Social Retreat and Economic Stagnation
Silbiger, Stephen & Gross, Jan T. & Brand, H. & Harrington, Michael & Plastrik, Stanley & Clark, Joseph
On this eve of the 1980s, American capitalism is in the midst of a crisis that bewilders the conventional wisdom of both liberals and conservatives. The nation is, in a sense, in a...
...III ALL OF MR...
...and local corporations and apartmenthouse owners who will share a couple of billion dollars in tax reductions...
...The Administration is actively considering cutting back on some Social Security benefits...
...It now has over a million members consisting of a cross section of workers, from unskilled laborers to top professionals...
...with a rising tide of inflation," as Albert Sommers of the Conference Board has written...
...Then it was the mass unemployment of the Great Depression that could not be understood or controlled...
...Often the "new man" was a surgeon...
...It projects unemployment rates of 6.2 percent of the labor force for both the end of 1979 and the end of 1980, while severely reducing public employment programs in addition to many other employmentcreating outlays...
...Why were they so wrong...
...And who can forget how the 100 flowers wilted and died more than 20 years ago...
...Labor, for example, ought to work out specific plans for a guaranteed income operating through a negative income tax, or an out-and-out cash transfer scheme...
...BUT THERE are many, and far more important consequences, of the incredible sequence of events climaxed by Teng Hsiao-ping's visit to our country...
...This view is confirmed by the persistent gap between actual and potential GNP for all but four of the last 23 years—the four years marked by the Vietnam war...
...BUT WHILE TAX REFORMERS were winning a few skirmishes on Capitol Hill, they were losing the war for tax equity across the country...
...Still, it would be wrong to see these events as the fault of a single individual, even when that individual is the most powerful elected official in the nation...
...The "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" had not only been an extended pogrom...
...It is no secret that the right is devoting money and energy to assaults on the labor movement...
...For, so far, health and pension benefits, though they are steadily increasing in recent contracts, still constitute only about 15 percent of total worker compensation...
...In 1978, with the state's major municipality near bankruptcy and some of the poor living in the nation's most squalid slums, the Governor and the 141 Legislature passed a billion-dollar tax cut, which largely benefited the wealthiest...
...This is a historically evolved pattern that will change only against great resistance...
...Many power centers are better than just two...
...Today, about 30 uncensored periodicals appear in Poland...
...The poor and the minorities are being ignored by the policymakers and rendered invisible by the statisticians...
...we believe the Administration is already headed in the direction of overall controls in piecemeal and ill-designed stages...
...the] resemblances among the three recessions of the last decade [i.e., 1967, 1970, and 1975] are suggestively strong and progressive...
...Their complaints: that, by military aggression, Vietnam seeks to become the ruler of the whole Indochinese peninsula, and that it has persecuted and expelled hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens from Vietnam...
...But, overall, the facts as a whole emphasize rather than diminish the unions' role as "basic protector of the worker's economic interests...
...Thus every citizen who has suffered wrongs at the hands of the authorities and could not find recourse through official administrative or judicial procedures can lodge his complaint with the opposition...
...Jacek Kuron, one of the founders of the Workers' Defense Committee ("KOR"), which is part of this movement, describes the activities of the opposition in Poland...
...There are such monthlies as Gospodarz (Farmer) or Robotnik (Worker), addressing themselves to the everyday problems of peasants and workers...
...Let me suggest here merely that workers are increasingly disinclined to employ this "ultimate" weapon...
...Uncontrollable" outlays represent entitlements embedded in open-ended programs legislated in earlier years, or carry-overs of previously obligated balances...
...The budget confirms again that full employment has ceased to be a goal for the Administration...
...What is the conflict all about...
...This followed an often ominous event, the signing of a mutual aid agreement, this time between the Soviet Union and Vietnam...
...Today's peasants do not hide their anger—'just leave us in peace and let us do what we have been doing for generations," concluded a recent petition to the authorities...
...During the same period, the tax burden for a family earning four times the national average rose half as fast, only increasing from 20.2 percent in 1953 to 29.5 percent in 1975...
...Things got out of hand and the army took over...
...The stagnationist tendencies characterizing the economy's private sector preclude the raising of taxes, since doing so would lower private consumption and investment—thereby accentuating those tendencies...
...The opposition understands this very well...
...Divided as it is, in effect, into three or four "federations," one cannot speak of a united voice of labor...
...Though opinions differ regarding the amount and effectiveness of new antiunion activities, most spokesmen agreed it is "not the same across the board," but strongly concentrated in the industrial Sunbelt area, and rather ineffectual in the East and Midwest...
...There is an abundance of sad history at hand...
...Seeds of rebellion when the Communist discovers that the cause for which he fought has been betrayed, much as the Kronstadt sailors rose up in 1921 demanding Soviets without Bolsheviks...
...Indeed, we can now recognize that there was a conservative premise in the New Deal that honestly wanted to take on the economic royalists...
...Taken with the already growing tax burden on any additional income, this may well leave workers worse off than before—how much worse will only be determined when the heavy negotiations are over...
...And because that "economy," a major cruelty for those who suffer from it, will do little, or nothing, to check inflation...
...Their complaint: that the Cambodian Communists had imposed the most murderous regime in the world on its people...
...No, it does not...
...the optimum allocation of resources, efficiency, and higher living standards of the masses are derived from private, profit-maximizing decisions in the boardroom...
...second, the common desire to reestablish labor's former broad political alliance within the Democratic party...
...leads the world technically in nearly every significant aspect of military hardware, non-nuclear as well as nuclear...
...What gives us hope that this foretaste of freedom in Eastern Europe will not become in the near future food for ruminations by yet another generation of exiles and prisoners is the unfolding of a similar process in other parts of the world...
...Nevertheless, unions have published competent material and gone to the bargaining table with skill and hard data...
...In many areas, however, government workers earn more than those on their level in the private workforce: millions of workers who are either unorganized or do not belong to one of the powerful unions have not kept abreast...
...By analogy to its 19th-century predecessor, which 148 functioned clandestinely in Poland under the regime of the Russian partition, it is known as the "Flying University...
...democratic control by the public of collective sources of new capital, like pension funds...
...Every morning the American President listens to his Polish-born adviser on national security...
...Since they cannot mold society to fit into the regime's institutions and cannot part with their political monopoly because of their Soviet guardians, they must, to avert a national disaster, move to institutionalize the opposition...
...For over a decade now, we have been accustomed to samizdat—the way in which important literary and political journals have been published in Communist countries...
...Chamber of Commerce, stating "[union] wage demands were not a major cause in 1978 of the inflation we expect in 1979...
...It is critical that private, profit-maximizing, corporate control of investment decisions be abolished...
...they all took their basic energy from periodic, intense struggles of economic policy...
...One of those proposals involves abandoning the "minimum benefit"—which guarantees $120 a month, no matter how little a low-paid worker had contributed—and to shift the affected people to the Supplemental Security Income Program...
...Inasmuch as most of the income security outlays are already indexed to the cost of living by law, the full brunt of the $9-billion decline falls on the other human services...
...In southern California the increases far exceeded the statewide figure...
...The concessions did, however, have the effect of shifting the tax burden to individuals and away from large corporations...
...The reduction of the deficit is thus planned in the face of continued stagnationist trends in the economy...
...Public service employment alone is to be cut back by $1.3 billion in 1980, or $1.4 billion when adjusted for expected cost rises...
...They were echoed in 1974 by Robert Solow and Alan Blinder, who wrote that "The whole point of discretionary fiscal policy is the stabilization of economic activity at a satisfactory level in the face of fluctuations in private demand...
...Also, "The object of policy...
...Our antiquated system of fee-for-service medicine paid for by third-party insurers is not only unjust, it is a leading source of inflation...
...In agriculture, family farmers suffer, while agribusiness, including huge export corporations, prospers as a result of multibillion-dollar subsidies that raise prices for the consumer...
...to enact a national health program with progressive financing...
...This political rhetoric was actually translated by some members of Congress into efforts to reform the tax laws...
...Because of the across-the-board nature of the tax rollback, only slightly less than $2 billion of the $7 billion reduction in revenues will find its way into the pockets of homeowners...
...Carter's own Council of Economic Advisers was very frank on this count...
...new transactions amounted to $54 billion— representing the equivalent of 12 percent of the total budget outlays...
...The police has resorted to all kinds of harassments against active participants in the movement...
...The real beneficiaries of Proposition 13 are: the federal government, which will gain $2.5 billion because of the decrease in deductions for real-estate taxes...
...To begin with, Social Security is the centerpiece of the welfare state created by the New Deal...
...Later they had to destroy millions of red books with the Lin Piao introduction and substitute new ones sans the dead mischief-maker's preface...
...In Russia, thousands of young people have been jailed for gathering in small groups to read and discuss topics or books that were absent from the reading lists of official university courses...
...There must be united action — • to fight any cuts in social spending in the federal budget...
...Neil Kotler in The Federal Budget and Social Reconstruction has written that The most serious failing of the Budget Committees to date is their hesitancy to formulate their own budget agenda or priorities...
...On the contrary, income taxes were slashed by $19 billion only two months prior to the issuance of the "lean and austere" 1980 budget...
...It is also coming more and more in conflict with the setting of national priorities, which are supposedly established through the budget...
...In other words, the President is playing symbolic politics with real lives...
...IT WILL PERHAPS BE SAID that the Carter administration's planned reduction in the budget deficit conforms with some of the ideas expressed here...
...Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y...
...This assumption has lost validity...
...The true problem, to be dealt with in the remainder of this article, is the uncontrollability of budgetary finance, rooted in the declining relative importance of taxation as a source of funding outlays...
...The Subcommittee's report was summarized by AFL-CIO economist Markley Roberts, in the AFL-CIO's American Federationist, August 1978: The network of big business leaders as they meet on the boards of directors was revealed by a careful computerized staff study of the top 130 U.S...
...And no one has contested this statement...
...Although Sino-Russian ideological differences were irreconcilable—as demonstrated by their contradictory policies in Cambodia—they could eventually settle their problems as between states...
...worker self-management at every level of production, in the services and professions as well as industry...
...that influenced such Chinese leaders as Teng...
...Without such changes, scarcity in the public sector will persist, and its gradual impoverishment becomes a probability...
...In the June 6, 1969 issue a "poor peasant" is quoted as saying, "My wife had 150 a pituitary tumor and was afraid of an operation...
...they sprang up in reaction to a grossly unfair retirement tax recently imposed on the peasantry...
...They mortgage the state's real resources and, because of the manner in which they are financed—by means of securities of ever shorter maturities, ever more easily liquidable—they represent a major source of inflation...
...We have to get rid of the old baseball bat, T-shirt, tattooed image," says Fred Kroll of the Railway Brotherhood...
...In fact, continued tax cuts are likely, if only to offset the inflationary bite into real incomes...
...NOW TO President Carter's anti-inflation program, and its 7 percent wage-benefit target or guideline...
...Labor economists maintain that, with the exception of the Teamsters' union, which has special pension difficulties, the cost of maintaining current benefits will come to I percent of any wage gain, leaving 6 percent untouched...
...The major argument for tax credit for progressive state and local income taxes is that it is one tax cut that may actually expand the public sector...
...Responses to this question varied among the union spokesmen...
...With chronic joblessness increasing in the next period— and the only debate being on how high it will go— the employed workers will find themselves on the defensive, fearful of layoffs and asked to hold down their consumption...
...The United States is only 200 years old, but it has developed because it has no idols or superstition...
...It is, rather, the consequence of the specific conceptualization of the role of public finance in dealing with economic stagnation...
...Instead, it has enormously raised them, in terms of unemployment, fiscal stringencies among states and localities, and lost output...
...That most politicians see a link between a high state income tax and low economic growth is illustrated by the recent tax history of New York State...
...Total control over society reaches its perfection in arbitrariness, and neither a moral nor a social order is compatible with it, only social atomization...
...By 1976 these revenues amounted to $156 billion, a whopping increase of over 650 percent...
...The reason federal taxes are more progressive than state and local taxes is not that federal legislators are more progressive than their state and local counterparts...
...Now these Self-Help Committees are drafting statements on taxation including all sorts of grievances that have accumulated over the years...
...All this activity goes on because there are people in Poland who are willing to pay the price for freedom, though the government has fixed that very high...
...Carter's guidelines will put a brake on wage and benefit increases, even if the benefits themselves do not change...
...Had the government maintained its 1960 share of GNP, outlays for purchases of goods and services in 1978 would have run $69 billion higher than their actual level of $154 billion...
...One was how often the word "rational" appeared in conversations with the Chinese leaders...
...If they last longer they become, even despite some rulers' noblest intentions, incompetent...
...There were at least three basic reasons...
...But when the political leadership became concerned with the massive loss of jobs, they zeroed in on one cause— taxes...
...67,500 Rubber Workers by mid-April...
...it has never been tried before...
...THE IDEA of using the Internal Revenue Code to influence state tax policy is not without precedent...
...to finance an extension of social services and an improvement in the quality of life by redistributive tax policies based on ability to pay...
...Actual and potential GNP is discussed in Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report of the President, January 1978 (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...Yet the United Labor Committee coalition won in November by a three-totwo margin...
...March I To listen to some of our doomsters who write on the American labor movement, it is in a bad fix...
...The adoption of the tax credit would help to create such an equitable tax structure and thus stabilize public budgets in the future...
...The only legitimate objection to the use of a tax credit to induce state and local governments to reform their tax structures is that a credit would reduce federal revenues and deprive the already fund-starved public sector of needed funds...
...Take, for example, the fact that today's Congress has not a single trade unionist in its memberhsip...
...The problem is not wages, which have chased after prices...
...Rather, it is proximately attributable to the increasing, and evidently permanent, shortfall in tax receipts, particularly income tax receipts...
...Gain of 3% during the first half of 1978...
...Senate Committee on the Budget, Can Congress Control the Power of the Purse...
...The KSS "KOR"—the Social Self-Defense Committee KOR—and also the Human Rights Movement (ROPCiO) have set up independent "bureaus of intervention...
...The "actual" deficit, $48.8 billion, was reduced by the trust fund surplus...
...it had eliminated all higher education and banned foreign culture from Shakespeare to Beethoven, not to speak of 4,000 years of Chinese culture...
...Uncontrollability" is viewed as further restricting the power of Congress to allocate funds, and to compel the Executive to center its budget control efforts on the "controllable" portion of the budget...
...I was told that General Motors, opening several plants in unorganized Southern areas, tried to prevent UAW members who were working in the North though born in the South from applying for transfers to these new plants...
...However, in 47 of the 50 states, the same $5,000-a-year family will have to pay a greater percentage of its income in state and local taxes than will a $50,000-a-year family...
...Before our transportation system made it easy to move goods and people from one part of the country to another, and the threat of the flight of capital placed great limitations on the abilities of states to raise revenues, state governments were pioneers in developing programs...
...government debt rose 51 percent...
...The antilabor offensive, of course, is wielded by the big corporations...
...IF DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM were the subversive thoughts that sparked the wall posters and demonstrations, what were the motives for detente with the U.S...
...In response to the decision, an initiative was placed on the ballot to amend the state constitution in order to permit the classification of different types of property and its taxation at differing rates...
...The real reasons is that (unlike the federal government) state and local governments are constantly subject to the threat that businesses and wealthy residents will move away if their taxes are raised...
...Challenging the opposition of the right to all new progressive social legislation will require the labor movement's unified effort, and much closer contact with new forces in American society—e.g., the women's movements, black, Hispano-American, consumer, and ecological groups...
...The minorities will not be able to challenge their systemically inferior position in the occupational structure since they will suffer from the "downturn" at roughly twice the rate of immiseration as the white majority...
...The instrumentality for these efforts can only be the federal budget, and thus they are bound to come increasingly in conflict with the setting of national priorities...
...they are not in search of some new mask—be it called "thaw," "revisionism," or even a "human face"—to fit upon the Communist party...
...mechanism for the adjustment of inequities, controls prices for everything and lasts only for the duration of the emergency...
...Relying on invincible Mao Tse-tung Thought and the revolutionary spirit of fearing neither hardship nor death, and with the resolve to "fight the Soviet revisionists to the end even if our blood makes the Wusuli River flow red" [we] triumphantly repulsed the Soviet revisionist aggressor troops...
...Since, given high R&D spending, the technological obsolescence of armaments is constantly forced, their replacements will steadily gain in effectiveness and the military value of the inventories keeps increasing...
...It therefore hired the corporate advertising firm of Winner & Wagner, which is closely tied to the California Chamber of Commerce, to do its media work...
...his budget strikes at the cities, the poor, the minorities, and women even as he endorsed the scandalous congressional increase in welfare for the rich last year...
...V THIS ANALYSIS POINTS in the direction of a democratic left program...
...Since state and local governments now consider themselves the captives of large economic forces making it impossible for them to reform their tax structures, action at the federal level will be required before major shifts in state and local tax burdens can occur...
...This development has of course reduced the progressivity of the tax system, and this has impaired the ability-to-pay principle on which it is presumably based...
...Will the old union-Democratic caucus get a new lease on life...
...it has also become part of the problem of instability and "stagflation...
...For the hidden story of Proposition 13 is that it does very little for the average homeowner...
...Despite all the subsequent talk about Mao's senility, he was alert enough to take out an insurance policy against the threat from the Polar Bear—detente with the United States...
...72 ff...
...the investment tax credit, close to $11 billion...
...To be sure, throughout the postwar period, national priorities have been hostage to stabilization policy enforced by the Office of Management and Budget...
...necessary...
...In fact, it is quite difficult to get one's manuscript published in the more prestigious ones, for they have large backlogs of submitted essays and stories awaiting publication...
...83 ff...
...There are some leftists who reject the distinction, but in a capitalist society based on private property, it remains of fundamental importance...
...Nor do they pose problems of inflation, as is indicated by the substantial surpluses that their financing generates (see below...
...8 percent in 1961-64...
...This country faces intracapitalist competition of a kind that did not exist until the '60s...
...Another sharp recollection of the editors is how a speaker, when mentioning the "Gang of Four," would raise all five fingers to show that it was the "gang of four" plus Mao Tse-tung...
...But, so far, labor has withstood these assaults surprisingly well...
...These realities are invariably linked to 143 structural changes in declining industries (e.g., clothing, steel), and to the entry in recent decades of millions of rural, unskilled service workers (including 6 to 7 million "illegals"—Mexicans, West Indians, and others) who have little experience in unionism and exercise a depressing affect on wage levels...
...Shipbuilding is the prime example...
...If the defection of Tito from Stalin's camp in 1948 was of lasting significance, perhaps multiplying the 25 million Yugoslays by the 900 million Chinese may give some idea of how important this is...
