The Week

■ Bernhard Goetz has been ordered to pay $43 million to his mugger. The jury wanted to send a strong message that mugging with a fancy lawyer in court is eight million times more profitable than doing it with a sharpened screwdriver on the subway.

■ The ease with which Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and their troops budded under pressure on the minimum wage betokens an emptiness at the center of the Republican Congressional agenda. For nearly two years the GOP has neglected the pocketbook concerns of average voters, talking instead about budget-balancing and Medicare-fixing that by some time in the next century might have reduced long-term interest rates enough to make it easier to re-finance your mortgage while the Medicare Trust Fund inches its way back into solvency—according to the latest CBO Trust Fund report, of course. No wonder the minimum wage seems like a vivid issue by comparison. Meanwhile, on other economic issues, House Majority Leader Dick Armey is on the right track with a package—now endorsed by Gingrich—that is likely to include the $500-per-child tax credit (the GOP’s lone recent stab at serious middle-class tax relief) and other measures to get the government’s hands off people’s take-home pay. Gingrich and Dole are on the right track, too, with their call for a repeal of Clinton’s gas-tax increase. But as long as Republicans are tame about taxes Clinton will co-opt them; he already has his own package of tax credits and is making favorable noises about a gas-tax repeal. The GOP can reach for bolder stuff—actual cuts in tax rates—or run on empty all the way to November.

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■ Bernhard Goetz has been ordered to pay $43 million to his mugger. The jury wanted to send a strong message that mugging with a fancy lawyer in court is eight million times more profitable than doing it with a sharpened screwdriver on the subway.

■ The ease with which Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and their troops budded under pressure on the minimum wage betokens an emptiness at the center of the Republican Congressional agenda. For nearly two years the GOP has neglected the pocketbook concerns of average voters, talking instead about budget-balancing and Medicare-fixing that by some time in the next century might have reduced long-term interest rates enough to make it easier to re-finance your mortgage while the Medicare Trust Fund inches its way back into solvency—according to the latest CBO Trust Fund report, of course. No wonder the minimum wage seems like a vivid issue by comparison. Meanwhile, on other economic issues, House Majority Leader Dick Armey is on the right track with a package—now endorsed by Gingrich—that is likely to include the $500-per-child tax credit (the GOP’s lone recent stab at serious middle-class tax relief) and other measures to get the government’s hands off people’s take-home pay. Gingrich and Dole are on the right track, too, with their call for a repeal of Clinton’s gas-tax increase. But as long as Republicans are tame about taxes Clinton will co-opt them; he already has his own package of tax credits and is making favorable noises about a gas-tax repeal. The GOP can reach for bolder stuff—actual cuts in tax rates—or run on empty all the way to November.