Editorials

...its estimate of military spending is based on an average inflation rate only two percentage points higher than that used by the administration...

...Reagan spokesmen are adamant on their plans for enormous increases in military spending, apparently counting on a strong anti-Soviet mood in the country, but under pressure they are beginning to talk of possible modifications in their tax plan...

...TV actually rarely captures the intensity of the pope's road show...

...As if that were not bad enough, the Congressional Budget Office says the projected administration estimates for military spending are in fact underestimated because in planning to spend roughly $1.5 trillion on the military in the five fiscal years ending in 1986, the president's program allows too little for inflation...

...The problems in this area strike us as ones that have been confronted for a long time with the regulation of food labelling, the marketing of drugs, and cigarette advertising...

...And our guess is that his staying power in American minds had everything to do with the pope, this pope, as a master ritualist, as the leader of a particular kind of cosmic parade, and a particular kind of street-theater that Americans had almost forgotten existed...

...In both ways we are touched far beneath the skin...

...Yet it is curious...

...And found there a father's face telling them the cosmos is, after all, well-pleased they're alive and kicking...

...In the secularized West, the pope's appeal is far different than it is in the traditional societies of East and South...

...The Congressional Budget Office thinks this is too optimistic...

...Add realistic inflationary estimates to Mr...

...This code was developed after a decade of warnings that the promotional activities of infant formula manufacturers were contributing to the dangerous decline in traditional breastfeeding practices, a decline that may be responsible for the deaths of millions of infants in developing nations...

...The Reagan people base their figures on the calculation that the inflation rate will shrink to less than five percent in that period...

...Indeed, overly sanguine inflation projections by the Pentagon accounted for as much as thirty percent of cost increases in major weapons systems...

...People will of course differ, but curiously enough we suspect the man's near-universal appeal, even when one disagrees with some of his statements, has much to do with with his almost shamanistic capacity to trigger an awareness in people that God's glory has suddenly come to earth...

...Somehow, this vigorous Polish pope evokes the one, and symbolizes an answer to the second...

...The result: an escalation in costs by a whopping $136 billion, an overrun that Congressman Jack Brooks of the House Government Operations committee said would be "devastating" to the federal budget, numerous social programs, and the economy as a whole...

...According to the manufacturers, groups opposing infant formula promotion have made inflamatory claims out of anti-capitalist motives...

...What reason is there to expect that current Pentagon estimates are any more accurate, made worse as they are by the low Reagan administration estimates for the economy as a whole...

...HEART-AND MIND What would we have missed had Mehmet Ali Agca's bullets removed Pope John Paul II from sight - and touch...

...IN DUBIOUS BOTTLE Why must American citizens be humiliated by their own government...

...The Democrats are urging one cautious step at a time, and their main alternative proposal calls for a one-year, $28 billion tax cut, targeted more directly at low- and moderate-income families...

...Or, to put the matter another way: suppose the supply-side expectations of pronounced economic growth did not eventuate after the administration tax plan went into effect, Mr...

...The anti-bottlefeeding advocates have sometimes engaged in the kind of oversimplification characteristic in political mobilization...

...Predictably, the pope's strict moral lectures - and later, the Kung affair - went down hard, for many Catholics as well as for interested outsiders...

...Furthermore, this method of calculating military costs is made even worse than usual by the fact that Reagan administration predictions of inflation for the economy as a whole are highly optimistic, being substantially lower than any anticipated by reputable private forecasting firms, let alone the Congressional Budget Office...

...It's often as if "reality" and "imagination" were reversed...

...His genuinely charismatic presence in those vast public liturgies seemed to address some great repressed need in countless numbers of people, many of them non-Catholic...

...What's properly feared in all this, remembering the enchanting reflected glory drunk up by Hitler's Germans or Stalin's party commissars, is that such magic can entrance, play on our worst fears, expunge the critical mind...