...If these fluctuations are small, then—and only then—can the budgetary response be small...
...A painful readjustment of relations is taking place, and its outcome is uncertain...
...Mao used Snow as a conduit for getting a visit from Nixon and agreement with the U.S...
...Even serious journalists such as A. H. Raskin hold these pessimistic views...
...So sweeping a program is scarcely on the agenda of Congress or of the Administration...
...will be eagerly enforced by every public and private employer in the land and by the IRS and by threats of blacklisting and official denunciation" (New York Times, November 7, 1978...
...The late Chou En-lai is quoted by Edgar Snow as saying that casualties in the army alone totaled more than 100,000...
...Who are these young people in such open rebellion against Maoist tyranny...
...A moderate proposal to give unorganized workers the democratic right to choose a union was defeated in Congress last year as the corporate rich mounted an effective onslaught, a class struggle from the right...
...That gap, however, has remained large (it was calculated at $38 billion for 1978), notwithstanding the fact that it has been figured in terms of progressively higher unemployment rates (5.1 percent of the labor force for recent years, as against 4.1 percent in the early '60s...
...A chart showed clearly how high rates of unemployment brought low prices-6.7 percent joblessness held inflation down to just a bit above I percent in 1961—and high employment threatened rising prices...
...The working people of America are under attack...
...The notorious oil-depletion allowance was greatly modified...
...Elected on a pledge to achieve full employment, he now openly proposes to deliberately increase unemployment...
...Both call for restraint by each side, for there are no institutions vet that can bring society and government together under a Communist regime...
...the more egregious tax shelters in movies and livestock were closed...
...THE LABOR PEOPLE whom I consulted for this report all spoke candidly when questioned about the situation...
...and Cardinal Wojtyla's thoughtful protection of the independent Catholic intelligentsia in Cracow go far beyond the traditional and essentially conservative posture aimed at preserving national customs...
...out-of-state corporations, which will see their taxes go down by $3 billion...
...The union leadership is unhappy with the Democratic administration, but it considers the notion of a labor party "nonviable...
...because it violates a basic promise we have made to the aging...
...President Carter was wise in avoiding the military Troika Teng wanted to set up—a U.S., China, Japan alliance against the Soviet Union...
...There has been little attempt to jettison the old yardstick of incrementalism in favor of expressly identifying national goals according to some ordering of preferences...
...It was the failure of the Democratic leadership in California to do anything about the enormous increase in property 140 taxes that fueled the Proposition 13 initiative...
...The absorption of resources by the federal government has actually tended to decline in relation to both the national product and the federal budget as a whole...
...Carter is moving toward cuts in that system—i.e., in the very heart of the welfare state...
...federal support for the extension of the cooperative principle at the local and neighborhood level...
...But, typically, samizdat was clandestine...
...This leads us to the third reason for the eagerness to achieve detente with the U.S., the realization' that poor, underdeveloped, populous countries can modernize only with the aid of the United States, Japan, and Western Europe...
...Here is Snow's recording of Mao's words: The Russians looked down on the Chinese and also looked down on the people of many countries, he said...
...That was the tack taken by Mr...
...If there were no agreement on the need of a "countervailing" labor movement, this would suffice...
...Almost every one of these demands directly counters stagflation by attacking its real sources: administered prices and targeted profits, the sectoral costs in health, housing, food, and fuel— and military spending, which does not purchase national security but creates buying power...
...We must also be mindful of assuring that there are sufficient revenues to provide these people with vitally needed public services...
...Will the government not overestimate its weakness and try to restore its total control by police repression...
...Who was this "new man"in China...
...In his acceptance speech, Jimmy Carter called the federal tax system "a disgrace to the human race...
...he increases military spending and proposes wasting funds on a fraud called civil defense...
...Wurf has recognized this, and shown his readiness to negotiate on improving the productivity of government employees, even if this leads to reducing their numbers through attrition...
...It was the recent loss of jobs in New York State that made this tax cut seem "sensible...
...Not so many years ago, for example, public employees were held in low status, and it was widely accepted that people on the public payroll do not rate the crucial rights won by the workers in the private sector: to strike and to bargain collectively...
...it will assuredly likewise attempt to "stimulate" the economy once the slowdown deepens...
...Fourth, there are a number of sectoral crises in the American economy that are both inflationary and impervious to cure by recession...
...ONE OF THE MOST TRYING problems the union movement now has to face is the loss of its experienced leadership, now aging, retiring, and dying—a whole generation of leaders trained and seasoned in the harsher conflicts of the'30s and'40s is going...
...The unions are particularly bitter about the 145 guideline policy because, as George Meany has put it, "It is based on the false assumption that wages alone are the cause of inflation when in fact wage increases are an attempt to catch up with living costs and every economist—left, right, and center—agrees that this inflation was not caused by wage increases...
...Much has been made of the increasing "uncontrollability" of budget outlays, some 75 percent of which fall into that category in the current fiscal year...
...The increase in regressive social security taxes has caused a family with an average income to pay an additional 5 percent of its income in taxes, while only increasing the tax burden of those earning four times the average by less than 2 percent of their income...
...Congress has remained impotent in setting priorities of its own...
...These efforts to defeat situs-picketing legislation, promote right-to-work laws, fight labor-law reform legislation, and the endless propaganda aimed at arousing middle-class antiunion attitudes—all are familiar...
...But this rise is not tantamount to an equivalent rise in the absorption by the federal government of financial (and therefore human and capital) resources...
...For the essay by Walter Heller, see OECD, Fiscal Policy for a Balanced Economy (Paris, 1968...
...In the absence of comprehensive national planning of capital investment and enforceable price controls, stabilization efforts will probably continue to guide the economy for many years...
...Third, American capitalism has lost the advantages of having won a war without suffering destruction at home and then providing the technology for the restoration of European and Japanese capitalism—at a price...
...In addition, Congress reduced the tax burden on the poor, even eliminating most people below the poverty line from the income-tax rolls completely...
...As a result, a greater and greater percentage of our tax burden is composed of regressive sales taxes, and a declining share comes from the relatively progressive federal taxes...
...but this is an irrelevant, a deceitful argument, all the more so since these programs are preponderantly self-financing...
...The validity of this observation, of course, will have to be tested in showdowns, which both sides at present carefully avoid...
...It was the function of federal finance to bridge the gap between actual and potential GNP...
...First, there is the common concern for the protection of the membership's standard of living...
...There is no question that it makes the whole bargaining process more difficult," says Douglas Fraser, UAW president...
...I find their astonishment meaningful and enlightening...
...There is one more example of this trend, and it is perhaps the most revealing...
...its financial position is strong, but with a growing number of retired workers paying only nominal dues (the UAW has 250,000 retired members...
...With due respect to differences between these cases and to the historical uniqueness of each, at least one side to the conflict, in all these confrontations, seemed strikingly similar: on one side, there was the government, its machinery and its clientele, surrounded by a social vacuum...
...for it reveals the profoundly authentic character of this process by which Poland's society is starting to participate in its own affairs...
...They still defer to the President's budget...
...It uses fiscal policy to engender higher levels of unemployment...
...The growth in deficit finance, illustrated by the statistical relations cited, is not simply the result of tax-base erosion...
...Meany continues, citing Dr...
...There are, finally, the Student Solidarity Movement (SKS), which is active in all university towns, and an unofficial library from which people can borrow books that are placed on the government's political "index...
...The notion that expansion in federal outlays has cramped the resources otherwise available to the private sector is a myth—a myth serving in particular those interests that seek to preserve high rates of private consumption and investment, and would reduce the redistributive function of the budget...
...See especially the essay by William Cannon...
...And now one observes there the fascinating spectacle of civic society reemerging from the straitjacket into which it had been laced by the authoritarian regime...
...After all, there is no point in giving a family a few hundred dollars in lowered taxes if to do so requires reducing their police and fire protection, closing their public libraries and parks, and depriving their children of educational opportunities...
...The unions desperately need to recruit membership from the lower categories of workers (those most discriminated against, the millions of "illegals," service employees, etc...
...to begin the process of making the decision process in giant corporations transparent by requiring them to give advance notice of, and to defend publicly, any price increases...
...Morrison and Walker write, "[The] U.S...
...Although regional trends were obviously a factor in the decline of New York's economy, they could not have been the major cause since most of the firms that left relocated in neighboring states...
...It will raise the military budget, which not only steps up an arms race threatening human existence itself but also feeds inflation by creating income yet not goods and services...
...With all its troubles, the trade-union movement remains a strong and progressive force for the democratization of American society...
...However, in 1968 Congress passed the revenue and expenditure Control Act, which denied federal tax exemption to an industrial-development bond issue exceeding $5 million...
...Jack Carlson, chief economist of the U.S...
...The amount of money involved, even when projected over three or four years, is negligible...
...to create a public energy corporation, charged with the responsibility to develop publicly owned oil and gas deposits, and to develop solar technology on a human scale and tear away the veil of secrecy that now hides the activity of—and even the basic data about—oil multinationals...
...The wage guidelines are supposedly "voluntary," but George Meany is more correct than others when he points out that they really are inflexible and...
...John Cornwall, Growth and Stability in a Mature Economy (New York: John Wiley, 1972...
...By looking at one-half of this integrated evil, the Administration ignores the enormous social cost of its own unworkable antiinflation policies...
...Like Richard Nixon in 1969, he has decided to "trade off" an intentional and managed slowdown for relief from inflation...
...But a postscript is in order...
