Editorials

...It is good, therefore, that the Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether Congress can constitutionally limit expenditures by the so-called "independent political committees" which in the 1980 election spent millions of dollars on behalf of Ronald Reagan beyond the limits set by the Federal Election Commission...

...Heavy recipients of PAC largesse in 1980 were most of the members of the House Ways and Means Committee and of the Senate Finance Committee...

...This latter sign and reality has been pre-empted and corrupted by the designers, but it was a good and encouraging thing while it lasted...

...The American Medical Association is big on PACs, as might be expected...

...The corporate charter usually is centered on organizing an entity which has as its purpose getting, within the limits of the law, the largest financial return for stockholders, and incidentally for corporate officers...

...In four critical Senate contests, conservative Republican candidates received more than $ 100,000 each from oil and gas PACs alone...

...Two pro-gun PACs are more or less typical...

...idate for the U.S...

...The economists who are really on the spot are those now popularly labeled "supply siders...

...Worry over the role of the PACs is mounting with their increase...

...Some of the economic forces are already at work, others may be released through reduced government regulations and government protection...

...Foreign competition is finally forcing a change...

...Who is behind some of the other PACs...

...all unseated their incumbent opponents, Senator John Culver of Iowa, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, and Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana...

...If significant change is to take place in the United States, the motivation of the American people will have to be something more more powerful and more basic than that offered by the Reagan tax and spending policies...

...As a result, former Vice President Walter Mondale and Senator Edward Kennedy are already setting up their own political action committees to raise funds for Democratic candidates, apparently on the principle of joining them if you can't beat them...

...In the races of twenty-seven Senate hopefuls studied by Mr...

...but increasing the defense expenditures within the limits of an overall smaller budget could create inflationary pressures stronger than those which would be created even by the possibly wasteful non-military expenditures that the administration wants cut out of the budget...

...This meant that conservative/right-wing PACs accounted for thirty-two percent of all dollar receipts and thirty percent of spending...

...Perhaps the most detailed study of them was done in post-election articles by Morton Mintz of the Washington Post, in one of which he disclosed that the leading one hundred PACs collected $75 million to influence races for federal office in 1979 and 1980...

...Democratic incumbent Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri received fifty-two percent of his contributions from PACs...

...Second was the Congressional Club, which began as a fund-raising unit for the far-right Senator Jesse Helms (R.-N.C...

...The fat in the defense budget (or, for that matter, in the non-defense budget) is, as a rule, less inflationary than the lean in the defense budget...

...What, if anything, to do about the PACs...

...By charter the corporation is not a fully moral and socially responsible institution...

...The bill passed in the House but died in the Senate under threat of a filibuster raised mainly by conservative Republicans...

...The importance of PACs to candidates continues to escalate...

...Ten health-related units laid out $6.2 million...

...In third place, with spending of $3 million plus, was the Fund for a Conservative Majority...

...A major step in deemphasizing such campaign financing would be to introduce public financing of congressional races like that in the presidential contest...

...Some PACs are broadly based in structure, but many are not...

...The Reagan tax program will provide incentives as well as additional funds, for saving and investing-that is, for persons in the high-income brackets and for corporations...

...These groups are crucial in Washington, with jurisdiction over all taxes and perhaps one-third of all federal spending...

...Nonetheless, the pressure is undeniably there...

...If one assumes that the additional money made available through tax cuts to persons and corporations is actually invested, there remains a question as to whether it will be invested constructively...

...These are the economists whom President Reagan credits with having provided the theoretical foundations for his economic program...

...Top-spender among the leading right-wing groups was the National Conservative Political Action Committee which raised and spent more than $7 million on favorite candidates...

...No wonder so many liberal and moderate candidates bit the dust in the 1980 elections...

...However, the three top-ranking PACs were non-party conservative or right-wing units...

...Many of the liberals who went down to defeat the last time around, such as Senators Church and McGovern, were the targets for the negative campaigning of right-wing groups which had no ostensible connection with their conservative opponents but which waged often vicious campaigns nonetheless...

