase in margin buying and the decrease in long-term investment. Buying on margin, meaning investors borrow up to half the cash from their broker, grew by 62 percent last year. The danger here is that the drop in a falling market will become precipitous as margin-borrowers rush to sell in order to cover their debts. That rush will become especially desperate for those margin borrowers who are also among the millions of Americans who have been ringing up record amounts of consumer debt in recent months.

As for the decrease in long-term investment, 79 percent of the shares of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange were traded last year compared to 46 percent in 1990. In other words, most investment was long-term back then. Now only 21 percent is. On NASDAQ the situation is even worse. The turnover was more than 200 percent last year. This means more people in a hurry to get rich and more people getting involved in day-trading and other lunacies. "Today stock market investors are trading more frequently than they have since the 1920s," reports The New York Times, and you know how that decade ended. Similar turnover also happened in 1901 followed by the Panic of 1903 and again in 1905 followed by the Panic of 1907.

RIGHT-WINGERS HAD BEGUN TO froth at the mouth over recent news stories suggesting that the Clintons were going to ask the government to pay their legal bills. But the president told Larry King on December 23rd: "I've never considered doing that."

My own feeling is that he is entitled to reimbursement for all the fees he incurred until he lied in sworn testimony. This occurred in January 1998. All of Hillary Clinton's legal expenses should be reimbursed. She was never shown to have done anything wrong beyond being excessively defensive. (Okay, she probably did conceal those billing records for a while, but the point is that they contained no evidence that she had committed a crime.) As for the president, Ken Start totally failed to find him culpable in Whitewater, Filegate, or Travelgate. If Ronald Reagan and George Bush...