WASHINGTON REPORT
Sisyphus
WASHINGTON REPORT SOMEWHERE IN THIS PROMISED LAND The whiff of economic grapeshot is smelled across the land. First-aid stations are being haphazardly set-up for the victims, but no basic surgery...
...No milk, but let school kids bite on that apple of knowledge, simple Simon said...
...About one-third are adult women...
...In other areas, the President's budget is also not constructive...
...Could this not, in the spirit of Woodcock's remarks, be a time to fashion a more promising land somewhere other than those whose economies rest upon heroic materialism or Marxism with its ugly moral failures...
...Apparently, they've not much choice, if Fortune magazine reflects the attitude of industrial managers...
...Watergate," of course being a major quake recorded on the political seismographic recorder...
...However, by tolerating such disfigurement of the economic landscape over an extended period of time—as the President indicates he is doing—not only are there economic consequences (breaking, so to speak, the strands of investment) but also political consequences in terms of demoralizing Americans further in their attitude toward their system of government...
...Amid the energy shortage and a publicity-oriented "Project (energy) Independence," more than half of Ford's budgetary requests for transportation is allocated to highways—"the most demonstrably inefficient, high-energy consuming form of ground transportation available," as Martin Nolan of the Boston Globe pointed out in an article...
...Testifying before the Joint Congressional Economic Committee, Simon complained that students "never learn that a man named Adam Smith ever existed...
...But they tend to cancel one another...
...Additionally, the combination of proposed tax-rebates and fees on imported oil, proposed by the President, is also contradictory...
...Too bad the heads of Ford, GM and Chrysler wouldn't talk similarly, instead of flying to Washington to defeat or postpone emission-control standards for motor vehicles...
...There is heard almost no talk in Congress about the future of the dominant mode of transportation —the automobile—successor to the railroads in this capacity...
...The problem, unstated by Woodcock, is that at present the estimated domestic total capacity for bus manufacturing is 5000 annually...
...Last month, the rate reached 8.2 percent—highest in 35 years, at which time it was 14.6 percent...
...The most that is being said, even by members of his own political party, is that the economic forecast, accompanying the President's proposed 1976 budget, is a somewhat honest appraisal...
...In a recent issue, an article stated: "Despite the high rate of unemployment to be sure, a majority of the jobless are not the principal bread-winners of families...
...One of twelve in the labor force will be unemployed on the average this year...
...Except for a few self-serving "told-you-so" statements from the socialist academicians, there appears no recognition among economists and industrial managers that perhaps there should be a restructuring of the economy...
...Walter Heller's definition of an economist as a man who married Elizabeth Taylor for her money has a bruising quality about it today that did not exist when it was spoken in whimsy a couple of years ago...
...Readers should send funds directly to Fr...
...Pushed by his interviewer, Woodcock conceded that manufacturing mass-transit vehicles would not absorb all displaced union members, now on the assembly lines, but: "But if you keep going in a direction where the system's going to fall of its own weight, the loss of employment on a permanent basis could be much, much worse, like the situation we're going through now...
...Industry, the Kefauver studies disclosed, as it becomes more monopolistic in character will raise prices during economic bad-times...
...Twenty years ago, Senator Kefauver, as chairman of an anti-trust and monopoly subcommittee, brought to light for any economist, majoring in other than Ricardo and the Austrian school, the foundations for an inflation/recession economy that now has the nation over a barrel—with or without oil...
...Otto Eckstein of Harvard University, an economist, told the Senate Budget Committee last December...
...When his remarks became known among his UAW political rivals, Woodcock found himself in trouble...
...By implication, Woodcock doubted there'd be a return to the time in which 9 to 10 million passenger car vehicles would be sold a year...
...As an analysis provided by the staff of the Joint Congressional Economic Committee points out, "The total economic impact of $13.5 billion in stimulus and $17-billion in restraint would appear minimal...
...As if this isn't enough to flunk the budget, there is contained a proposed 10 percent increase in Defense Department outlays contrasted with a $9-billion reduction in programs directly aimed at helping the poor or the elderly, and elimination of the school-breakfast and special-milk programs...
...Air transportation, another fuel burner, would receive nearly one quarter of the Transportation Department budget...