...We need to confront, and accept, a challenge not unlike that which John Adams laid down to the American colonists as a cost to them of the Revolution and of separation from England...

...The positive forces for desirable economic changes may not be the Reagan tax program or the attention-gathering budget proposals at all...

...he led the floor fight that defeated a bill opposed by the industry to restrict rising hospital costs...

...In the last three weeks before the election, PACs poured in $10 million, mostly in connection with House and Senate races - fourteen percent of the $73 million-plus they had spent over a two-year period...

...Included in the top one hundred PACs were sixteen sponsored by trade associations, which spent a little over $ 10 million, and those of thirteen corporations, which spent over $4 million, including nearly $800,000 by three major defense contractors...

...The institutional limitations on corporate conscience and social responsibility will mark what is done with available investment funds...

...Last year there was a bipartisan effort in the House to stop the political action committees from becoming the dominant source of campaign spending...

...Such candidates received thirty-four percent of their total campaign receipts for the first nine months of 1980 from PACs...

...Most of the economists agree that for a variety of reasons, some of them not directly related to the Reagan program, consumer prices will rise less rapidly in 1981 than they did in 1980...

...Reduced taxes for those, individuals and corporations, who consequently will have more money to invest, should stimulate production...

...PACs will sometimes give to candidates of both parties, but they like to focus their giving...

...In the light of how badly they have been hurt by PACs in the past and the prospects for 1982 and beyond, it's no wonder that the Democrats are worried...

...Washington comment BEYOND THE BUDGET MORALS & ECONOMIC RECOVERY HOT SURPRISINGLY, economists are in disagreement over what effects the Reagan tax and budget-cutting programs will have if adopted and put into practice...

...Some economic, at least indirectly, and the others moral...

...But even these figures do not begin to tell the whole story for many individual candidates...

...But political experts interviewed by the Post said that those who blocked the bill accomplished something larger: assuring GOP candidates enough cash to give them a good chance of capturing the House in 1982, thus giving the Republicans control of the House, Senate, and presidency at one time...

...Republican candidate Mark Andrews of North Dakota, for example, got fifty-eight percent of his total contributions from PACs...

...they-spent almost $5 million, with more than twice as much going to Republicans as to Democrats...

...Andrews was elected, defeating Senator McGovern, Eagleton reelected, and Durkin defeated...

...Democrat John A. Durkin of New Hampshire received fifty percent of his campaign spending from PACs...

...The grand total the PACs took in was more than $127 million, up $50 million from receipts in 1977-78...

...Of twenty senators on the 1982 hit list of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, seventeen are Democratic, three Republican...

...and which spent $6.6 million...

...Biggest spender among the labor unions was the United Automobile Workers, which laid out $2 million...

...Beyond this one point of agreement, confusion reigns...

...Adams said, "We must change our habits, our prejudices, our palates, our taste in dress, furniture, equipage, architecture, etc...

...Not counted in such sums are the large so-called "independent expenditures" made for or against candidates by groups unconnected with them...

...Furthermore, the top one hundred PACs included eight other right-wing units that took in and spent almost another $6 million...

...We have gone far beyond poor Thors-tein Veblen...

...presidency...

...The automobile industry is the clearest example...

...Representative Richard A. Gephardt (D.-Mo...

...This compares with fifteen percent in 1976 and thirteen percent in 1978...

...The combined income of these three right-wing units was $ 18 million, their outlays $ 16.8 million...

...We continue to be the most over-transported, over-heated, over-cooled, over-fed (most of us), over-housed (many of us), over-defended (all of us), and over-advertised people the world has ever known...

...Overall, corporate, trade association, and rightist PACs outspent labor PACs by a margin of roughly five-to-one...

...There can be no quarrel with their first principle: that if the supply of goods and services is increased significantly, some other things being held more or less as they are, the general economic picture would be improved...