...Reagan's tax cuts and military hikes together would amount to far more than his budget cuts in social spending...

...At its best, Catholicism has striven to keep alive and in tension these two deep matters - the ineradicable child's heart unafraid to seek a father's blessing, and the equally insistent claim of the mind to understand what sort of universe we dwell in...

...The moral teacher...

...So he's conveniently reduced in the press to a moral authority, a Renaissance Norman Vincent Peale...

...The nub of President Reagan's proposal is a three-year, ten percent annual cut in the personal tax rate, at an estimated cost of $44 billion in the first year alone, plus almost $10 billion more in business cuts...

...We have read the code...

...So far as public discourse is concerned, we hardly have categories any longer to discuss the disconcerting aura a charismatic pope like John Paul II carries...

...Theater indeed...

...and quite apart from being totally subject to modification or non-enforcement by World Health Organization nations, it is overall a moderate and cautious document, obviously a compromise, in part due to manufacturers' lobbying, from a stronger draft...

...The manufacturers, therefore, feel justified in undertaking low-profile but well-funded attempts to influence the media and gain credibility through the support of sympathetic intellectual promoters like Ernest W. Lefever and his Washington Ethics and Public Policy Center...

...Reagan's already huge military budget, combine these with his proposed across-the-board, three-year tax cuts, and how can the result have anything but a tremendously inflationary impact on the American economy...

...Centuries of church-state struggle, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment behind us - or at least behind our elites - the pope's blessing or curse may still affect individual Catholics, but Western leaders no longer seek his imprimatur...

...The United States is already spending twenty-five percent of its national budget on military spending...

...But the Brookings study of the pattern in past tax cuts indicates that although such cuts may have some effect on how long or how hard people work, they would not raise output sufficiently to offset the cost to the treasury, "even with the most generous estimates of the total labor supply response...

...but the manufacturers' double standard is patent...

...Experience suggests not...

...And as a spokesman for the CBO pointed out, the next five troubled years could turn out to be even worse than historical experience already suggests, especially if instability in the Middle East, bad weather, or some other uncontrollable factor causes sharp price increases in commodities bought in large quantities by the military, such as oil, food, and exotic metals...

...Congressional consideration will soon turn to the proposed Reagan tax cuts, and perhaps now some attention will be paid, at least to the economic consequences of the escalation in Pentagon spending when combined with the proposed tax cuts...

...Or maybe the papal theater...

...Giving additional substance to such fears is a recent report from the Brookings Institution...

...However much the pope is honored as a vicar of God in non- Western traditional cultures, there will be the taint of representing a Western conception of God - and the link to a colonial past...

...Is the Congressional Budget Office being too pessimistic...

...And it passed with most of the public discussion centered on the cuts in social programs and relatively little on the huge jump in military spending, with all that this could mean for the cause of world peace...

...According to the manufacturers, there is no conclusive proof that any significant percentage of the damage done by the decline in breastfeeding is due to the use of their products or the impact of their marketing...

...How natural it is for us to think of Karol Wojtyla in terms of touch...

...But something very deep remained, some subsurface synapse he touched in the American nervous system...

...For many years, under Democrats and Republicans alike, the DOD has calculated the impact of inflation on its purchases not on the basis of Pentagon and defense contractors' experience, but on the basis of rates drawn from the economy as a whole, which are considerably lower...

...My life is not important," Mehmet Ali Agca is reported to have said...

...A lot too smugly, much of our therapeutic culture calls the transaction here either "regression" or a "return of the repressed...

...In both parts of the world but for different reasons, the response will be ambivalent...

...The result: not a balanced budget in 1984 but a deficit of as much as $100 billion...

...as if, but for a moment, the substance of things hoped for were securely in place - the ritual meal spread, and all the hungry welcome...

...They insist that their opponents abide by the same standards they object to having applied to themselves...

...According to the manufacturers, the code threatens freedom of commerce and, because of restrictions on advertising, freedom of speech...

