proposed by Josh Sugermann in his new book, NRA: Money-Firepower-Fear, as we move beyond the twenty-fifth anniversaries of the firearms assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Reducing the Investment Gap and Employing

Youth in Infrastructure Repair

Reducing the investment gap that exists between the United States and its major competitors has become perhaps one of the defining metaphors of the 1990s.

Above and beyond targeted economic development and housing policy that employs highrisk youth in the inner city, we must incorporate the employment of high-risk young people into the process that reduces the investment gap and increases productivity.

Estimates of the infrastructure bill vary from the $30B to $40B that will be needed simply to refurbish the most deteriorating bridges and roads to the $500B investment during over the next decade proposed by New York City investment banker Felix Rohatyn.

We endorse public sector jobs for both public works and public service. We believe that the jobs can be administered both through public agencies and through non-profit community development corporations. Whatever the level of expenditure on public works -- and, we hope, also on public service -- the goal should be to employ a substantial number of high-risk youth.

Employing Youth in High Technology

High risk inner city youth and persons who are getting off of welfare must not be left out of the employment that is generated by military conversion to high technologies in domestic sectors to close the investment gap. There already are partial models for how this can work. If high-risk young people are channeled into university education through "I Have A Dream" and related programs, their chances of employment in high tech industries are improved. But even if their education ends with a high school equivalency degree, we need a national policy that plans on their job involvement in high tech operations and the industries that serve them. For example, in France, in the city of Lille, there is a training center for computer maintenance by high-risk and disproportionately minority-foreign-born youths who have no previous work experience. The program is based on a contract with a corporation that deals in computer maintenance and computer networking services.

Replacing Fool's Gold with Responsibility

The contemporary dialogue on the legacy of the Kerner Commission is being framed with words like children, investment, replication, reinvention, bonding, leadership, responsibility and sacrifice.

These words need to replace many of the words used over the 1980s and early 1990s. The latter were sold as fool's gold, in our view, to try to distract the public from the federal government's decision to disinvest and to allow economic conditions to deteriorate for the middle class and the poor. In particular, fool's gold was sold in the form of supply side economics, enterprise zones, volunteerism, self-sufficiency, partnerships and empowerment.

These latter terms do have their place. Enterprise zones could contribute, eventually, to well-resourced multiple solutions. Most successful initiatives need and use volunteers; Head Start is a good example. We need to replicate the principles of ventures like Delancey Street which are financially independent. Linking remedial education, training and placement, as in Job Corps, is a partnership we need. Sufficient investments will give to disadvantaged more power. The concepts only become fool's gold when they are pro-offered as panaceas. That is what happened over the 1980s.

Levels of Investment to Fulfill the Kerner Commission

The Kerner Commission asked the nation "to mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problem." For the initiatives in this report, our estimate is that mounting to scale means $15B more in annual appropriations for each of ten years to implement the recommendations for investing in children and youth. This covers funding Head Start preschool at levels that come close to three years for all eligible three, four and five year olds (and some two year olds), creating the national Corporation for Youth Investment, overhauling job training and placement and starting to bring expenditures back to pre-1980 levels, refocusing anti-drug initiatives to prevention and treatment, and implementing promising inner city school reforms -including refinement of the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965, implementation of the recommendations form the several Carnegie reports, replication of the Comer plan, replication of programs like "I Have A Dream" if evaluations show them to be successful, and continued innovation in vocational and apprenticeship programs like Project Prepare and Project ProTech. The prime federal funding agencies for these ventures are Labor, HHS, Education and Justice.

The interrelated need is for $15B more per year in annual budget appropriations for each of ten years, at a minimum, to implement the recommendations for reconstructing the inner cities and for closing the investment and productivity gaps. The bulk of this funding is for employing the poor, welfare recipients and high-risk youth in the urban reconstruction. The work will expand housing and rehabilitation delivered by non-profits as well as by those forprofits, like TELESIS, which can integrate multiple solution youth development into economic

development. Our budget here also covers repair of the urban infrastructure that employs inner city residents, creation of community development banks in the inner city owned by people who live there, expansion of tenant management in public housing, employment of those new community and problem-oriented police who live in the inner city neighborhoods where they patrol, and pursuit of those high tech investments linked to military conversion that generate jobs for high-risk youth and welfare populations in the inner city. The prime federal agencies are Labor, HUD, Transportation, Commerce, Justice and a new, independent National Development Bank.

It is this level of investment — a minimum total of $150B in appropriations for children and youth and a minimum total of $150B in appropriations for coordinated housing, infrastructure and high tech investment -- over a decade at least, and not the $1.2B, one year response by the federal government after the 1992 Los Angeles riot, that begins to address the Kerner Commission's "scale equal to the dimension of the problem."

Sources of Investment Funding

As structural reforms at existing expenditure levels are enacted to improve the present federal job training and job placement program and the present low income housing delivery system, we also can begin to secure new funds first by eliminating or retargeting other existing programs. For example we can save nearly $5B per year by increasing demand side drug prevention and treatment to seventy percent of the anti-drug budget, reducing prison spending and eliminating ineffective programs, like "weed and seed." We also can redirect at least $500M in HHS, Labor, HUD and Justice discretionary and demonstration monies into replicating what already works.

