The Nation's Pulse
Jay, Marshall
(WASHINGTON) -- The Budget of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 1973 stands before me on the desk, five volumes of various sizes bordered in blue, stacked back-to-back, measuring...
...And come next January, just to prove that a little bit of gall can sometimes make the medicine go down, the President will undertake to pass the "'tax, tax" buck to Congress...
...Nor is that all...
...I~t's see what else the numbers say...
...One need only compare the budget sent to Congress by John Kennedy a decade ago, back in the days when presidential candidates and the American people still worried about missile gaps...
...tET 12 The A l t e r n a t i v e ; March, 1972...
...The mind boggles...
...An armament development is going, Russia will soon have-the capability of destroying 95 per cent of our Minutemen missiles even before we retaliate...
...Though the Nixon Administration has promised to keep "America strong," etc., etc., the American Security Council now finds that: a) Russia has over 300 super ICBM's (sS-gs) while we have exactly none, b) the Russian SS-9 delivers 25 megatons while our obsolescent Minuteman delivers just one megaton, c) Russia's total megatonnage surpasses ours by more than 6-1, d) Russia already possesses a missile defense system while we have none, and e) Russia presently leads the United States in nuclear weaponry and is actually increasing this lead...
...Would a thousand hours' study unravel its mysteries...
...Moreover, the Democrat candidates, who fairly tumble over one another promising new programs for the relief of mankind, now yak incessantly about the need to re-order our priorities...
...Thanks to the energy of the National Strategy Information Center, the AmeriCan Enterprise Institute and the American Security Council, evidence abounds Concerning our diminishing capabilities...
...How many more times will GNP be revised downward and the deficit revised upward...
...In high humor with the chapter entitled Improved Management of the Federal Government, or in deep despair with the section on Manpower Training...
...The deficit for next fiscal year will be the third consecutive deficit of whopping proportions, the seventeenth in the past 20 years, the thirty-second in the past 43 years...
...Is there a man alive who comprehends it...
...the funds are and will remain borrowed funds, no less so than if the government had to acquire them from the money market...
...WASHINGTON) -- The Budget of the United States Government for Fiscal Year 1973 stands before me on the desk, five volumes of various sizes bordered in blue, stacked back-to-back, measuring some six inches across the spines, weighing perhaps ten -to-twelve pounds...
...Harry Hopkins said it so well during the 1930s: the secret to success in modern democratic politics is to 'spend, spend, tax, tax, elect, elect...
...Who is to gainsay the estimable George Mahon, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, when he says that the deficit for last year could go as high as $50 billion...
...For fiscal year 1973, these funds amount to $10.7 billion, which when added to the "'unified budget" deficit, gives a true operating deficit (i.e., expenditures less revenues) of $36.6 billion...
...We can't say that Congress didn't have it coming...
...Under Nixon, however, the party of Coolidge, Hoover, Taft, and Eisenhower -- none of whom was ever recorded as a Keynesian -- has been mixing up a batch of its own special elixir, which will be bottled under the label, "spend, spend, elect, elect~ tax, tax...
...No, wait...
...It is possible that the Administration is awaiting the counsel of Charles Reich...
...A GNP of that size would mean a net increase over fiscal year 1972 of $98 billion, or the largest increase for any single year in the nation's history...
...For fiscal year 1973, according to the Budget, there will be outlays of $246.3 billion and estimated revenues of $220.8 billion, leaving an estimated deficit of $25.5 billion...
...In that decade, when the population increased about 9 per cent, the federal budget has grown 21/2 times -and, as our Sainted Milton (Friedman) likes to say, that means about 2r times as much chaos as there was before...
...The sad fact of the matter is that we have already re-ordered our priorities: in 1968, the government spent approximately 45 per cent of its budget on national defense and related matters, and 32 per cent on "'human resources" (as it is now called...
...The interest on that debt will gobble up somewhere between 17 and 20 cents of every tax dollar collected by the federal government from individuals and corporations...
...Meanwhile, the Nixon Administration has Cut our effective military spending by only, about 25 per cent...
...What, indeed, has happened to the Republican Party...
...The national debt by 30 June 1973 will total $493 billion, one-fourth of which will have been incurred during the administration of Richard Nixon...
...for fiscal year 1973, those figures are reversed...
...Let's see...
...But since even the President has indicated that 1973 will be only a "'good" as opposed to a "'great" year, we may take the GNP estimate as rosy indeed...
...The fiscal year 1973, estimates are based on an estimated GNP of $1,145 billion, a figure that not even Julie and Trica can believe...
...For the better part of 40 years, the Democrats possessed an exclusive franchise on the distribution of that particular brand of snake-oil, and they made a sizeable political fortune by the simple expedient of leaving the "tax, tax" part of the formula to the Republicans...
...There's a note indicating that these figures are based on the so-called "unified budget" concept, a gimmick that may well be marked as LBJ's most enduring contribution to the political longevity of his successors in office...
...Under the "unified budget," the real deficit is disguised by adding to the revenue side of the ledger the surpluses from federal trust funds, which are administered by the government in a fiduciary capacity...
...by December of last year, the estimated GNP was down to $1,047 billion, and the estimated deficit up to $44.7 billion -- and that with the fiscal year only half over...
...Even the New York Times nods in this direction occasionally...
...Cordially, Roger D. Tyrrell We have already published several essays on America's decreased military influenge...
...Where does one begin...
...Two-thousand two-hundred and seventeen pages of bureaucratic duckspeak, annotated by multi-colored charts, graphs, tables -- and numbers, numbers, numbers...
...When Milton Friedman gets his copy, where does he begin...
...Perhaps the numbers will help...
...Is there anything we can do about this...
...Consider, for example, last year's track record (recalling, if you will, the President's prediction that it would be a "great" year): in January, 1971, the estimated GNP was $1,065 billion and the estimated deficit a piddling $23 billion...
...When the government undertakes to place them on the revenue side of the ledger for budgetary purposes, it is engaging in statistical sleight-of-hand...
...The deficits during Richard Nixon's first term of office will total approximately $125 billion, or more than double the $54 billion total accumulated during Lyndon Johnson's last four years in office...
...But still, the nagging question returns: what has happened to the Republican Party...
...A.Memo to the Editor Dear R. Emmett: Are you aware that the American Security Council has recently done a study of America's defense in comparison with the Kremlin and found us to be in a bad way...
...What, God save us, has happened to the Republican Party...
...These include social security trust funds, railroad retirement trust funds, and the like...
Vol. 5 • March 1972 • No. 6
