Editorials

...But-and here's what makes the administration's figures look passable-in 1982 there were an additional three million people who fell below 125 percent of the poverty line...

...The nation's total indebtedness has soared under Mr.Begin, reaching almost $21 billion, which makes the debt the highest per capita indebtedness in the world...

...Despite a formal charge that avoids all hint of a hunger problem, any process of analyzing and improving the food assistance programs could logically lead to a careful examination of the needs that, so far, have been attested by the U.S...

...If the task force is short on individuals with direct experience of food programs, it has room for several ideological sharpshooters who are likely to put a heavy burden of proof on anyone claiming cause for more federal effort in feeding low-income citizens...

...Israel now receives more U.S...

...Of course, the new task force could be different...

...The figures are slippery, beginning with the choice of 1980 as a baseline rather than the last Carter budget (1981) and skirting the fact that these numbers would be different had the president actually succeeded in obtaining the cuts he requested...

...Begin's policies, only more so: Shamir was, for example, opposed to the peace treaty with Egypt...

...Shamir is a Begin political clone without Begin's charisma, and he can be counted on to continue Mr...

...The hunger this task force seems most calculated to serve is the administration's hunger for a better image...

...should abandon what he called its evenhandedness in the Middle East and give Israel our unequivocal support...

...The dilemma posed by the takeover of the West Bank has often been pointed out: if the Arab inhabitants of the annexed territory are refused citizenship, Israel becomes a Mideastern South Africa...

...But the real reason for these increases-when they are increases-is simply that unemployment and growing poverty in the Reagan years have enlarged the numbers of eligible citizens seeking aid...

...Then there's Kenneth W. Clarkson, an economist who worked at the Office of Management and Budget when OMB was designing cuts in food stamps...

...And Israeli losses were far heavier than had been anticipated, the equivalent in Israel's population of almost 200,000 American casualties, and they continue to mount...

...If the absolute totals of recipients or spending still have not fallen, credit is owed not to the administration's fairness but to a slightly recalcitrant Congress and, above all, to the recession...

...If citizenship is granted to that many additional Arabs, they will in the foreseeable future outnumber the Jews and vote the Jewish state out of existence...

...On the face of it, anyway, that is hardly a job for a special presidential study group...

...Begin's policies ask, is this de facto annexation really to Israel's long-term advantage...

...Also on the task force are former Massachusetts governor, Edward J. King, known as "Mr...

...Thus in 1981, for every 100 people with incomes below 125 percent of the poverty line, there were between 52 and 53 people receiving food stamps...

...help...

...A lot will depend on the independence, knowledgeability, and sensitivity of the task force members...

...Reagan named his task force...

...Ever since the president insisted that an across-the-board tax cut for rich and poor alike was perfectly fair, even while David Stockman was recognizing this as a "Trojan horse" which hid a significant shift of the tax burden off the shoulders of the well-off, the administration's defenders have been trying to counter charges of unfairness with one set of figures after another...

...With few Palestinians around to argue the point, that, we suspect, is about the level and complexity that discussion of the Middle East will achieve in this country until the presidential election is behind us...

...But such a course would surely mean condemnation by a united world opinion, and can Israel stand that...

...Where does all this leave the United States...

...Begin's legacy for his country...

...That committee recommended slashing a few more billions from food assistance programs...

...Inflation is incredibly high, and it is unlikely to get better unless Mr...

...There is a lot of room for improvement in the nation's food assistance programs-improvement in the direction of getting aid to many who are not now receiving it as well as in husbanding resources without waste...

...Department of Agriculture are paid to do...

...Begin may have enlarged Israel's borders, but he has at the same time left a well nigh insoluble problem...

...There's J.P...

...District Court judge agreed, Finding that the committee had acted in violation of federal law...

...foreign aid, under more generous terms, than any other country in the world...

...Civil war, while not new in Lebanon, became fiercer, and there is less and less chance that the government there will be able to police its own territory, let alone guard Israel's borders...

...But in Lebanon, Israel under his leadership for the first time fought a war of choice rather than necessity...

...Reagan's favorite Democrat" for his conservative views on governmental responsibility, and George Gordon Graham, one of the few pediatricians to have testified against the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC...

...If they aren't doing their jobs, a ninety-day task force won't be able to do it for them...

...As it is, we'd like to be surprised...

...So consider the president's appointments...

...In fact, another presidential panel just finished evaluating the food assistance programs...

...Not that Menachem Begin's likely successor, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, is much inclined to see the situation on the West Bank as a problem...

