The Reagan Budget

...Reagan should increase the number of budget examiners in the Office of Management and Budget, which is nothing less than his administrative strong right arm...

...Ah, but why not finance defense spending out of large reductions in the non-defense sector of the budget...

...That represents a 17.8 percent growth in only one year--far greater than the growth in GNP and about one-third higher than the anticipated growth in federal outlays...

...That is a tax " c u t " of sorts, to be sure, but it hardly qualifies as the irresponsible giveaway that Carter forces termed it during the campaign...

...House Document No...

...is part of the United Nations, it had to be a bit more circumspect...

...Ford had submitted before leaving office...

...PATCO's highaltitude demonstration blast was all that was necessary...

...L e t me be specific...

...Our scholars leave Western statesmen dumb before those who still wish to see and hear what Solzhenitsyn calls "a proud, principled and open defense of freedom...

...but no one should imagine that success in this will come easily to him...

...And almost all of it is indexed to inflation, which means that entitlements rise in lock-step with rises in the Consumer Price Index...

...A Carter deficit of that magnitude would occur in the context of a weaker defense and a more bloated central government...

...it is of only marginal use in getting Congress to accept requests for guts in existing programs...

...And higher deficits lead to higher interest rates and higher inflation...

...and the new (since 1975) congressional budget process provides it witb a greatly enhanced capability for making independent judgments about the budget in all its fiscal ramifications...

...If" a study published early this year entitle...

...Other changes in Income Security and related programs cited in the CBO study could produce over $15 billion in savings...

...No one should doubt that there are large opportunities for savings in the hundreds of programs that comprise this one-seventh of the budget...

...But the immediate problem is budget recommendations for 1982, when the new administration, will be faced with the prospect of a deficit that, with large increases in defense spending and few offsetting cuts in domestic outlays, may approach the $55 billion mark...

...Almost the entire amount falls within what is commonly called the "uncontrollable" portion of the budget: Outlays are required by existing law and are alterable only by a positive act of Congress...

...Liberalism's claim to be universally true and beneficial is belied in a world split apart...

...Having lost any measure of man but his state of preservation, they become incapable of making a reasoned distinction between noble and base aspirations.~ Solzhenitsyn advises us, his friends, that "no one on earth has any other way left but --upward...

...Certain radical organizations abetted, it is rumored, by Friends of the Earth, became determined to break the Society's stranglehold on the Third World's image...

...The third and most dispiriting lesson is that nobody knows what works...

...The practical question is whether, given the relatively few weeks available to them before the February deadline, the Reagan people will be able to identify yery many of them...

...In a sense, the development was inevitable, and we should not be surprised to see these weapons of mass destruction migrate into the profit-making sphere...

...in 1982 alone, according to CBO estimates, that would save $4.8 billion, rising by 1985 to $13.9 billion...

...Reagan's intentions...

...Most of the outlays for these latter two categories are technically in the discretionary-that is, controllable--portion of the budget, requiring annual authorizations and appropriations...

...For he is required by law to submit to Congress within weeks of his taking office any changes he wishes to propose in the budget requests left behind by the outgoing Carter administration...

...With defense spending and interest on the national debt removed, total federal outlays for fiscal 1982 are currently estimated at just over $470 billion, an increase of almost $50 billion, or 11.7 percent, over spending in 1981...

...Still, $61 billion in revenues foregone is, other things being equal, $61 billion added to the potential deficit for FY 1982...

...Paradoxically, he will have to be willing to swallow hard, gulp once or twice, and permit an increase in federal hiring in several key areas...

...A political science that has become contemptuous of universal doctrines is blind to the nature of Marxist regimes as well as liberal ones...

...It is astonishing but true that the number of budget examiners --approximately 200--has not risen since 1950, while the federal budget which they are responsible for examining in detail has increased fifteen-fold...

...As one of PATCO's officers pointed out, there is nothing like the sight of a mushroom cloud where LaGuardia airport used to be to persuade pilots that they ought to go land someplace else...

...The Reagan deficit will result from a badly needed first step toward restored military strength and reduced federal claims on our national wealth...

...And by the time the Senate and House agree, there is no telling what the final package will look like...

...The entry of nuclear weapons into the private sector will almost certainly have an effect on the behavior of the free market...

...Its own nuclear weapons development program is now cranking full tilt on a crash basis...