...The right may not be making the gains it boasts of, but its advocacy of "new concepts" on taxes, fiscal policy, etc...
...Through our activities it is society that organizes itself, independently of the state power...
...the Senate filibuster...
...One truly sees in it the active presence of "social forces"—actors that have rarely appeared on the political scene in the "people's democracies...
...Facts, of course, speak for themselves...
...Federal legislation will be needed both to lessen the economic advantages enjoyed by states with low and regressive taxes and to create incentives for states and localities to enact progressive income taxes...
...National health insurance, proposed by President Truman in 1948, still appears to be a decade away...
...The outrage that ensued fueled a significant movement for tax reform...
...A fiscal theory that, on grounds of insufficient private demand, rationalizes a rise in the national debt by one-half in a period of relative prosperity and of relative decline in the military budget is bankrupt...
...I have used the 6.7 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for 1980 projected in the budget, to arrive at the adjustments...
...It said the invasion was against the principles of international law, which China usually upholds...
...Specific groups of workers (teamsters, coal miners, auto and steel workers) have kept up with or ahead of rising prices...
...Our central problem is not inflation—it is stagflation, a situation in which chronic joblessness and high prices reinforce one another, producing unhappy, fearful prosperities and unprecedented kinds of recession...
...Military expenditures are often expressed as a percentage of the national product to show their relative decline in recent years, but the comparison is irrelevant...
...In effect, however, "tax expenditures" constitute a shift in resources from the public to the private sector, and to its more privileged strata at that...
...the pastoral letters of the Polish Episcopate on human rights, and mass media, or freedom of conscience...
...Among them are "off-budget" government lending...
...The other 20 state income taxes, which have more or less flat rates of taxation and are only marginally more progressive than sales and property taxes, would not qualify for the credit...
...These 130 corporations control more than $1,000 billion ($I trillion) in assets, about 25 percent of the assets of all American corporations...
...Under these circumstances, even declining expenditures give rise to ever larger inventories of armaments...
...Deficits have helped maintain capitalist democracy, but, nevertheless, they are a symptom of economic pathology...
...collective profit-sharing" whereby a portion of profits in an enterprise is paid, in the form of equity capital, into a worker-controlled fund that will actively participate in decision-making...
...Also, January 1979, pp...
...good union workers, experienced in unionism, can of course move back to where they grew up in the South...
...In 1978, for example, trust funds showed a surplus of $12.7 billion, while the "administrative" budget— which covers general government operations (e.g., defense, agriculture supports) and is supposed to be financed from income, excise, and estate taxes—showed a deficit of $61.5 billion...
...Morrison and Walker write...
...There were people within the Administration who almost got the President to postpone the enforcement of measures against brown-lung disease on the ground that they were inflationary...
...The real revolution of our time is related to the striving for democracy and freedom...
...The same can be said for the unemployment that the Administration's policies will bring...
...Albert T. Sommers with Lucie R. Blau, The Widening Cycle: An Examination of U.S...
...Tax data released by the federal government in the late 1960s revealed that several hundred millionaires were able legally to avoid paying any federal income tax...
...For authoritarian regimes cannot be otherwise if they extend their tenure beyond the relatively brief period of a well-defined emergency that legitimizes their restrictive character in the eyes of their subjects...
...In 1924 the Congress, fearing vigorous competition among the states for old people and their estates, enacted a tax credit on its estate tax for payments made for state death taxes...
...As with most popular initiatives, the tax-reform movement had its greatest impact on the political rhetoric of candidates for office...
...Can the conflict with the Soviet Union be ended...
...It was the failure to do anything about the regressive nature of state and local taxes that changed the focus of the tax issue from progressive reform to reactionary revolt...
...There can be no progressive solution to any major problem in American life unless there is full employment...
...The number of strikes in the first nine months of 1978 was 3,852, down from 4,630 in the previous year...
...In couirast to earlier budgets, the one for 1980 has been formulated in terms of international financial policies...
...It has often been said that the human-service programs of the federal government contain much waste anyway, and they do...
...It is the function of government to create an economic environment in which sound capitalist principles can function...
...Finally, the smaller deficit will not result from the expectation of a diminished "gap" between actual and potential GNP...
...Granting tax concessions to attract industry is so widespread that a recent staff report of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) concluded that they had no real effect on attracting business from one state to the other...
...Instead, the opposition's focus revolved around the threat of the loss of public services...
...Given the recent New York experience, it is clear that so long as our system rewards those political jurisdictions that tax regressively or fail to raise sufficient revenues to provide for their disadvantaged, state and local governments will inevitably avoid taxing their wealthier residents and continue neglecting public services...
...True, the share of nondefense purchases of goods and services rose slightly over the periodi...
...The steel industry, which now needs inflation "trigger prices" in order to survive, is the most obvious case in point...
...In short, we are in the midst of a massive transformation of the American labor force in regard to size, character, and deployment...
...is not to balance the budget of the public sector, but to balance the economy as a whole...
...The housing shortage in California had caused a boom in the value of single-family houses...
...Nevertheless, military Research and Development spending has been budgeted to rise another 7 percent in 1980, and will account for nearly half the government's R&D outlays...
...It would take, the Council said, six years of "very high" 132 unemployment and $600 billion in lost revenues to have a significant impact upon inflation by means of a slow-down...
...This inflation is clearly Governmentinduced...
...Yet, now that the union movement is confronted with serious, multiple problems, there are more issues that pull it together than divide it...
...In such a world real detente among all the power centers has become a matter of survival...
...No one fully controls this new movement, and this means, most of all, that it is not manipulated, staged, or provoked...
...Those who seek to use the "China card" irresponsibly to fan conflict with the Soviet Union make no contribution to sanity in a nuclear world...
...Others urge unions to drop their outdated hostility toward greater unionworker participation in management bodies that is based on fear of "co-optation" and the blurring of distinction between labor and management...
...It can be described as a mirror image of the way Communists viewed relations among capitalist countries affected by irreconcilable conflicts...
...Quite a striking coincidence in the history of a country that, according to Alfred Jarry, is "nowhere...
...Our federal system of government, which prohibits state interference with interstate commerce, places very real limitations on the ability of state and local governments to tax wealthy individual and corporate residents...
...Corporate power needs periodic recessions but it no longer is forced to respond to them by lowering prices...
...These statements were anything but figures of speech...
...China needed a modicum of rational behavior and procedure, urgently...
...Without it, public budgets will constantly be open to the threat of tax revolts and massive expenditure cuts...
...In Warsaw, in the '60s, we used to meet for such discussions, and prosecutors in the trials held after the so-called March Events in 1968 cited attendance as proof that the accused were members of some "illegal organization...
...In this sense, it has not only failed to deal with the cyclical fluctuations and stagnationist tendencies of the capitalist economy...
...The political message of the movement is wonderfully simple: it is the call for the restoration, indeed the naive practice of restoration, of the elementary human right to chose freely what to do, what to think, and whom to trust...
...there is electronic speculation on a global scale carried out via satellites, reinforcing and profiteering from the weakness of any given currency...
...A few representative examples: When outlays for human services—i.e., community and regional development, education, training, employment and social services, health, income security—are adjusted for the projected trend in prices, it turns out that the Administration plans a cutback in excess of at least $9 billion in 1980...
...Second, Social Security has always been enormously popular in this country because it recognizes a right...
...Solarz's bill, which I helped draft, would establish a 50 percent tax credit for payments made for truly progressive income taxes, while at the same time repealing the current deduction for regressive sales taxes and nonprogressive income taxes...
...CARTER'S BUDGET CUTS, taken together, will not .reriouslt affect the inflation rate...
...Who now is on the offensive and who on the defensive seems clear...
...This applies particularly to the area of health care, where expenditures have been rising at an annual rate of 12 percent—far above the inflation rate...
...Because it deprives American workers of a right and substitutes for it a means-tested welfare payment that costs less...
...The Budget Act, meant to coordinate the appropriations process, has failed to restore congressional power of the purse...
...Thus, deficit finance is but one source of degradation of the tax system: let us note some others...
...The Society offers a number of courses, which are taught in private apartments by eminent intellectuals...
...As a result, radicals and progressives have looked exclusively to the federal government for the creation of new programs...
...139 Ii there is any issue that exemplifies the rightward drift in American politics, it is the issue of taxes...
...and so-called tax expenditures (i.e., revenue losses attributable to provisions of the tax laws that allow special exclusions, exemptions, or deductions from gross income, or provide special credits, preferential tax rates or deferred tax liability...
...He must be communing somewhere with the "new Soviet man" who took somewhat longer making an exit from the stage of history...
...97,400 Electrical Workers, vs...
...In responding to the tax revolt, we must not only be concerned with relieving the tax burdens imposed on low- and middle-income people by inequitable taxes...
...The failure of Congress lies in permitting, even promoting, the erosion of the tax base, not in allowing budget expenditures to grow...
...But, in Poland, this chasm between the two is only now beginning to be articulated...
...There also is a broad area where it is impossible to calculate exact costs, such as layoff protection, pensions, so-called noneconomic issues involving subcontracting work and floor discipline...
...There is in Poland, then, this underlying weakness of the government and an underlying strength in the opposition—and both revealed themselves unexpectedly to both protagonists and are not easy to come to terms with...
...If Butterfield doesn't get the Pulitzer prize this year for his prescient coverage of China from Hong Kong and Peking, the folks at Columbia don't know their business...