...Yes, perhaps the theater, and a special kind of drama...

...And that's why it is important that it be known that the pope also stands behind the Western critical intellectual tradition...

...In the last quarter of 1980 the price of forty-seven major weapons systems increased by over $47 billion, according to Morton Mintz of the Washington Post (a sum, it should be noted, roughly equal to the budget cuts in programs for the poor), and nearly $14 billion of that sum was due to faulty inflation estimates, according to the General Accounting Office...

...Stated in constant dollars, that increase would be three times larger than the Vietnam war buildup - a buildup that many economists think started our present inflationary spiral because President Johnson feared to raise taxes to pay for an unpopular war...

...Here the figures are scary, far exceeding the savings achieved by slashing social programs...

...What this means is that the Reagan administration plans to increase defense spending in the next three years by a sum greater than the entire military budget for 1978...

...But these are strange terms to name that burst of self-worth experienced by many faceless individuals in a crowd - who understand themselves, if only for a glorious moment, as meaning something great and good in the vast universe, something that Carl Sagan's biologism won't ordinarily let them mean...

...An ungenerous ideology may be the mother's milk of this administration-but not, we believe the U.S...

...That is the harsh question that comes to mind in the wake of the administration's vote, in the company of two right-wing dictatorships, against an international code, proposed in the UN's World Health Assembly, to regulate the marketing of breastmilk substitutes...

...It is, after all, oversimplified and (in the past) sometimes deceptive advertising they are determined to protect...

...The irony is that those present at John Paul's street-theater know differently...

...The baby food multinationals have nonetheless persisted in their opposition, relying on a number of highly questionable arguments...

...Reagan's plans would boost that sum to close to forty percent...

...Is it just that irrepressible personality...

...They too read the financial pages, and they know that more and more of those who run the nation's financial markets have qualms about scheduling heavy tax cuts three years in advance...

...There is merely the "clinical" evidence submitted by health workers all over the globe...

...Supply-side supporters of the administration tax proposal argue that reducing individual tax rates will have a significant effect on incentives to work and save...

...The projected figures: $162 billion for 1981, $189 billion for 1982, $226 billion for 1983, $256 billion for 1984, $304 billion for 1985, $343 billion for 1986...

...they are increasingly worried about the effect of the Reagan tax plan on inflation and high interest rates...

...According to a top official in the General Accounting Office, past Pentagon projections of inflation rates even three years in advance turned out to be less than half the actual rates, and prices paid by the DOD to buy major weapons systems and military supplies have always increased faster than prices in general...

...Despite the ease with which the Reagan budget gained approval in both House and Senate, an increasing number of moderate Republicans are beginning to share Democratic worries about the size and extended duration of the Reagan tax plan...

...Moderates in Congress should take advantage of this fact and of public worry as evidenced in the opinion polls and insist on cutting the size and scope of the Reagan plan...

...If the Congressional Budget Office is correct in its estimates, the Department of Defense is simply following a long-established practice in this matter...

...Acting at the prompting of the manufacturers, the American government voted against an imperfect but pragmatic code that both it and the companies had helped to draft...

...It did so despite the obvious bad politics and the loss to America's reputation throughout the world...

...Sound policies always involve a balancing of considerations.' One would think that the health and survival of infants would weigh heavily in such a balancing...

...In Western cultures, on the other hand, where transcendence is either privatized or repressed, the pope's presence makes many nervous...

...In weighing the impact of the proposed three-year tax cuts, Reagan's plans for military spending are a crucial factor...

...It was as if, for a forgetful moment, people bathed in a glory which supposed he was in fact the vicar of God's word made flesh...

...The vigorous defender of human rights...

...The government has misrepresented the nation...

...When John Paul visited this country in the Fall of 1979, the response suggested the nation hid more closet religious "primitives" than one would have supposed...

...It is true that there is a paucity of scientifically controlled studies...