...On the basis of its interview with Van Cleave, CQ reports that the Reagan budget for 1982 "is likely to include substantial new outlays for existing programs, plus funding for such items as a new manned bomber, an accelerated deployment scheme for the new MX missile, production of the so-called neutron bomb and an expanded Navy...

...But not all deficits are created equal nor are they all equal in their long-term consequences for the nation...

...For that reason alone they present opportunities for large savings...

...What will make it possible for him to do so is of course the instrument of the federal deficit...

...The upshot of all this is that the Reagan revisions to the fiscal 1982 budget may well be able to target reductions in domestic outlays approaching the $20 billion level...

...These are the two areas in which it gives evidence of wanting to cooperate...

...Religion can therefore be tolerated in a modern polity only when the faithful no longer take religion and its possible truth seriously...

...Solzhenitsyn's demeanor, which offends most of the contributors to Solzhenitsyn at Harvard and even its publishers, complements his argument, for he personifies a quality which is antithetical to the spirits of both Christianity and liberalism, but is the peak of Classical virtue: megalopsychia--greamess of soul, or pride...

...Second, he ought to encourage Congress to beef up the audit staff of the General Accounting Office...

...Undoubtedly, too, there will be some form of personal income tax rate cuts, even if not as neat and clean as the 10 percent across-the-board cut that Reagan will request...

...The morality of modern liberalism is nothing more than obedience to the laws that make peace possible...

...Chrysler, for one, makes no bones about it...

...No doubt some such analysis was underway even before the election, conducted by a task force headed by former OMB Director Caspar Weinberger...

...Thousands of Americans have flocked to Chrysler showrooms to sign up for a K car.' We still pretend that we are doing this in order to sock OPEC in the gas pump, but it's just the result of unchecked nuclear proliferation and all that goes with it...

...The Society's photographic expeditions, sent in search of ever more exotic bare-breasted women, were victimized by sporadic attacks...

...The federal government has warned us of the dangers of smoking cigarettes, but that warning will be as nothing once the tobacco growers' leaf-launched missile is deployed...

...But this method of reducing federal outlays is known in liberal rhetoric as "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor, the elderly, the minorities...

...To be sure, if balancing the budget were the new administration's fondest desire, this 17.8 percent rise in revenues would look delectable, because the budget would then finally be in balance--and neither the President nor Congress would have had to lift a finger to accomplish that...

...but as Herbert Stein has pointed out in a recent issue of the AEI Economist, the former may well preclude the latter for at least the next several years...

...Practically everyone agrees that a revenue increase of that magnitude is dangerous to the nation's economic health and ought somehow to be trimmed back...

...But everyone knows that it does...

...The answer to that is implicit in the phrase I used earlier, "given the politically available options," and I shall discuss it in more detail later in this article...

...No matter how much advantage a president may enjoy by way of initiative in budget drafting, Congress still retains the power of the final say...

...That step alone justifies the outcome of the 1980 election...

...Q00~06~oO~QgI900QQO~0QmOQ~ggOOOOOOQ~ODQO~00Q0oQ0~IQO0Q00o0Q~m0QQQ~O~Q0O0o~O00Q0Q00OQ~OQO~OO~00~0m00060~OQQ~QQOtgQQQ~OD0OQm~g00O0O0~0OOmOOOQ O Karl O'Lessker THE REAGAN BUDGET A budget for the candidate who said, "The Time is Now...

...and veterans benefits, programmed to cost just over $23 billion next year...

...To think about the profundity of liberalism's difficulties is to have begun our ascent...

...If the preservation of one's own body is one's greatest (and most justified) concern, how could it ever be reasonable to risk one's life for any person or principle...

...He is confident, and with good reason, that he will attain that goal too in another year or so and appears willing to pay the political and economic price of a "Reagan deficit" in order to get started on his defense and taxreduction programs...

...All opinions compatible with the metaphysical dogma of this "humanistic autonomy," that the first principle is the individual human body, are tolerable...

...No president should be expected to wage a self-destructive campaign that he can't possibly win...

...It is that Congress makes a difference...

...but of these several, like Impact Aid and the College Student Loan Program, have powerful middle-class constituencies and others are targeted on minority youth unemployment, which is presently running close to 40 percent...

...If only because of its immense costs, this is a place where significant budget cuts could be made...

...So management was not far behind...

...Four years earlier President Carter seized the occasion to propose what we now know to have been disastrous changes in the FY 1978 budget that Mr...