...GM's decision to raise the sticker price of its cars by $1,000 in the midst of a recession can be taken as an appropriate symbol of that structural change in capitalism...
...Incredible as it now seems, they were worried in 1969 because the inflation rate had almost reached 4 percent...
...They don't even address their grievances to the Party, but send them to the Diet...
...U.S...
...on the contrary, they ease its implementation...
...For example, the exclusion from taxation of employer contributions to private pension plans was worth $8.7 billion in 1977...
...and the resultant deficit financing of expenditures other than those for the bulk of income support payments...
...What might that new labor strategy be, and what are its chances to succeed, in the face of today's strengthened corporate capitalism...
...We are being checked and balanced into immobility...
...Not only is the effectiveness of stabilization policy declining: it is becoming part of the economic crises it supposedly prevents or alleviates...
...Slowed growth and budget restraint must result in unemployment rates well above 4 percent for years to come, according to the Administration's own projections...
...THERE SHOULD BE• public and employee members on the board of directors of every major corporation...
...In January 1978, Mr...
...In his pocket was the little red book of Mao's savings, with an introduction by Lin Piao...
...and today the red books have been banished altogether...
...Yet, stabilization policy was originally conceived to minimize the social costs of the business cycle...
...It must be a program that treats all Americans equally, provides a...
...it's corporate power...
...But Carter cannot and will not allow such a catastrophe, for it would assure his defeat in 1980...
...By 1976 they amounted to $95 billion, or approximately 20 percent of our total tax bill...
...The deficit has an economic meaning of its own, to which we will return...
...Labor rightly fears the rise of the fanatical single-issue groups (Proposition 13, righttowork, antiabortion), which act to break up existing coalitions and nullify political efforts that work toward broadening alliances...
...Second, the deficit is to be cut in the framework of the continued planned decline in the relative importance of federal purchases of goods and services, i.e., the continued contraction of the (federal) public sector...
...And it works, so far, anyway...
...There are news bulletins containing political commentaries, such as Biuletvn Informacyjny (Information Bulletin) or Opinia (Opinion), addressed to the general public...
...Economic stagnation meant that the economy was operating below its potential, with potential being defined in terms of a high employment rate...
...First of all, capitalism today is much more concentrated, which means that the market power of gigantic oligopolies has increased enormously...
...Those of us with political memories that extend past June 6, 1978 will recall that the issue used to belong to the left...
...Experience with Stabilization Policy in the Last Decade (New York: Conference Board, 1975...
...Finally, so far as the ideological affect of antiunion material on workers is concerned, labor leaders point out that, except for the most antiquated "business type" craft union, the rank-and-file's understanding of the union's role in the million-or-moremembership industrial unions has gone up considerably in the past decade...
...This report described several cases of murder, committed by militiamen and never prosecuted...
...When the hard bargaining gets going, the factor that will decide success or failure is the issue of benefits...
...To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...The profits of these huge corporations indeed have grown at an extraordinary pace, while inflation has had a devastating effect on the greatest part of the population...
...It is common knowledge that the peasantry and the Catholic church are bulwarks of resistance against the Communist authorities in Poland or, for that matter, anywhere...
...Between 1929 and 1933, when joblessness engulfed approximately one-fourth of the labor force, prices went down by roughly 25 percent...
...We need not speculate about these matters...
...The reasoning behind the bill is that the 50 percent credit for progressive income taxes will reduce the competitive disadvantage of states with such taxes, while the elimination of the deduction for sales taxes and nonprogressive income taxes will create a popular demand on the part of local taxpayers to have their state and local government convert from sales taxes to progressive income taxes...
...The Party's ultimate strength, as always, emanates from Moscow...
...On the contrary, as has been noted, the unemployment rate (a crude measure of the "gap") is projected to rise to 6.2 percent by the end of this year, to remain unchanged through 1980, and then to decline to a level still well above 5 percent by the end of 1981...
...There is at least one highly desirable result of the new turn in China—the "new Chinese man" has suddenly disappeared...
...In terms simply of military requirements, there is no explanation for the Administration's now intensifying this pursuit...
...Jimmy Carter is moving superbly to achieve the worst of several intolerable worlds—a world that will oscillate between high unemployment and higher unemployment, high prices and higher prices...
...UAW's Solidarity, Sept...
...The budgetary deficit accounted for 4 percent of total federal outlays in 1960, and for 19 percent in the late '70s...
...In their refusal to yield to arbitrariness, the emerging social forces in Poland practice, if you will, society...
...30, 1978...
...They did not 151 believe that there were people who would not do so and that one of them was his humble self...
...In Missouri last year the unions resoundingly defeated a right-to-work initiative, though the polls earlier had shown voters to have favored it by almost 60 percent...
...That corporate power favors periodic recession as Arthur Burns has told us and as the Wall Street Journal boldly proclaimed when it headed a December story: "Businessmen: Let Slowdown Come...
...Is it being questioned by unionists...
...a minimum tax was established to make sure that every wealthy individual paid some taxes...
...Debt data are from the Federal Reserve's Flow of Funds accounts...
...In the decade preceding the tax cut the state lost 600,000 jobs while the rest of the country, including New York's neighboring states, showed gains in employment...
...This is an extraordinarily instructive work...
...Is the need for unions, and their very "legitimacy," now being questioned...
...The fact is that many California voters were in need of legitimate tax relief...
...it is not federal spending, which has fluctuated within a narrow band as a percentage of full-employment GNP...
...145,000 Ladies' Garment Workers by the end of May...
...Unprecedented corruption and spoliation by Party officials, not surprisingly, accompanies this erosion of power...
...And what we will get is more inflation and more unemployment at the same time...
...In April 1977, KSS "KOR" published a shattering 47-page report on police brutality in Poland, entitled Documents on Lawlessness...
...and "the big one"—the UAW and the Rubber Workers (with 684,450 members), vs...
...Yet, the sermons of Primate Wyszynski...
...So, they go along with Teng's dictum that it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice...
...Nor should labor shy away from the complaint of "excessive government spending" and budgetary waste...
...The loss of control over budget finance and stabilization policy—to return to the problem initially posed—thus cannot be ascribed to expanding federal outlays, measured in terms either of their total or of purchases of goods and services...
...the] simplistic pursuit of military growth has...
...Does the labor movement have a program to offer...
...they will be blamed for the crisis on the grounds that there are "too many" of them in the labor market...
...The fiscal theory that has underlain deficit finance since the 1960s implies a stagnationist view of the economy...
...The reason there are such long gestation periods for federal programs is that a political consensus among a heterogeneous population must be developed...
...subsidies to private employers for taking on young workers, etc...
...Recently, legislation aimed in this direction was introduced by Rep...
...During the last two decades state and local taxes have grown twice as fast as federal taxes...
...People have been threatened, beaten up, arrested, and one collaborator of the Workers' Defense Committee, Stanislaw Pyjas, was, in all probability, killed by the police...
...The military expenditure increases proposed by the Carter Administration, $11 billion, are based on no discernibly rational policy...
...nor is it explainable merely by any "compromise" between the advocates of the "welfare state" and those of the "warfare state...
...The Marxist idiom no longer appeals to them...
...We always knew that the pat's reel and the pays legal east of the Elbe were two different things...
...They were "spontaneously" mobilized by the Mao faction of the Party, given food, lodging, and transportation, armed with little red books, and later some of them with guns and mortars, and encouraged to rampage in a revolution against the Party that Mao had reared...
...Within the liberal-labor coalition, socialists will point the way beyond this immediate program...
...The public sector, being used by means of budgetary policy to sustain the economic health of the private sector, forgoes the means to its own health, and suffers "scarcity...
...It was not true then, and it is even less true today...
...One reason the tax burden has shifted to those least able to bear it is the meteoric rise in social security taxes...
...in a totalitarian or an occupied country two forms of opposition were traditionally recognized— conspiracy aiming at the overthrow of the imposed regime and efforts to induce the authorities to do some "beneficial" things...
...Purchases of goods and services by the government—used here as a rough measure of resource absorption—declined from 58 percent of the budget and I 1 percent of the national 136 product in 1960, to 34 percent and 7 percent in 1978...
...But large numbers of unorganized workers may turn to the unions in sheer defensive need—and such blocks of new membership might make the difference...
...Since only estates in states that had such death taxes could take advantage of the credit, every state in the union, save Nevada, has enacted such a tax...
...THE TRADITIONAL American labor leaders are pragmatic, "food-on-the-table" types...
...Having just leafed through some 12 years of Peking Review I noticed that certain attributes of the "new man" popped out all the time...
...In general terms, the AFL-CIO Executive Council, at its October 1978 meeting, adopted a policy for 1979...
...What began as an act of civil courage by a handful of intellectuals as they protested against police torture and the courts' violation of the legal system (in the repression of workers' food strikes in June 1976) has slowly evolved into a complex movement of opposition to the regime...
...A mere ten years ago, Lyndon Johnson's outgoing Council of Economic Advisers summarized the conventional wisdom...
...if not quite at death's door, its condition is critical...
...killed the administration-backed bill that would have made it easier for unions to get in and stay in...
...Apart from the smallness of these figures, they indicate that the decline in the relative importance of defense spending, which the comparisons reflect, was not to any significant extent balanced by a rise in that of nondefense spending...
...A large domain of political freedom has been carved out in Poland...
...Carlson further acknowledged that rigid enforcement of the Administration's wage policy would mean a 2 to 4 percent loss in real purchasing power...
