Letters: Apr. 28, 1997

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After reading about the ancient computers and costly inefficiency of the IRS, I had to check the date of your story to make sure I wasn't reading your earlier article about the FAA. I am not sure which makes me angrier: the waste of my tax dollars on worthless fixes or a system that allows cheats to get away with tax scams. We must urge Congress to allot the IRS enough money to achieve the efficiency that is our right. The public will pay one way or another, and I prefer to get a system that will take us into the next millennium instead of allowing petty thieves to siphon off money for personal use. CATHERINE MERGEN Bloomingdale, Illinois

While I did not agree with everything you said about the IRS, your five-point proposal for improving it rings true and echoes a five-point plan unveiled last month in a speech by Treasury Deputy Secretary Lawrence Summers, who is charged with looking after the IRS. His plan requires Treasury and the IRS to 1) strengthen oversight; 2) improve flexibility, cutting away the bureaucracy and using outsourcing wherever appropriate; 3) improve budgeting, particularly for investments in information technology; 4) proceed with tax simplification to make the tax code easier to enforce and 5) put in place the leadership from the commissioner on down to carry the IRS into the 21st century. Your choice of these same five principles suggests that a consensus is beginning to evolve around the key elements for reinventing the IRS. HOWARD M. SCHLOSS Assistant Secretary (Public Affairs) Department of the Treasury Washington

AMERICA'S DYING CULTURE

Your review of cultural historian Garry Wills' John Wayne's America [BOOKS, April 7] and the story on Heaven's Gate converged to give us a double-barreled glimpse of our national uneasiness. The cultists' pitiful yearning for spiritual safety in a topsy-turvy world and the Wayne admirers' desire for a presumably safer, vanished world are simply different reactions to the fact that we're living in a dying culture.

There are two Americas: the original American Republic we know from history books and personal experiences, and the subterranean shadow Republic that has been taking shape since the turbulent '60s. It is this struggle between the dying First Republic and the burgeoning Second Republic, not the end of our millennium, that is haunting the American people. The only way to save our national sanity is to acknowledge the existence of the Second Republic so we can deal realistically with the problems that led to its birth. And the sooner the better! MARC RANGEL New York City

A HOME RUN

Jack E. White's commentary on baseball's Jackie Robinson [ESSAY, March 31] should be required reading--not only for multimillion-dollar utility infielders but also for every young person who aspires to be anything. It is powerfully eloquent in its simplicity and brevity, which should well serve a generation that has the attention span of a strobe light. MIKE KALLAY Honolulu