Tilting at Windmills.

• Author: PETERS, CHARLES
• Position: Column

Red Light Runners * Ivy Singles * Lady Lawyers Suspicious Surpluses * Corona and Verona * The Buckley Conflict

TREASURY SECRETARY PAUL

O'Neill made a speech on March 31, suggesting that the government "should be able to close down businesses that do not meet a mandated level of workplace safety" reported The Washington Post. Apparently, O'Neill had not read another Post story that week which began, "The Bush administration yesterday ordered the suspension of a Clinton rule that would have significantly strengthened the government's ability to deny contracts to companies that have violated workplace safety, environmental, and other federal laws" This appears to be another case, like EPA's Christie Whitman and global warming, where the subordinate is right and the White House is wrong. Maybe we'd be better off with a Bush administration in which the inmates run the asylum.

MY FEAR THAT GOVERNMENT IS attracting less than the ablest young people has been confirmed by Seth Stern in an article for the Christian Science Monitor. Less than a third of the graduates of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy are entering the federal service. And the same is true of slightly more than a third of the graduates of Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. The situation is sufficiently dire that Harvard's Kennedy School of government is forgiving loans to students who agree to serve as Presidential Management Interns and giving free tuition to some students who commit to three years of public service after graduation.

IF JASON DEPARLE'S New York Times' articles on welfare didn't convince you that getting a job doesn't end the problems of welfare recipients, be sure to read Katherine Boos "Does Welfare Make You a Better Mother?" in the April 9 New Yorker. Boo describes a single mother whose departure from welfare has in many ways been a success story. She's a policewoman, holds another part-time security job, and supports her family of four. But even with a good heart and the best intentions in the world, she doesn't have enough time for children. One incident after another tellingly described by Boo makes clear what her children are missing and the pathetically inadequate array of resources available to help her, the most miserable of which are the D.C. public schools (including, by the way, the charter schools that were supposed to save us).

The great irony is that the biggest backers of making welfare mothers work are the same conservatives who urge middle-class mothers to stay home. Why is it good for welfare mothers to work, and not for middle-class mothers? I remember making this point to my friend Mickey Kaus just as he launched his on-the-whole- admirable campaign to get liberals to face the need for welfare reform. But Mickey brushed it off, saying it was more important for the welfare children to have the example of a working adult. A good point, but it didn't and still doesn't answer their need for a mother. Liberals also find the news difficult to face because they are so anxious to defend the right of mothers to work that they don't want to acknowledge any downside that can't be cured by quality day care.

The Peters solution for welfare mothers with small children: part-time work which would satisfy Mickey's point and high-quality day care while that work is being done, which should make my fellow liberals happy.

The only problem with the Peters solution is that, although I planted its flag a decade ago, I definitely do not see an army, or even a few stragglers, when I look behind me.

IRS EMPLOYEES GIVE THE WRONG advice on tax questions about half the time. Investigators from the Treasury Department's Inspector General's Office posing as taxpayers were given incorrect answers to 47 percent of the questions they asked IRS employees who answered the agency's toll-free help line. Thirty-seven percent of the calls didn't go through.

What's the explanation? For the wrong answers, I suspect the grotesquely complicated internal revenue code that Congress has created is a major culprit. When the income tax was begun in 1913, the instructions took only one page. Today, only a genius in both law and accounting could be expected to answer all the questions. But 47 percent wrong is high enough to suggest that the IRS needs better people. And it needs more...