Disabled Citizens
We were gravely disappointed with your series, "The Disabling of America" (Jan. 22-Jan. 25), for many reasons.
First, your reporters met extensively with members of this team and our clients. We tried our best to be honest and open with them about the nature and complexity of securing and maintaining Social Security benefits for our disabled clients.
Unfortunately, they organized their quotes so that some of our statements appeared out of context and were then misconstrued.
An example of this was the section where one of our social workers was discussing Delmont Williams' need for a payee, and they used her comments excluding the context.
Second, they did us all the disservice of sensationalizing the issue by using reactive lines such as, "Your tax dollars pay for illegal drugs and alcohol."
While they did address treatment issues and lack thereof (our primary concern), the average reader had already absorbed the harmful messages, perhaps before reading the entire lengthy article.
Third, for all their research, they were not able to capture or convey to the public just how very difficult it is for the average poor and disabled person to apply for and receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI).
They made it sound as if people just walk off the boat or out of the bar and onto the SSI rolls, while this is far from the case. In fact, Maryland has the sixth highest SSI turn-down rate in the country.
The application process is complex, the appeals and reconsideration processes are even more complex, and for those lacking an address or housing, the process frequently takes between one and three years, or more.
Fourth, they did not address the very pertinent issue of representative payees, or having a (hopefully responsible) third party manage the recipient's funds in cases where his/her judgment may be impaired due to an addiction or a mental illness.
Although we arranged for them to interview two clients who are participating in two representative payee programs and who have had positive experiences, they did not use this opportunity to produce a balanced look at the impact of payees on SSI recipients.
Lauren Siegel
Baltimore
The letter was also signed by six other members of the social services team at Health Care for the Homeless.
Rant -- and Rave
Boy, the liberals are really ranting about Peter A. Jay's article (letters to the editor Jan. 16, for example) and are astonished that The Sun would print it.
Well, I'm also astonished that the liberal Sun prints his articles, which appear to me, a conservative, to be the most sensible, maybe only sensible, articles appearing in The Sun.
Peter J. Woytowitz
Baldwin
Charity Tickets
If J. D. Considine spent more time mastering the facts and less time playing the role of a rock fan, he'd have a different take on Pearl Jam's recent concerts to benefit the abortion rights group, Voters for Choice.
Mr. Considine wrote on Jan. 13 that the concerts were being held at D.A.R. Constitution Hall because it allows charity events to bypass Ticketmaster.
That's ridiculous. Charities routinely handle their own ticketing with our full blessing.
We would have been happy to aid in the Voters for Choice concerts, and we applaud Pearl Jam for supporting such a worthy cause.
Mr. Considine's misrepresentation needs to be forcefully answered because it reflects a disturbing trend among music writers to continue fanning the flames of last year's ticketing disagreement between Ticketmaster and Pearl Jam.
These writers insist on casting Pearl Jam as the David to our Goliath, conveniently ignoring the fact that Pearl Jam is a clanging cash machine backed by an international record conglomerate and a cadre of high-priced lawyers and lobbyists.
In their biased coverage, they also blithely dismiss the services Ticketmaster provides to millions of satisfied customers.
As Pearl Jam prepares to take to the road, Mr. Considine and his ilk should be openly questioning what all of the hoopla they have helped to create was about in the first place.
Ticketmaster has always maintained that the group was capable of touring without our involvement. And, lo and behold, that's exactly what they're doing beginning this summer.
We, at the same time, will continue to offer the service and convenience that many ticket buyers prefer.
Marla Hoicowitz
New York
The writer is vice president of the Northeast Region for Ticketmaster-New York.
Trash Experts
Let me guess: None of the consultants recommending once-a-week trash collection in Baltimore City (The Sun, Jan. 19) lives in a rowhouse.
The houses and neighborhoods we've inherited weren't built to accommodate ripening trash, indoors or out.
Most rowhouses have no garages and no place to build them. Metal trash cans roll or run away quickly.