...A month ago we noted the report that President Reagan was "perplexed" at talk about widespread hunger in America, and we expressed the hope that the task force Mr...

...That was the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, a business-dominated operation headed by industrialist J. Peter Grace...

...and John Douglas Driggs chairs a national network of food banks...

...But as thousands of Israeli citizens who oppose Mr...

...It was a war with several ambitious objectives: to destroy the Palestinians as a potent force, eliminate Syrian forces from Lebanon, and create a stable, pro-Israeli government able to maintain order within its borders and to sign a peace treaty with Israel...

...True, the Palestinians were dealt a heavy blow, and have themselves damaged their own cause even more since then, but no one can imagine that this will make the Palestinian problem disappear...

...Driggs, a former mayor of Phoenix, is one of the several millionaires on the task force...

...This, of course, unless the Palestinian residents are driven out, as the architect of the Lebanon war, Ariel Sharon, would probably like to do...

...WHAT BEGIN LEAVES BEHIND WORRIED ABOUT his declining health, depressed since the death of his wife last fall, deeply concerned by the quagmire he got Israel into in Lebanon, Menachem Begin said simply: 'I cannot go on any longer...

...As Nancy Amidei, director of the Food Research and Action Center, observed, "That's what the people who work at the U.S...

...HUNGER PAINS (CONT...

...Almost unnoticed by the outside world while all this was going on was Israel's financial plight under the Begin regime...

...On that we have leached an impasse, and it is unlikely that we can come up with any other creative undertaking at this point...

...Well, here's what has happened...

...It is hard to see how the process can now be blocked, given Jordanian and Palestinian shortsightedness...

...The Syrians, rearmed by the Russians, are stronger than ever...

...As is obvious by the daily papers, the 1984 presidential campaign is already well under way, and a truism of American politics is that no significant initiative in the Middle East can develop during a presidential campaign...

...In a 1975 book, Clarkson declared that food stamps could be abolished and, considering alternatives, drew attention to the merits of a diet, first proposed in 1944, of spinach, cabbage, pancake flour, and pork liver...

...For all his good intentions, President Reagan's Mideast peace plan is dead in the water...

...Instead, the Israelis are caught in a situation from which they cannot escape...

...Of the other task force members only two have had direct involvement in the hunger issue: Betsy Brian Rollins runs a Durham, North Carolina, soup kitchen...

...The assignment he gave it never mentions the word "hunger" or the need to determine how widespread hunger is Instead, the task force is mandated to "analyze federal and other programs intended to render food assistance to the needy and . . . make recommendations . . . how such programs may be improved...

...Begin's successor takes stringent measures that Begin himself was unwilling to undertake...

...Begin negotiated peace with Egypt and later shared the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts...

...With King Hussein and the Palestinians unwilling to bargain in terms of President Reagan's peace plan and with Israeli land takeovers and settlements proceeding apace, the West Bank is close to having been annexed...

...Bol-duc for one, a senior vice-president at the Grace corporation and the chief operating officer for the aforementioned Grace committee on cost control...

...Yet that compassion should not prevent a realistic judgment on Mr...

...In 1982, for every 100 people below 125 percent of the poverty line, there were only 48 getting food stamps...

...In regard to food stamps, the latest argument has been to point to overall increases since 1980 in the budget for food stamps as well as in the number of people receiving them...

...Nonetheless, Mr.Begin's successor will almost certainly have to ask for a substantial increase in assistance from the U.S...

...Conference of Mayors, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, church groups and food banks around the nation, reports collected by the Government Accounting Office, newspaper and TV stories, and legislators like Democratic Congressman Leon Panetta and Republican Senator Mark Andrews who have overseen congressional hearings...

...If the new task force were beginning its work as free of biases as it apparently is of knowledge and experience, we would be more sanguine about its likely contribution...

...The pressure inside Israel on Begin to resign was significant...

...All this may be true, say Mr.Begin's supporters, but no one can deny his historic accomplishment: he has vastly extended the land of Israel, almost certainly making the borders of the nation reach from the Jordan to the sea...

...Israel's balance of payments this year is projected at close to $5 billion - a horrendous sum for such a small country...

...The economic mess, it should be noted, developed despite U.S...

...Amidei's group, along with the National Anti-Hunger Coalition, charged in court that the Grace committee had not complied with the standards of balance set forth in the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and last July a U.S...

...Even his most severe critics must feel compassion for an aged man who has reached the end of his rope...

...After Anwar Sadat made his historic pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mr...

...Democratic candidate John Glenn said recently that the U.S...

...Reagan was appointing to study this issue would be more than another gesture in the president's assiduous campaign of image-building...