However, most of the increased funding should be based on reductions in the military budget, reductions in the budget of the Agency for International Development, and taxes on the very rich. We support, as well, higher taxes on tobacco and alcohol -- and a gasoline tax as long as lower income groups receive tax credits, so they do not end up paying.

The Timing of a Reform Scenario

What kind of scenario for financing investments in children, youth and the inner city makes sense, given many competing budgetary demands and the priority on the economy and deficit?

Over the 1990s, debt reduction will be a priority, but we also envision public works spending as an economic stimulus, and this may be where some of the reform proposed here can begin. We need to insure that significant numbers of high risk youth are placed in such

employment and that community-based non-profit organizations implement as much as possible. We anticipate some progress toward these goals during the first two years of our scenario.

It also should be attractive politically to move fairly swiftly on reform of Chapter 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, reform of the Job Training Partnership Act, and the delivery of housing and economic development via nonprofit organizations and creative forprofit organizations. This will be especially true if such reform initially can be negotiated without increased federal spending. At the same time, we anticipate at least some progress on shifting drug spending from thirty percent demand side to seventy percent demand side, on discontinuing unsuccessful domestic programs, and on shifting some federal domestic discretionary money from demonstrations and experiments into replicating what already has been demonstrated to work. The net result could be as much as $5B in funds freed up--to begin expansion of Head Start to all eligible children, expansion of Comer-type inner city school reform, expansion of reformed job training and placement, creation of a Corporation for Youth Investment and expansion of drug prevention and treatment. It is within the realm of political feasibility in our view to achieve many of these goals by the end of the third year of the scenario.

Over the first four years, we anticipate significantly reduced military spending, increased taxes on the rich and an increase in gasoline taxes. This is likely to be used to reduce the debt and to finance infrastructure investment and conversion to high tech industries. But we recommend at least some of these revenues also be used to help expand Head Start and reform job training and placement. Our scenario then envisions increased funding for the package advocated here, so that by the fifth and sixth years of reform, the full $15B per year in new investment in children and youth and the full $15B per year in new investment in inner city reconstruction can be sustained while deficit reduction can proceed and a strong military still can be demonstrated.

Once we are up to $15B per year in new appropriations for child and youth investment and $15B per year in new appropriations for housing, community development, community banking, infrastructure development and high tech development that employs, high risk youth and other truly disadvantaged, along with supportive services like community policing, that level of investment should be sustained for at least ten years.

This means that there will be an incremental process through which we work toward the $15B per year child and youth investment and $15B per year in inner city investment levels. Such a process is necessary because it is unreasonable economically and politically to expect all the new funds at once. It also is desirable because incremental increases allow for better managed growth and more orderly administrative expansion of capacity in the public and private (especially non-profit) sectors.

Hence, implementation of the scenario may take in the neighborhood of fifteen to sixteen years -- almost a full inner city generation -- depending on how quickly we reach the proposed levels of new investment, which then are sustained.

Political Feasibility

Public opinion suggests that our plan is politically feasible. For example, in 1992, right after the Los Angeles riots, the New York Times and CBS asked, in a nationwide poll: "Are we spending too much money, too little money or about the right amount of money on problems of the big cities, on improving the conditions of Blacks, and on the poor?" Sixty percent of the respondents said that too little was being spent on problems of the big cities, sixty-one percent said too little was being spent on improving the condition of African-Americans and sixty-four percent said too little was being spent on problems of the poor. The pollers also asked, "To reduce racial tension and prevent riots, would more jobs and job training help a lot, help a little or make not much difference?" Seventy-eight percent of the respondents said that more jobs and job training would help a lot.

Leadership

America found the money to fight the Persian Gulf War, and it found the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to bail out the failed, deregulated savings and loan industry. America can find the money for a true strategy of child investment, youth investment and community reconstruction if there is the right leadership at the very top. We now have that leadership.

Beyond finding the money over the long run for successful and promising programs, we ask that the White House reinvent and reorganize the present cost-ineffective bureaucracy of federal government initiatives for children, youth and the inner city. Only comprehensive, holistic, multiple solutions work. But federal legislation and bureaucracy is categorical, fragmented, narrow, inflexible--and doesn't allow for local, neighborhood-based "one stop shopping" for coordinated services, as is more common, for example, in France. We call for a White House summit, and a follow-up implementing task force, firmly led and controlled by the White House, on Replicating What Works.

Reversing the Betrayal of American Democracy

If we are to reverse the betrayal of the American democracy, we need even more than wise national leaders. In the words of William Greider, in Who Will Tell_the_People, "Rehabilitating democracy will require citizens to devote themselves first to challenging the status quo, disrupting the existing contours of power and opening the way to renewal." Common people must engage their surrounding reality and "question the conflict between with what they are told and what they see and experience."