...II WHEN JIMMY CARTER SHIFTED the governmental focus from full employment to inflation, he obscured the central issue before the country and guaranteed that his Administration would retreat, not simply from the pledges of the 1976 Democratic platform, but from the liberal heritage of the New Deal...
...Such exclusions, of course, lower taxable income...
...The Massachusetts initiative came about as a result of a Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that interpreted the state constitution as requiring commercial and residential property to be taxed at the same rate...
...Prior to publishing the budget, the Administration, with its repellent mix of guile and irresoluteness, partly "restored" cuts in social expenditures previously announced, in an attempt to show its humanitarianism...
...But we have lived to see in China a wall poster with the declaration: "The new thinking, the great democratic and human rights to which we aspire, which we seek, have today raised their heads in the great land of China...
...The evident loss of control over federal budget financing is not by any means due—as both conservatives and many liberals argue—to its alleged rapid expansion...
...Unions lose more National Labor Relations Board elections than they win, and disenchanted workers vote them out of bargaining rights they already have at quadruple the rate of a decade ago...
...Ours is still a "society of private affluence and public squalor," to quote John Kenneth Galbraith...
...This is the tack taken now by the man who defeated Gerald Ford in 1976 by saying that unemployment was the key issue for the nation—and it will not work for him...
...His case, if he so desires, will be described in the uncensored press and so the official abuse will be publicized...
...corporations—the 30 biggest industrial corporations, the 20 biggest banks, the 10 biggest insurance companies, the 10 biggest diversified financial 144 companies, the 20 biggest utilities, the 20 biggest transportation companies, the 10 biggest retailers, the three major broadcasting companies, and seven investment advisory companies...
...the planned curtailment of the budgetary deficit and cutbacks in nonmilitary expenditures are meant to demonstrate the seriousness of the Administration's support for the exchange value of the dollar...
...The government's function here is merely that of a redistributive agent...
...The rights of conscience are assaulted as "antichoice" forces try to legally compel a majority of American women to follow a moral code on abortion in which they do not believe...
...He follows the game plan that did not work for Richard Nixon in 1969-71...
...Another less publicized but equally important reason for the downward shift in the tax burden is the enormous growth in state and local taxes...
...In April 1978, the Senate Subcommittee on Reports, Accounting and Management lifted the curtain of secrecy on one aspect of concentrated corporate power, the network of interlocking directorships...
...the average manufacturing wage in 1977 was $103.97, or $6.00 less than in 1972...
...When we examine these political views more closely, we see that the union leaders prefer to reestablish previously existing alliances in short, to restore rather than to innovate...
...His case will be thoroughly investigated (to his and the movement's benefit, for the latter must be on guard against police provocation) and he will receive legal advice...
...The reflation of the dollar as the international currency is to occur at the expense of the disadvantaged...
...He, or she, was always uncomplaining, nay, happy about unremitting and unremunerative toil...
...Since the activities of the Workers' Defense Committee are not conspiratorial, they are interpreted as a form of pressure on the authorities...
...The best opportunities at the moment lie in the South, with its overall liberalization and growing industrial centers...
...It is clear that the old union caucus, centered in the Democratic party, is coming to an end...
...Young, trained people (economists, statisticians, labor lawyers) have hesitated to make the labor movement the base of their careers, and few talented people seem to be working toward leadership up from the ranks...
...In our actions we are oriented toward society and not toward the authorities...
...Despite the slow progress of various recent organizing drives, these efforts will continue...
...In 1978, personal and corporate income taxes accounted for 60 percent of total federal budget receipts, compared with 74 percent in 1969...
...In turn, inflation is fought by deliberately inducing a slowdown, whose eventual reversal 138 requires renewed inflationary finance (i.e., still greater deficits...
...The inherent conflict between stabilization policy and the setting of national priorities was manageable so long as a reasonable relation between tax revenues and expenditures could be assumed—if not on an annual basis, then at least over the period of the business cycle...
...If his pick struck stone and he removed the boulder, he never forgot to explain that this was accomplished with the direct assistance of Mao Tse-tung's Thoughts...
...As a result, by 1974 the dollar amount of such individual bonds fell by two-thirds, from $1.6 billion in 1968 to $0.5 billion in 1974...
...e., from 2 percent of the national product and 10 percent of the budget in 1960, to 3 percent and 12 percent in 1978...
...they think that people get what they pay in and that is why, until quite recently, few Americans attacked the regressive Social Security tax...
...In 1974, when unemployment headed for the highest levels since the Great Depression, prices soared at the same time (and began to do so before the OPEC oil embargo...
...Such growth reflects the power of organization and refutes the allegations of public hostility to unionization of public employees...
...That sum is roughly three-quarters of the $12.5 billion by which total current services in the budget are expected to decline in 1980 after the "inflation adjustment...
...But we are pursuing a completely new form of activity...
...They thought that they only had to speak the word and all the people would listen and obey...
...Chinese-American detente further diminishes the dangerous bi-polar conflict in the world...
...There are serious political reviews, such as G?os (Voice) or Krtvtvka (Critique), and the sophisticated literary journals Puls (Pulse) and Zapis (Notation...
...When the Chinese Communists were fighting a small war with the Soviet Communists on Chenpao island, here's how the Peking Review (September 26, 1969) described the secret of victory: Just note, we didn't use aircraft or tanks...
...It shifts the burden of fighting inflation to those least able to bear it, while providing for large, inherently inflationary increases in military spending...
...The changing nature of strikes is a subject that demands its own study...
...146 A special session of Congress should...
...Now we want real freedom, human rights, and democracy...
...loans guaranteed by the government...
...It should also be pointed out that the bill would only apply to the income taxes of the 21 states, and the District of Columbia, which meet the definition of "progressive" contained in the bill...
...One hastens to acknowledge that China under Hua Kuo-feng and Teng Hsiao-ping is not in the throes of a democratic revolution...
...Even the most incorrigible optimists in this movement admit they would have laughed in the winter of 1976 if anyone had told them the story of the two years of activities that were to follow the founding of the Workers' Defense Committee...
...Laws protecting sexual minorities from discrimination have been repealed...
...Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Kennedy and the leading exponent of the "New Economics" in the early'60s, wrote in 1965 that "The appropriate impact of the budget depends on the state of the economy, rather than on the state of the government accounts...
...This question, on one level, is pragmatic...
...retraining and relocating chronically out-of-work people...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics...
...In fact, recession often performs an unavoidable function...
...First of all, it will not be the result of a sounder tax base...
...An environment of deficit finance and fiscal stringency is hostile to higher public nondefense expenditures, no matter how urgent the social priorities they are meant to fund...
...A similar issue is the matter of pension-funding, particularly for the big unions, which all have severe benefit-funding problems...
...Take, for instance, the uncensored publications...
...Needless to say, few of the ads against Proposition 13 labeled it a corporate rip-off...
...The ideas I am advancing all basically point to a strengthened federal sector, and to a halt in the erosion of the federal tax base and its progressivity...
...But, most likely, ways will be found to smooth over the sharper edges of the Carter program, with loopholes that will enable the unions to beat the guideline...
...As a result, if state governments are liberated from the fear of the flight of capital and are given the capacity to raise revenues to fund new programs, some states might actually break new ground in providing public services...
...Although these efforts in no way reflected the scope of the campaign promises, they did result in some significant changes in our tax laws...
...to reject the increase in military spending and to redouble American efforts to negotiate an end of the arms race...
...Some Third World industries can now compete with the United States, Europe, and Japan...
...Government Printing Office), pp...
...When the issue boils down to an elementary defense of working-class interests, tons of propaganda and millions of dollars fail to bring results...
...The crucial "unsolved problem" was "reconciling prosperity at high 131 employment with price stability...
...But by the early 1960s AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees) was the fastest-growing segment of the trade-union movement...
...Although the Solarz bill would initially cost the Treasury $4 billion, or less than one quarter of last year's tax cut, the long-run costs of the bill would be significant despite some strict limitations in the bill on the percentage of one's income tax that can be reduced by the credit...
...It is now clear from the California experience that the maintenance of a healthy public sector depends on funding through an equitable tax structure...
...Carter's planned deficit reduction proceeds in an entirely different context...
...People who are part of this movement act as if they were truly the enfranchised citizens of a constitutional state...
...And our energy policy has, since the I920s, paid out billions to huge 133 corporations, which then caused us to be unnecessarily dependent on Arab oil, criminally wasteful, and backward in the development of environmentally benign technologies...
...One group from Kweichow, a province quite isolated from Peking, calls itself the "Democratic Forum" and consists of young people who were forced out of the schools during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution...
...That theory has clearly been exploded by the stagflation of the '70s, yet Carter is following policies based on that demonstrably obsolete analysis...
...What may the future hold for America's tradeunion movement...
...Although racism and plain selfishness had a good deal to do with Proposition 13, it would simply be wrong to dismiss all of its supporters as a reactionary mob...
...1978 was a relatively inactive year for union/corporate bargaining, involving only 2 million workers in the larger industrial units...
...Robert W. Hartman, "The Budget and the Economy," in Setting National Priorities: The 1979 Budget (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institutions, 1978...
...Had that line prevailed, its cost would have been paid for in premature deaths...
...There will be opposition to, and changes in, the Administration's 1980 budget, but the relationship of forces is in its favor...
...During the same period of time, federal revenues increased by less than 350 percent, from $74 billion in 1953 to $323 billion in 1976...
...But it is not only "fluctuations" in demand that stabilization policy must deal with...