...The budget, as a whole, incorporates proposals for both tax rebates and spending reductions in a floundering economy...
...He conceded UAW membership would be hurt, but that displaced workers could, if management would build the facilities, also make the buses...
...Interestingly enough, one speaker on the subject is Leonard Woodcock, president of the United Auto Workers union...
...What the householder may receive in the way of a rebate would be absorbed by increased home-heating costs (SO percent increase in oil prices because of import fees and price decontrol, and a 120 percent increase in average price of natural gas because of decontrol and excise taxes...
...His mission supports 180 poor children in two boys' homes and 60 aged and widows—and also provides hospital care and medicines...
...The narrowness of the Ford administration's response to the problem is demonstrable...
...We can't continue in this direction...
...I can not see how a responsible government could, with open eyes, let the economy sink into such a condition," Dr...
...Among America's "internal aliens," as many as one of three unsuccessfully seek employment...
...Long accustomed to having funds to pad the edge of things, their rising unemployment rate (from 3.7 percent to 4.5 percent for married men in one month) is provoking them into writing whining letters, with undertones of political nastiness, to newspapers and to their elected "governing" officials...
...The Federal Railroad Administration would receive less than 5 percent...
...But they make some sense...
...No one was suggesting the rate of joblessness would reach 24.9 percent as it did in 1933, highest during the most recent Great Depression in our history...
...On the other hand, although more wounded, blue-collars without jobs display an element of stoicism—as if it is to be expected each of their generations suffers misfortunes of some sort—first to die in war, first to suffer the consequences of industrial mismanagement...
...Unemployment in the Detroit area traps one of eight...
...One lesson Simon and others who travel in the same economic pack seem not to have understood is that perhaps there are no "good old days" to return to...
...And, more fundamentally, those good old days weren't good for everyone...
...Apparently, there are Americans who can be consigned to economic oblivion, an example of the divorce between existing religious theory and economics—a condition long ago noted by Tawney in his work, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism...
...In contrast, the Urban Mass Transportation Administration has been assigned 10 percent of the Departmental budget...
...Roughly, a quarter are teen-agers...
...His budgetary requests work at cross-purposes with avowed policy objectives of his own administration...
...A third of American industry is now oligopolistic...
...Particularly upset are the white-collars in their over-mortgaged houses in which they live their debt-ridden lives...
...Greenspan apparently prefers to let the bad times dampen wage rates by means of letting unemployment continue at approximately the present rate and, thereby, letting profits recoup from what he regards as a burden of high wage rates...
...SISYPHUS AN APPEAL—Still recovering from the effects of the monsoon that "kept us marooned for the whole month of July," Salesian Father Khonglah appeals for "sacrifices and generosity" to aid his needy charges...
...Besides, he finds that 1975 is a year that "trails its own forebodings...
...John Khonglah, S.D.B., 793111 Cherra Bazar, Meghalaya, India (260 Airmail), or c/o Salesian Missions, 148 Main Street, New Rochelle, N.Y...
...But the indicative economic planning, in the face of deteriorating conditions, tolerates a national unemployment rate of seven or eight percent for several years...
...On top of this, the Treasury Secretary, William Simon, offered a rebuke to pupils...
...Historically, they are the first to turn tail and run toward a single-issue political savior...
...First-aid stations are being haphazardly set-up for the victims, but no basic surgery is being prescribed for the economy...
...Even new arrivals in the Congress aren't speaking about income redistribution, for example, a topic a few in Congress were discussing openly in the late 1940s and early 1950s...
...The energy sector is one...
...Appearing on an education television interview program in early February, Woodcock, in response to a question, said that "there are basic readjustments ahead for the automobile industry . . . they (auto manufacturers) should be tapping the (Federal) Highway Trust Fund to develop mass transit systems, to develop a sensible mass transportation system of which the automobile is an integral part, but not the overwhelming— you know, we are so totally dependent, almost totally dependent for personal transportation on the private automobile, to the detriment of our society...
...Calvinism, he wrote, made its peace with the economic world...
...10801...
...The economy is characterized by a coupling of recession and inflation that can never exist according to the standard economic textbooks, and in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of such as Alan Greenspan, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers...
Vol. 101 • February 1975 • No. 15