...The two nagging doubts, to put the matter gently, are over the effect of the program on unemployment and also on inflation...

...Most of the money will be handled through some corporate structure, possibly through several-financial, managerial, or industrial...

...corporate PACs are multiplying at the fastest rate, and too many PACs are narrowly focused and seem to suggest a quid-pro-quo operation...

...Reducing the federal budget expenditures should be anti-inflationary...

...eugene j. McCarthy (Eugene J. McCarthy is the former senator from Minnesota and candidate for the U.S...

...For years, the industry controlled its own market, and General Motors, by carrying Ford and Chrysler, controlled the supply to fit its own created demand...

...These three alone accounted for nearly one-quarter of the top one hundred's receipts and expenditures...

...Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission disclosed that the top one hundred PACs accounted for about sixty percent of all the money raised and spent by the more than seventeen hundred non-party units...

...The latter expenditures not only release consumer purchasing power without producing goods to absorb that power, but also compete with the civilian economy for scarce materials and scarce skilled labor...

...PACs of thirty-three union organizations spent $18.8 million...

...presidency...

...The result was a bill prohibiting a House candidate from accepting more than a total of $70,000 from all PACs in any election and more than $6000 from any single PAC in the primary and general election combined...

...They may spring from other sources...

...These committees are only part of the PAC problem, but perhaps the reasoning to be enunciated by the justices will provide some clues in the larger over-all problem of proliferating PACs...

...Ten others in the race for the Senate got between one-third and one-half of their contributions from PACs...

...At the moment this solution seems politically impossible, so the PACs will continue to pose a major problem, and one for which there is no simple solution, since unwise restrictions on political action committees could constitute interference with free speech and the public's right to participate in the political process...

...Wage freezes and reduced benefits have been accepted by the employees at Chrysler, similar action is most likely to come next at Ford and, eventually, at General Motors, in keeping with the Charlie Wilson principle that "What is good for the United States is good for General Motors, or vice versa...

...This result assured an unrestricted flow of PAC dollars to Republican House candidates in the last election and avoided an awkward double standard for PAC financing - new limits for the House but not for the Senate...

...Political action committees related to the oil and gas industry spent $6 million on House and Senate races last year, according to the National Committee for an Effective Congress...

...The moral forces are less evident although there have been promising signs going back to the consumer revolts of the sixties, manifest first and most clearly in the turning to small cars, and then especially, in the actions of the young people, with their preference for simple blue jeans as the clear example...

...We need a revolution of moderating expectations, a change of spirit, leading to a sharing of work, of resources, not only with our contemporaries, but with some thought to future generations...

...Not every candidate who received PAC money will vote the way his donors want, of course, and Congressman Gephardt might have fought against restricting hospital costs without any PAC contributions...

...of Ways and Means received eighty-two percent of his 1980 contributions from PACs, including $7,250 from health-related PACs...

...But we can live and be happy...

...However, tight money and high interest rates are counter forces...

...But more than Democrats should be worried about the mushroom-like growth of the PACs...

...they raised $2.4 million and spent $2.2 million - which made their receipts fourteen times those of the PAC of Handgun Control Inc., which managed to raise only $ 168,267, not enough to put it into the top one hundred...

...The most profitable piace for investment in the next two or three years, may not be in productive enterprises, in retooling or in rebuilding plants, but it may be buying up sound, effective, operating companies, not to improve their efficiency, but to skim off financial gains, through recapitalizations, sale of properties, or other actions, which may not only be non-productive but even counterproductive, wasteful, and inflationary...

...As one Congressman who chose not to run for reelection said, "Every campaign contribution carries some sort of lien which is an encumbrance on the legislative process...

...Mintz, one-fifth of all campaign contributions came from PACs...

...Too many American businesses and industries have been overprotected by the government, while others have been protected by their own economic positions, monopolistic in a formal sense, as in the case of financial organizations, or monopolistic by virtue of production costs and economic conditions, as in the cases of the American automobile industry, the United States steel industry, and the oil companies...