...Labor, however, now has its ideas and proposals on the drawing board: improved federal job programs...
...A much-cited argument was that Connecticut, which had tripled its number of Fortune 500 headquarters at the expense of New York, had no income tax, and that an executive who was transferred to Houston immediately received a 20 percent increase in pay because of the difference in taxes...
...But the wait for new federal programs is always a long one...
...A more recent use of the federal tax system involves the use of tax-exempt state and municipal bonds for private industrial development...
...The nation is, in a sense, in a period resembling the years between 1919 and 1933: a critical problem has emerged that the established theory can neither comprehend nor master...
...Tax expenditures" have become a key factor undermining the progressivity of the income tax, and the ability-to-pay principle...
...Much now is made of the facts that the proportion of unionized to nonunion workers in the labor force has gone down, and that such unions as the ILGWU have lost thousands of members...
...It does not overestimate its strength and proceeds cautiously...
...guided by clever "consultants," they aggressively engage in unionbusting...
...As a result, almost the entire political leadership of the state, ranging from conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats, supported a massive tax cut that reduced the tax burden of someone earning $100,000 about 20 times as much as it reduced the burden of someone earning $10,000 annually...
...the sudden outburst of wall posters in the Chinese capital over the last week has revealed the existence of deep popular resentment against the widespread political persecutions of the last decade and a strong desire for democracy in China...
...During the past year editors by the planeload have been leaving for visits to China...
...The most significant positive effect of the tax credit is that it would breathe some life into our federal system...
...AFSCME...
...And after all the nonsense we have read about the universal support for the dictatorship during the years when the "Gang of Four" was in charge comes a dispatch in the New York Times by Fox Butterfield...
...Raskin, writing last fall in the New York City newspaper-strike paper City News, summarized matters as follows: The number of union dues-payers keeps going down while the number of jobholders goes up...
...Although they had succeeded in closing a few loopholes, taxes in general have been less progressive in the mid-1970s than they were in the conservative 1950s...
...But at the time no one dared to say it...
...That premise was: the basic corporate infrastructure was and is sound...
...It is no accident that he finds no theory, no policy, to guide him, for on the very eve of the past decade's ride on the economic roller coaster the best mainstream theorists were telling the nation that prosperity was the "normal state" of the American economy...
...is more effective than that of the unions...
...Before 1968, many local governments used the tax-exempt bonding privilege to finance industrial construction that was then turned over to private industry to lure it to their jurisdictions...
...However, it did not surface as an issue in the campaign because the leaders of the opposition, for political reasons, wanted to have a broad-based campaign that included the business community...
...Why...
...After the parades, After the promises, Someone has to work to keep our states and cities runnin' A-F-S-C-M-E AFSCME...
...If this approach continues, it will be fair to speak of the unraveling of the New Deal under the leadership of a Democratic president elected by a modern version of the New Deal coalition...
...However, with a state surplus of $5 billion and a state budget increasing 10-20 percent a year, that threat never became credible...
...It will cut back on the social budget, which will hurt the poor and further deteriorate the quality of life for all but will not have any significant impact upon inflation...
...their levels have nonetheless remained high, considering that no large-scale wars have been fought in years...
...now it is simultaneous joblessness and inflation...
...Instead of prophesying its decline, we ought to help expand its potential for improving life in this country...
...there is no cohesion, no discipline in the Democratic party...
...Military expenditures in the United States have 135 indeed been declining when adjusted for rising costs...
...The "new man" had an unbelievable manner of speech...
...That erratic economic climate of the last several years has been as carefully analyzed in labor publications as anywhere, and labor people have done an especially excellent job of documenting conditions of low-paid workers...
...One must assume that it seeks to accommodate the mindless conservatism of military interests and their industrial allies, and of the more philistine strata of the American electorate...
...How startling is the revelation of the nature of relationships among Communist countries...
...Thus, suggests Helen Dewar in a New York Post column (November 28, 1978), a 10 percent increase in a health and pension plan that constitutes 10 percent of a worker's total compensation would amount to no more than a l percent increase in overall payroll costs, but it would consume 14 percent (oneseventh) of what the unions can get under the 7 percent guideline policy...
...Yet, there is much talk today of the need for a new strategy...
...Nevertheless, a 25 percent rise in spending for strategic nuclear forces has been budgeted...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Budget deficits, meant to dampen cyclical downturns, now also accompany recoveries, intensifying inflation...
...The higher the incomes, the more they are worth in tax dollars...
...That compares as follows with previous expansionary periods of similar length: 20 percent in 1971-74...
...Transfer payments represent merely shifts between those who bear the payroll tax (or other ear-marked levy), and those who receive benefits (a large proportion of which must be regarded as deferred wages rather than unearned income...
...The first test for wage guidelines has been passed, with an agreement in January between the oil industry and the 60,000 members of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers' Union...
...The President is incapable of meeting the challenge...
...Change would involve a large shift of real resources to the public sector, not merely in terms of restoring income taxes to their erstwhile importance and progressivity...
...such gains, worth 7 percent today (to keep up with rising cost-of-living indices), will be counted as 3 or 4 percent...
...Given the realities of the present Congress, it is doubtful...
...Hearings (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, March 6, 1978...
...Change would also spell greater independence of the public sector from the private sector, e.g., by establishing more public enterprises, and by preventing the privatization of such service functions as health care, pension funding, communications, transportation...
...A few examples: Although the federal income tax has loopholes of which only the wealthy can take advantage, and social security is funded by a flat regressive tax, federal taxes are relatively progressive...
...Elizabeth Holtzman reports that the Vietnamese Communists have made millions of dollars from ransom payments by refugees...
...What of 1979, with almost double the number of workers looking for new contracts...
...Alan S. Blinder and Robert M. Solow, "Analytical Foundations of Fiscal Policy," The Economics of Public Finance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974...
...Our housing industry— if one can dignify that Rube Goldberg sector with such a name—has been victimized by ups and downs of monetary policy for a generation and is getting ready for another inflated recession...
...Indeed, most people don't even know that there is a welfare component in the system...
...But this is a burden rather than a blessing...
...Burns's co-thinker Richard Nixon in 1969— and it didn't work then...
...The big battles will take place over the federal budget, cuts in social programs, issues of education, health, manpower, and defense...
...Prosperity, it proudly said, was now "the normal stage of the American economy...
...It was, ironically, the most unfair, and the least criticized, of federal levies...
...First of all, Social Security benefits and Medicare do account for about two-thirds of domestic social spending...
...But why, then, should we rise up in arms against such a move...
...Between the third quarter of 1975 and the third quarter of 1978, a period of cyclical expansion, U.S...
...Take another example, the tradition of clandestine study circles...
...Yet, while the drain on the federal treasury is a definite drawback, the benefits of the credit far 142 outweigh its liabilities...
...The Administration is tightening up credit, which will bring both inflation and recession in the housing sector...
...The writers sign themselves "The Democratic Forum...
...He will be cruel but not sufficiently cruel to achieve his purposes...
...See also the response by Russell Murray 2nd, Program Analysis and Evaluation, Department of Defense, Scientific American, January 1979, p. 8. Marcus G. Raskin, ed., The Federal Budget and Social Reconstruction: The People and the State (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1978...
...A little fiscal and monetary fine-tuning, and that can be done...
...They meant that the budget should be balanced only at full employment—while at less than full employment, the budget should be in deficit...
...Sources: Department of Commerce...
...This may seem a naive stand to take in a "people's democracy...
...There are Peasant's Self-Help Committees in several regions of Poland...
...If there is flexibility it applies to the fringe benefits whose importance grows every year...
...But when she saw the comrades of the propaganda team in the operation theater leading the doctors and nurses in reciting Chairman Mao's teaching on serving the people wholeheartedly, she stopped worrying...
...draft a legislative program of full economic controls, covering every source of income—profits, dividends, rents, interest rates, executive compensation, professional fees—as well as wages and prices...
...They have also accepted the view that new men and old men alike need material compensation and incentive for work...
...It seems to me that the most important is a demonstration, this time in the most populous country of the world, that there is an underground stream of "dangerous thoughts," a longing for democracy that courses through all totalitarian countries...
...Second, the emergence of multinational capitalism after World War II effectively has deprived national policy-makers of control over the money supply that is at their disposal...
...Mao explained that it was fear of Russia...
...Although the business community launched a wellfinanced campaign against the initiative, it carried the state by over 2 to I, and swept Boston by 10 to 1. Given the Massachusetts results, it is clear that the best way to counter the tax-revolt fever is to make state and local taxes more equitable...
...Under such circumstances, the President has to retreat from the New Deal...
...Let us hope not...
...The secret police is no solution to this problem, for it was never intended—except insofar as it employs agents provocateurs —as a functional substitute for open political participation by the citizenry...
...Intended to mitigate the business cycle, stabilization policy has become increasingly subverted, and it aggravates what it is supposed to alleviate...
...The extent to which the economy has become dependent upon them is indicated by recent debt figures...
...The old man was not as senile as portrayed by his successors when he made it clear to Edgar Snow (Life, April 30, 1971) that he was ready for detente with Nixon's U.S.A...
...The Carter administration is virtually repeating the Nixon administration's policy of "restraint" of 1969-70, and the Ford administration's tightened monetary policy of 1974...
...The loss of control over budgetary (or stabilization) policy is related to additional, equally fundamental if less immediate, reasons for erosion of the tax base...