...The granddaddy of non-governmental nuclear forces, as everyone knows, is the now-aging fleet of B-47 bombers acquired in the mid-1950s by the National Geographic Society...

...Late last summer the Carter administration announced what it called a focused tax cut package that would provide $27.6 billion in tax relief during the current (1981) fiscal year--S15.7 billion for business, $11.9 billion for individuals...

...When President-elect Ronald Reagan sits down with his advisors to consider budget recommendations for the first fiscal year of his administration, he will be forced to confront--as policy maker rather than campaigner--a set of facts that may well make him wish he had gone into some other line of work...

...The total revenue loss then would be about $61 billion, out of an anticipated current law increase of $107 billion...

...All the rest of the federal non-defense budget (including international affairs but excluding interest on the national debt) for 1982 is expected to cost $101.5 billion in outlays...

...By every indication his two most cherished policy goals are a strengthened national defense and a reduction in incentive-destroying tax rates...

...I believe he will...

...Carter will recommend in his lame-duck 1982 budget requests is still not known at the time this is written...

...Reagan's opponents never tired of pointing out during the campaign, produce yet another massive federal deficit...

...The most recent Reagan tax proposals THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 19 involved a 10 percent across-the-board cut in personal income tax rates in each of the next three fiscal years...

...President Reagan may well be tempted to call for a level of defense spending approximating that of the Kennedy years--something like 8 percent of gross national product compared to the 5.2 percent of the current fiscal year...

...True, this has been one of the unintended consequences of the investment tax credit scheme...

...But at sea or in the air, it's a different story...

...Directed against what he called " t h e Congressional desire to add-on to every old program and to create new programs funded by deficits," the veto can be a powerful weapon in the battle for fiscal restraint...

...its latest shareholders' report maintains that customers will now be more readily coerced into buying K cars...

...It turns out that the average corporation can invest in nuclear forces and, taking advantage of accelerated depreciation schedules, write off most of the cost...

...One is in the staffs of the Inspectors General of the various departments and agencies...

...And this means, if current revenue and outlay projections are anywhere near accurate, President Reagan's first budget will contemplate a federal deficit in the neighborhood of $30 billion...

...For the moment let me only say that neither the new 97th Congress nor any likely to ,be elected in the foreseeable future will permit major reductions in nondefense spending--more than 80 percent of which, be it noted, goes for income security, health, veterans benefits, and interest on the national debt...

...This would give the I.G.'s an added capacity not only to ferret out fraud and abuse more effectively but also to develop new techniques to make them harder to commit...

...It seems a safe bet, however, that tax reductions on the order of $40 to $50 billion will be enacted for fiscal 1982...

...Reagan's principal defense advisor, William 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 R. Van Cleave, has been described by Congressional Quarterly as "a longtime advocate of a 'quick fix' infusion of cash to catch up with the Soviets [and whose] charge is to tell Reagan what is needed without regard to 'political realities' like budget ceilings...

...And that means that, as outlays are currently projected for next year, the new administration would be looking at a $50 billion deficit...

...Nor will Mr...

...Liberalism is transformed into the welfare-statism or socialism and finally the nihilism of liberal intellectuals only when they try to elevate the vulgar passions for equality and material wellbeing to principle...

...The 97th Congress will heed President Reagan's call for truly significant (as opposed to Carterite sleight-ofhand) increases in defense spending...

...It is necessary only to intone "subscribus Geographicus sum," and one can travel throughout the known world in perfect serenity...

...There is hardly any category of military activity that does not badly need the sort of improvement that only money can buy, whether it be better pay for better personnel, restoring the B-1 bomber to production, reversing the attrition of our naval forces, procuring adequate supplies of materiel for training and stockpiling, or any of a multitude of critical needs...

...But the cost of moving ahead in all areas of need simultaneously would be not only staggering but fiscally and politically impossible...

...We know from long experience that government auditors almost always repay their salaries several times over, both in recovering and in preventing wrongful expenditures...

...The Tobacco Institute, for example, understands this very well...

...Because Hobbes' doctrine is grounded on a universal fact of human nature, it should be universally applicable...

...Nor should President Reagan expect anything more in the way of deference from the tumultuous satraps at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue...

...The Senate will undoubtedly adopt the 10-7-4-2 accelerated depreciation plan which the Finance Committee itself approved last August...

...WillPresident Reagan even then ask for a $61 billion tax cut...

...Taxes: The most controversial of the Reagan budget proposals will involve revenues...

