Reform: a correction of faults or evils.
– Webster’s New World Dictionary.
Reform: a correction of faults or evils. – Webster’s New World Dictionary.
If you read newspaper headlines and the titles of ballot propositions, you’d have to conclude that California is or soon will be a much better place than it recently was. For that word “reform” is all over the place.
Everyone loves reform, especially headline writers and politicians. Every proposed change, for good or ill, is billed as reform.
When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa campaigns to take over control of his city’s massive school district, he calls it reform, even though there is no evidence similar takeovers by other big-city mayors have produced significant educational improvement.
Villaraigosa wants to take authority to hire and fire school superintendents away from the elected school board and he wants direct control over dozens of underachieving elementary and high schools. That would be change, for sure. But Villaraigosa has no background whatsoever in education, was not a particularly good student and offers no solid plans for the schools he seeks to take over. So where’s the evidence this would be reform?
Other headlines have drug “reform” advocates opposing plans to give judges the authority to impose short jail terms on drug offenders who relapse while in the rehabilitation programs set up under the year-2000 Proposition 36.
Since reform means improvement, by definition, that means the headline writers have decided for the rest of us that it’s better to send drug addicts to rehab than to prison, even when they are repeat offenders. Again, keeping druggies out of jail was change, but there’s a lot of reasonable doubt about whether it has improved anything.
Politicians love that word reform, too. When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger spent more than 40 million taxpayer dollars on last year’s special election, he maintained the five ballot initiatives he sponsored were such vital reforms it was worth the money to pass them nine months before the June primary, when they could have gotten an up or down vote at no cost.
The Schwarzenegger measures would have created change aplenty, in everything from state spending practices to teacher tenure, from once-a-decade legislative and congressional redistricting to labor union political donations. Plainly, the voters did not agree these notions were improvements, They defeated all five measures and ensured that the money spent on the special election was a complete waste – a subject Schwarzenegger avoids like the plague.
Now activists are back with a bunch more so-called reform propositions. These also might create some changes, in areas from abortion to regulating where probation officials can place released sex offenders and from energy research to property taxes.
But would a $50 parcel tax on every property in the state really be reform – change for the better – when the plan would levy an identical new tax on an oil refinery and a taco stand, a 1,000-unit apartment building and a one-bedroom condominium? There could be no more regressive form of taxation, no matter where the money it produces would go (in this case to public schools). For this measure would tax rich and poor identical amounts. Some reform.
All of which means it’s high time headline writers learned to substitute the word “change” almost every time they are tempted to call something a reform.
Maybe it’s time to circulate yet another proposed initiative. This one should require immediate dismissal for any reporter or copy editor who uses the word “reform” anywhere except on a clearly marked opinion page. And instant automatic recall of any politician who tries to label a bill or ballot proposition “reform.”
Some might call these suggestions an infringement on the First Amendment right to misuse words to mislead readers and voters. But shouldn’t it be up to voters and not headline writers or special-interest-funded politicians to decide when a proposed change is really a reform?
Elias is author of the book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated second edition. His e-mail address is [email protected]
