State Fiscal Responses to Welfare Reform during Recessions: Lessons for the Future

The 1996 welfare reform transformed open-ended matching grants to states to fixed block grants. This article considers whether, given the new regime, states will be able and willing to meet the need for public assistance during recessions. The accumulation of large balances of unspent federal welfare funds helped states weather the first year or so of the current recession without having to cut programs for needy families. While new fiscal rules promoted positive reform during a period of economic prosperity, they may be leaving states and their most vulnerable citizens at serious risk as the economic and fiscal slowdown continues.     

Analysis of potassium permanganate as addictive drug "precursor"

Potassium permanganate is used for the production of cocaine and methylcathinone. The third convention of the UN against narcotic drugs (1988) contains a list of so-called precursors, substances commonly used for the production of narcotic drugs. The control of the precursors can be a very important step to prevent the illicit production of narcotic substances. A chemical characterization of a seized product may contribute to determine the origin of the producing company and the trade channels and to prevent further illicit deliveries. 31 samples of permanganate (19 authentic and 12 seized samples) have been analyzed for 9 metallic elements. Detailed procedures for the emission spectrography and ICP-analysis are given and the range of concentrations is tabulated. It was surprising that no significant concentrations of metals like chromium, nickel or cobalt were present. Nor was the difference between the technical and analytically pure products sufficient to make a differentiation according to origin. This is probably attributable to the technical manufacture of permanganate by electrolysis. All the statistical analyses of the results performed on the available data do not allow conclusions as to the country of origin or manufacturer, as production batches of one and the same manufacturer may also show differences. Only the morphology of the product (crystals, powder or "free flowing") allows a certain characterization. Nevertheless it seems necessary to analyze all seized samples for impurities and to establish a table of "impurity profiling" in the future in order to receive more information and to find correlations in selected cases.     

Using hydrophilic adhesive tape for collection of evidence for forensic DNA analysis

Known exemplar samples of human DNA have traditionally been body fluids, such as blood, saliva, and semen. In each case, the presence of water is a risk for the bacterial growth, which may degrade the DNA evidence. In this study, the authors have developed a method that employed a hydrophilic adhesive tape (HAT) for collecting DNA evidence. The HAT method was used to remove surface cells from relatively hairless areas on the body. The area examined were ankle, arm, behind the ear, between fingers and back of the neck. The HAT was then dissolved in the extraction buffer. DNA typing was performed at vWA, THo1, F13A1, and FES loci using the short tandem repeat (STR) analysis. Our results show that the samples collected from ear give the best results with a success rate of 100%. All subjects tested by this method had known STR genotypes established from buccal swabs. The authors' results suggest that the HAT method can be used as a less invasive method for collecting biological evidence for forensic DNA analysis. In addition, this collection method should reduce the risk of DNA degradation due to the moisture, which is encountered using conventional collecting methods.     

Reviews

Janos Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, xxvii + 644 pp., £35.00 h/b, £9.95 p/b.

R. W. Davies, M. Harrison & S. G. Wheatcroft (eds), The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, xvi + 381 pp., £40.00 h/b, £15.95 p/b.

Michael H. Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland: Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976–1980. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, xv + 298 pp., $57.00 h/b, $20.50 p/b.

Rein Taagepera, Estonia: Return to Independence. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, xv + 268 pp., £33.50 h/b, £11.95 p/b.

Silviu Brucan, The Wasted Generation. Memoirs of the Romanian Journey from Capitalism to Socialism and Back. Boulder, CO, San Francisco, CA and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993, xii + 227 pp., £19.95.     

Turning Up the Heat: The Impact of Electric Utility Competition on K–12 Education Funding in Ohio

Ohio, like many states, is currently-considering deregulation of the retail electric power industry. This issue is made more complex in Ohio because structural change in the delivery of electric power is also likely to have a negative effect on state and local government revenues. This effect occurs because of three main forces: the elimination of differential property tax treatment of utilities relative to general businesses, the likely decrease in state electricity excise tax revenues as a result of falling power prices and administrative difficulty in taxing out of state providers, and the potential for stranded costs to diminish the taxable value of electric generating equipment. This article provides an overview of these issues and a brief analysis of the extent to which these problems will be shared by other states. The article then demonstrates the impact of deregulation-induced tax changes on both state and local school district revenues in Ohio and concludes with a discussion of how the state's ability to insulate local governments from these adverse fiscal effects is made both more imperative and more difficult by a recent Supreme Court Ruling on school funding Finally, the issues discussed in the article are placed in a more general context of the challenges of adjusting tax policy to changing circumstances     

Racial Vote Dilution: Impact of the Reagan DOJ and the Burger Court on the Voting Rights Act

Since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the subsequentregistration of millions of minority voters, racially basedvoting discrimination has shifted from a strategy of vote denialto one of vote dilution. The VRA, especially Section 2 and 5,is the dramatic congressional effort to eliminate strategiesthat deny effective political participation to millions of citizens.However, the VRA has to be aggressively implemented by the U.S.Department of Justice (DOJ), and it has to be broadly validated,in concrete cases and controversies in federal courts, if itis to blunt the vote discrimination/dilution strategy. Whilethe Warren Court saw Section 5 as a radical but legitimate toolto end the perpetuation of voting discrimination, the BurgerCourt has seen Section 5 in less sweeping terms. And while theCarter administration DOJ aggressively supported minority plaintiffsin federal voting rights litigation brought under Sections 2and 5, the Reagan administration has redirected civil rightspolicy, including the methodology of implementing Sections 2and 5 of the VRA.