...etc...

...And third, Mr...

...This is because sharply higher defense purchases can be financed only out of higher federal deficits or higher taxes, either of which is detrimental to new investment to increase productivity...

...D THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 21...

...all the more so in light of his insistence in the latter stages of the campaign that he would not even contemplate anything that would impair the structure of social security benefits...

...In that the W.H.O...

...By the time the rest of us were able to figure out what was going on, it was far too late...

...Then came enormous cobalt devices, ostensibly designed to destroy tumors but, in reality, powerful enough to knock down an airplane if aimed skyward...

...The most obvious political defect of liberalism, as Hobbes and his critics anticipated, is that it cannot sustain military courage...

...In a village in Borneo they sprayed the houseflies and the roofs caved in...

...At least they had the luxury of trying to do only one thing, but that is not a luxury our policy makers can enjoy...

...A subtler but perhaps more intractable dilemma h a s to do with the tradeoff between national defense and productivity...

...No matter how strongly he may yearn for a return to the fiscal discipline of a balanced budget, that is simply not his first priority...

...Laffer Curves to the contrary notwithstanding, it can't happen, at least not immediately...

...The largest would result from setting a " c a p " on cost-of-living adjustments to social security benefits--permitting indexing to rise to only 85 percent of the rise in the CPI...

...At first, it was just a matter of promoting the use of radioactive isotopes in basic medical research...

...No doubt that will provoke raucous jeers from liberals and cries of anguish from conservatives, and the decibel level 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 will not be greatly lowered by the President's confident (and accurate) predictions that the 1983 budget really will at long last be balanced...

...The second major lesson is one that ought to be obvious but often isn't, especially to a newly elected president and his advisors...

...However minimal these laws might be, modern politics does not require--nay, forbids--individual appeal to any higher moral or religious principles...

...the Kennedy tax cut of 1962 was held out as exemplary...

...I have already cited OMB projections for a 1982 tax bite increase of $107 billion if no changes are made in existing law...

...Let me cite THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 17 only the few that should be of greatest moment to the incoming Reagan administration...

...The fact that these goals are, if not mutually exclusive, at least incompatible, should not deter Mr...

...the functional category known as Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services, scheduled to rise to $34 billion in 1982...

...That would add almost $90 billion to 1982 outlays and even more to budget authority compared to the Carter projections...

...But a tax cut of that magnitude accompanied by a large increase in defense spending will, as Mr...

...First, and most obvious, the federal budget does make a difference to the state of our economy...

...But the major program review effort will have to wait for preparation of the FY 1983 budget, and it is then that we can anticipate important savings over what a reelected Carter administration would have provided...

...For years, we have been coerced into shelling out billions for preventive health programs and all we've got to show for it is a stepped-up arms race...

...By way of illustration, CBO has identified six possible reforms that could produce spending cuts totalling $3 billion in fiscal 1982...

...There is a multitude of lessons buried in that brief melancholy history...

...Other devices, too, are available to him and he will have to use whatever he can get his hands on...

...That's why the World Health Organization also made the decision to go nuclear...

...Or to put it rather more accurately, given the politically available options, it is almost impossible accurately to estimate the consequences of a set of fiscal policy choices...

...Given fewer appropriations accounts to handle, each examiner would be far better able to identify, if not fraud, then certainly waste and abuse in those accounts...

...it is an empirical proposition so well grounded in experience that no one today--least of all the activist liberal economists who have guided the Carter administration--would deny it...

...So it will--and every new president in living memory has pledged to make such an effort...

...The National Geographic Society doesn't like to make much of the fact that its influence in world politics rests on the bedrock of its secure second-strike force...

...But now with Republican control of the Senate, chances for passage of major elements of the Reagan tax plan will surely be improved...

...And in his definitive economic policy statement of last September, Mr...

...This incensed the Grosvenor family and all three generations of them decided to put an end to this impudence...

...comfort from the parallel fact that, in the absence of any change in our tax laws, federal revenues will increase by as much as $107 billion next year, nearly half ($47.4 billion) of which will come in the form of higher individual income tax payments...

...Presidents Nixon and Ford both enjoyed considerable success in forcing Democratic Congresses to reduce spending in specific areas (though not in overall budget aggregates...

...But it would not be surprising if Van Cleave's recommendations were to call for an increment of perhaps $20 billion over the latest (July) Carter projections for outlays and budget authority in 1982, bringing the figures President Reagan will propose next February to almost $200 billion for the former and $215-220 billion for the latter...