Controlling the stray animals and rodents feasting on seven-day-old garbage will cost the city more, I'll bet, than would be saved by laying off trash collectors.
Doing away with half of the city's trash pick-up days is, from this city dweller's perspective, the most environmentally oppressive and short-sighted way to save money I've heard in a long time.
If the city's "experts" had considered the trash issue from the inside, the way we must, surely they could not have concluded that less collection is better.
Eileen O'Brien
Baltimore
Higher Minimum Wage Raises Jobless Rate
Robert Reno's implication that it is difficult to find hard evidence of job loss following minimum wage hikes is simply incorrect (Opinion * Commentary, Jan. 16).
The vast majority of research in this area over the past decade proves that when the government mandates an artificially high entry-level wage, job opportunities for the least skilled are destroyed.
President Carter's Minimum Wage Study Commission, which performed an exhaustive review of all available literature, found that every 10 percent rise in the minimum wage results in employment losses from 1 to 3 percent.
But now there are more important reasons for avoiding minimum wage hikes.
When Kevin Lang of Boston University studied recent increases, he found that low-skilled adults were often crowded out of the job market by teen-agers and part-time students following an increase in the minimum wage.
And Peter Brandon of the University of Wisconsin has just reported that higher minimum wage rates result in lower work force participation among welfare mothers.
This is because low-skilled workers have a much more difficult time competing for entry-level jobs after a minimum wage increase attracts higher-skilled people to enter the labor market.
Thus, President Clinton's proposal to raise the minimum wage actually undercuts his own goal of "ending welfare as we know it."
Richard B. Berman
Washington
The writer is executive director of the Employment Policies Institute Foundation.
Robert Reno's column on the minimum wage shows, once again, the persistent economic fallacies that plague our nation's newspaper opinion pages.
Arguments for raising the minimum wage, typified by Reno's column, run something like this:
1. The current minimum wage has become lower because of inflation.
2. If someone earns the current minimum wage he will be poor.
3. Poverty is undesirable.
4. Raising the minimum wage will alleviate poverty.
5. Therefore, we should raise the minimum wage.
Unfortunately this ignores basic economic principles. A wage is simply a price. A minimum wage, therefore, is a price floor -- a limit on how low that price can be.
A simple supply-and-demand diagram shows that whenever a price floor is set, there is a surplus amount of that item. When a price floor is set on labor, there is a surplus amount of labor that is not utilized -- also known as unemployment.
Who is unemployed when there is minimum wage?
Imagine a minimum wage at $50 per hour. According to the "pro-labor" argument that I outlined above, this would be a wonderful situation because there would be no more poverty -- everyone in the work force would make $50 an hour.
But no government edict can eliminate poverty -- it can only create more poverty. How? Everyone who is already making $50 per hour or more will remain employed, at least in the short run. But all persons whose skills and labor are valued by the market at less than $50 an hour will lose their jobs.
The closet socialists who support a minimum wage know this. That's why none of them has ever proposed raising the minimum wage to this absurdly high level. At that rate, virtually all of America's labor force would be employed.
What happens, then, when the minimum wage is $4.25 an hour, or $170 weekly? Everyone whose skills and labor are valued by the market at less than $170 weekly is unemployed.
People who support the minimum wage suddenly feel better, knowing that no "greedy capitalist" will ever "exploit" a worker by employing that worker at less than the minimum wage. But is it really "socially desirable" to ensure that the most needy stay out of work?
One more observation: People who are just starting a small business and could use some help (like distributing fliers) but can afford to pay only $3.50 an hour are prevented by the law from making this agreement with workers.
Most likely, the person who will work 10 hours a week doing this would be a middle-class teen-ager who wants to supplement his allowance.
This teen-ager might even be in junior high school. The law would consider this an unconscionable case of "child labor" being "exploited" for "rock-bottom wages." But why should such examples of voluntary cooperation be illegal?
Phaedon Sinis
Owings Mills