...Those then are the very general dimensions of the FY 1982 budget problem with which the President-elect will have to wrestle even before his inauguration next January...

...The other major tool which President Reagan will have at his disposal for controlling government spending is the veto power...

...Supply-side stimulus will almost certainly result from a tax cut, but not before the deficit rises well above what it would have been without the cut...

...Nor is Congress likely to try to block him...

...If so, that will just about compensate for the likely increase in defense spending and will not therefore serve as any kind of offset to the $61 billion tax reduction he plans to request...

...Airline pilots, having refused to comply with PATCO's demands for periodic slowdowns, had to be brought into line...

...Although Hobbes' doctrine does not require a petty materialism in everyday life (one is still free to indulge the "lust of the mind" for knowledge), the common desire for material well-being is likely to be ubiquitous...

...Karl 0 'Lessker is senior editor of The American Spectator and Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University...

...Reducing the Federal Budget: Strategies and Examples, the Congressional Budget Office offered illustrations (not recommendations) of savings that could be achieved in the Income Security portion of the budget...

...But will other things be equal...

...When supply-side economic theory first came to prominence a few years ago, its proponents argued that a large tax cut would generate economic growth of such magnitude that lost revenues would quickly be regained, and with interest...

...John Nollson CHRYSLER'S NUCLEAR SHOWROOM The American people have been sobered by the announcement that the Chrysler Corporation is now in possession of its own strategic nuclear strike force...

...What major changes may we expect then from a Reagan as compared to a Carter budget for FY 1982 ? It will be useful to look at the question in the context of the principal budget aggregates--defense, non-defense (excluding interest on the national debt, which is effectively not subject to change in any given fiscal year), taxes, and the possibility of savings through reduction of waste and fraud...

...Nonprofit organizations have long realized the utility of independent nuclear forces, not under governmental control...

...Other major segments of the domestic budget include health programs, which next year will account for $72 billion in outlays most of which is uncontrollable...

...At first believing Congress to be only a larger and somewhat more heterogeneous version of the Georgia state legislature, Carter was surprised and angered by Capitol Hill reluctance to adopt his proposal for what would have been a sharply inflationary $50-per-person tax rebate for practically the entire population...

...That they were able to take advantage of their tax-exempt status to acquire them on the cheap has only inspired businesses to follow in their footsteps...

...We cannot defend liberalism without an awareness of its weaknesses as well as its strengths...

...A familiar dilemma, one I have already alluded to, is that of balancing the budget while lowering taxes...

...Even here, however, the stimulus package that emerged from Congress a few months later was significantly different from the one Carter had proposed in February 1977, with higher spending jammed into a shorter period...

...And the Democratic Congress, like a child after a tonsillectomy . b e i n g told that ice cream is not only not bad for him but is positively salubrious, only too eagerly accepted the new president's request to pump unneeded billions into an economy already rapidly recovering from its recent slump...

...000 National Defense: For as long as he has been a national political figure Mr...

...He does not urge a return to either the Middle Ages or the early optimism of the Enlightenment...

...Non-defense Outlays...

...Given the political and congressional constraints against cutting these programs, it is likely that the Reagan budget for 1982 will call for holding the line on most of them at an outlay figure close to the increases that inflation alone would dictate, with perhaps marginal decreases in social services grants to the states...

...The Reagan administration is intent on achieving enhanced levels of both...

...The most chilling of them is this: J u s t to keep pace with inflation, federal spending in fiscal 1982 will have to be almost $72 billion higher than it is this y e a r ' - - a n amount that includes no new domestic programs and no improvement in our national defense beyond what has already been programmed...

...He spoke often and fervently about "waste, extravagance, abuse and outright fraud in Federal agencies and programs" and acknowledged that "it will take a major, sustained effort over time to effectively counter this...

...Moreover, getting it through Congress would take a near-miracle: Republicans as well as Democrats quail before the anticipated fury of senior citizens...

...96-344...

...For President Reagan to propose something like it would be to incur heavy, in all probability intolerable, political costs...

...This year, too, that has been one of the central themes of his candidacy...

...A colleague of mine has enunciated his First Law of Ecology: You can't do only one thing...

...That will not be a problem in 1985, however, because by then the sum of federal receipts will have risen to such heightshnearly a trillion dollars even with the Reagan tax cuts--as to produce a tidy budget surplus...

...Given this experience, it was similarly inevitable that the nuclear question would invade labor-management relations sooner or later...

...In one such, three of the Society's tripods were destroyed in a lightening raid by a nomad sapper team...

...And Hobbes insists that it is true as well as salutary...

...Reagan take much "Except as otherwise noted, all figures in this article are taken from Office of Management and Budget, Supplemental Summary Fiscal Year 198l Budget, J u l y 22, 1980...

...But the veto is really effective only against add-ons...

...Nuclear weapons are of little use in the customary struggles between workers and capitalists, given the fact that these struggles usually occur at close range...

...This came as an enormous revelation to Jimmy Carter after a few months in office...

...Of that total for next year, $305 billion will go out in the form of direct payments to individuals--slightly more than half of which will be social security benefits...

...It is inconceivable that he as president would settle for no more in the way of defense spending than the Carter administration has projected for fiscal 1982--$177 billion in outlays and $194 billion in total obligational authority...

...The result, with which we are only too bitterly familiar, is the unprecedented inflation of the last three years--a result which, more than any other factor, led to Mr...

...That Solzhenitsyn believes our most fundamental danger to be intellectual, not military, has been made perfectly clear in his two recent statements in Foreign Affairs, as well as by the fact that he chose as his forum a scholarly journal...

...Then came the need for small amounts of enriched uranium to fuel ever more powerful X-ray machines...

...Every significant change reverberates throughout the economy in nearly incalculable ways--and the Reagan people will want to make dozens of significant changes all at once...

...Reagan sided with the skeptics: His advisors produced estimates showing that by the time the Reagan tax cut plan is fully phased in, it will yield an annual (in 1985) revenue loss of $192 billion while stimulating additional revenues of only $39 billion...

...Reagan has deplored the progressive weakening of our military capability and has called for that trend to be reversed...

...These together would siphon something like $61 billion out of that $107 billion automatic tax increase...

...Strategic theorists at the better universities, for example, look upon the test of wills between the nation's airlines and the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization as a textbook case...

...The returns--in terms of increased sales and heightened corporate prestige--already look impressive...

...Carter's defeat at the polls...

...The two main instruments a president has for doing anything about waste, etc., are the Office of Management and Budget, which has the responsibility for examining and recommending to the president a budget request for each of the one thousand appropriations accounts into which the federal budget is divided, and his own veto power...

...Other components of the payments-to-individuals category include unemployment compensation, public assistance, federal employee retirement and disability, and a variety of other programs administered by the states...

...This is not a truism...

...This was all the more surprising to him because the same Congress had reacted so enthusiastically to his request to add almost $20 billion in outlays to the Ford budget request for the same fiscal year...

...We needn't try to decide here whether Congress was smarter or dumber than the President in all this...

...but what Mr...

...The Society's ascendency in the Third World, one of the outgrowths of Pax Americana, had to be placed on a more stable long-term footing...

...Even the more liberal and Democratic 96th Congress showed unwonted zeal in voting for higher defense spending than the Carter administration had asked...

...In fact, the origins of W.H.O.'s deterrent can also be traced back to the 1950s...

...Any offset to it can only come from what Reagan himself last September called "One of the most critical elements of my economic program . . . the control of government spending...

...But most economists, conservatives as well as liberals, were never persuaded...

...In this way, the World Health Organization acquired control of a global network of nuclear installations...

...Reagan from irlcorporating them both in his February budget requests...

...for 1982 that would reduce revenues by something like $48 billion...

...The outcome on tax reduction is less predictable...

...And he has endorsed an accelerated depreciation schedule (the 10-7-4-2 plan worked out by the Senate Finance Committee last Augus 0 that would lower business taxes by $13 billion next year...

...No one should doubt the sincerity of Mr...

...But Governor Reagan campaigned all this year on a well-conceived pledge to cut income tax rates by 10 percent across the board and to provide business with some form of accelerated depreciation...

...But it is worth mentioning here because there is such strident disagreement among economists of all persuasions as to just how much difference the budget makes in a number of key areas--the price level, for instance, or unemployment or productivity...

...Now all of this together would not add up to an additional $90 billion, nor could the services spend anything like that sum even if they were authorized to do so...

...Today, membership in the National Geographic Society is the equivalent of ancient Roman citizenship...

...Not that the airport itself needed to be destroyed...

...It is enoug h to note that it had a mind of its own and stuck to it...