...A New York State legislator knows that the move from Westchester to Fairfield County may not involve any loss of personal amenities, and that the move from lower Manhattan to Hoboken need not cause the loss of any markets or clients...
...Notice that at every point in this account of the structural sources of inflation it is corporate power that is crucial...
...The enormous deficit in the administrative budget suggests the magnitude of a fiscal crisis that is induced largely by the steady relative decline in income taxation...
...the labor movement is implanted in American society, but at present there hardly are "bright prospects...
...Idols and superstition are good enough words to include fanatical religion and dogmatic ideology...
...The Editors 134 The federal budget for the fiscal year 1980 proposes a socially regressive shift in national priorities...
...The lack of rationale is highlighted by Carter's own words: "[Just] one of our relatively invulnerable Poseidon submarines—less than 2 percent of our total nuclear force of submarines, aircraft and landbased missiles—carries enough warheads to destroy every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union" (State of the Union Message...
...Thus, deficits have become a structural part of budgetary finance...
...The budget has many expressions of such concerns, but the proposed spending figures prove they are not genuine...
...on the other, there was society—very different in each case, but always subdued and exhausted...
...Easier said than done...
...And women will not only be kept in their insecure and underpaid "place" by these trends...
...If, as Philip Morrison and Paul Walker have recently shown in the Scientific American, U.S...
...General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, by mid-September...
...We will never know whether the results in California would have been different had the opposition focused on the great share of the tax relief provided to corporations...
...It advertises its meetings so that anyone interested can find out about them, and it draws large crowds of students in various university towns, for the lecturers travel around and repeat their courses in a few cities...
...WE NOW TURN to some broader aspects of budgetary policy...
...exclusion of capital gains, $6.9 billion...
...But after the results last November of another tax initiative, this time in Massachusetts, it is clear that the issue of tax equity can be a powerful one...
...States, however, are much more culturally homogeneous, and so political consensus can be developed far more quickly...
...Is there a new militant corporate action, with a higher level of sophistication, forming part of a general rightward trend...
...They are supposedly "one means by which the Federal Government pursues public policy objectives and, in most cases, can be viewed as alternatives to budget outlays, credit assistance, or other policy instruments" (Special Analyses, Fiscal Year 1979...
...The horror of the situation manifests itself in the fact that there are no dolphins in the apparatus, as there always were in past times, of crisis: now there are only sharks...
...The deficit is, moreover, consistently understated to the extent that the regular surpluses shown by the federal trust funds (into which payroll receipts for old-age pensions, Medicare, and various other benefit programs flow) are used to offset a part of the large shortfalls in what at one time was referred to as the administrative budget...
...Newly organized groups of workers, and new unions, often have added a new tone and new strength to the labor movement...
...In 1953 a family with an average income paid 11.8 percent of its income in taxes...
...and zero in 195457...
...The first was revealed by Mao himself at the end of December 1970...
...the strain on pension treasuries is growing...
...Outstanding off-budget loans—i.e., loans for which the budget does not account although the data are made available—amounted to more than $120 billion in 1978...
...on another, it is a matter of public, i.e., middle-class sentiment...
...The political will to assert that power has, if anything, slackened in recent decades...
...Now Mr...
...They brought back two vivid impressions...
...With the New Deal, the role of the states became a passive one...
...This time, people are expressing themselves with their own voices...
...He moved mountains with a pick and shovel and disdained machinery because he was self-reliant and wouldn't condescend to foreign devils...
...Richard B. DuBoff, "The Fiscal Limits of the Welfare State," Quarterly Review of Economics and Business, Spring 1978...
...to allocate credit for housing by requiring all banks that are beneficiaries of federal services to provide a specified percentage of their loans to socially useful investments in their geographic area...
...military needs could be met by expenditures 40 percent smaller than the current ones, then the waste by the military—outlays for which do not "reflect the fiscal restraint that is one of the dominant principles of this year's budget" (the sentence occurs, naturally, in the education, employment, and social services section of the budget)—could pay twice over for current social welfare programs other than income support...
...There are student publications, such as Bratniak (Fraternity) or Spotkania (Encounters...
...and, no doubt, every union will try to push up pension payments for already retired workers...
...Then the same teenagers who had been elected so "spontaneously" to be the masses were packed off to rural villages...
...When we propose a series of particular reforms, they are inspired by that general purpose...
...It tends to confirm a hypothesis that every Communist movement, every Communist country and most individual Communists are susceptible to the Kronstadt syndrome...
...This is also a time of growing social meanness...
...General Electric, by the end of June...
...Also, such transfers pose no significant problems for stabilization policy...
...The decline in New York State's economy was obviously caused by many factors...
...Dr...
...If the failure to do anything about the regressive distribution of local taxes fueled the Proposition 13 movement, it was the failure to even see the issue of tax justice that guaranteed Jarvis and Gann their victory...
...Taking budgetary outlays as a whole, it is quite true that they have risen relative to the national product, from 19 percent in 1960 to nearly 23 percent in 1978...
...No less than 702 contracts, according to the Department of Labor, are expiring this year, affecting 3.8 million workers...
...It is surely not the budget cuts alone that are both humanly hurtful and economically ineffective...
...POSTSCRIPT: The above was written before China's invasion of Vietnam...
...But transfer payments do not involve an expansion in the "role of government" in the sense that, through them, government absorbs more resources for uses of its own...
...A family earning $25,000 a year will have to pay more than twice the percentage of its earnings in federal income and payroll taxes than will a family earning $5,000 a year, and a family earning $50,000 a year will have to pay nearly three times the percentage paid by a family earning $5,000 a year...
...In time they become, literally, reactionary—capable only of reacting to breakdowns of social order or outbursts of social protest that occur suddenly and unannounced...
...Our tripartite system of industrial relations (unions, corporations, and the government) creates special realities: the most powerful unions had been winning 10 to 12 percent wage increases before the 7 percent "inflation-rate" guideline was proposed...
...The distribution of the tax relief provided by Proposition 13 was known before its passage...
...Workman's compensation, public housing, and unemployment insurance were all first introduced at the state level and only later adopted by the federal government...
...If so, by whom...
...During the '70s, their real buying power declined in four out of eight years...
...The size of that sector is probably still the largest problem we face as a society...
...Let me cite just a few instances of what that might mean...
...Butterfield quotes one of these youths in the Democratic Forum as saying, "Everyone in China knew that the Cultural Revolution was a period of fascist dictatorship...
...he is establishing his fiscal virtue and austerity in the anti-inflation struggle by attacking the most vulnerable people in a way that will not hold down inflation...
...IV IN ITS DAY, the New Deal seemed to be a radical experiment and it was militantly opposed by those who—through no fault of their own and little intention of the reformers—turned out to be the major beneficiaries of reform: the corporate rich who have made much more money . off welfare capitalism than they ever earned from Adam Smith capitalism...
...The deficit manifests the degradation of the function of taxation as a source of financing public services, and as a means to equilibrate the public and private sectors...
...The cautious Georgia Democrat was merely restating what had become by then the political consensus within the country's major party...
...Grants to states and localities, while slated for an increase of $800 million, will actually shrink by nearly $5 billion when so adjusted...
...Consequently, for the first time perhaps since 1945, the Communist rulers of Poland have to make a historical decision...
...As of last year, the Society of Scientific Courses has been founded in Poland with an advisory council composed of a large group of eminent professors...
...The company's efforts, however, failed completely...
...Aside from their negative impact on the equitable distribution of the tax burden, tax expenditures contribute to eroding the 137 tax base, and hence the ability to finance publicsector programs...
...There is an enormous Eurodollar market that does not obey the dictates of the Federal Reserve...
...It was not uncommon for some families to see their substantial real-estate tax bills more than double, without any corresponding increase in public services...
...147 Poland lately is visible in world affairs...
...Undoubtedly, the deterioration of the quality of life in the state's largest city, caused by a decline in public services, played a role in persuading corporate executives to move themselves and their firms...
...There is a temptation to foresee bitter confrontations, and they indeed may lie ahead...
...How important are the changes in China...
...What incapacitates the rulers is not that they cannot satisfy the public but that they have lost the ability to manipulate it...
...In this regard, the democratic left approach contrasts sharply with that of a Carter administration that engages in cruel but empty gestures based on obsolete economics...
...The peasantry also no longer conforms to the old stereotype of a dull, amorphous, stubborn (and therefore resistant) social mass but now organizes itself and takes initiative...
...These are mostly funded from payroll taxes or other earmarked levies, i.e., they are almost entirely selffinancing...
...This agreement skirted President Carter's "guidelines" with some fancy manipulation of figures...
...But, there are enough fundamental reasons for the ending of Chinese isolation and for Chinese-American detente to give reasonable hope that we're only at the beginning of a process...
...Some experts, including labor leaders, have predicted that 1979 will be a year of intense confrontation between labor and capital...
...In 1954, these taxes accounted for $7 billion in revenues, or less than 9 percent of all taxes...
...Yet, it represents but a part of a broader trend toward the reduced relative importance of taxes in federal finance, and the use of the tax system actually to impede the shift of financial resources to the public sector...
...The second fundamental reason for the Chinese desire for detente is illustrated by a point made on a wall poster: "The United States is a capitalist country and is the most developed in the world...
...the attempt to reduce them cannot but hasten the coming of the cyclical slowdown already in prospect, turning the planned reduction into an unplanned increase...
...By denying freedom to their subjects they deny themselves information about their subjects' activities, aspirations, and desires...
...But whatever the grievances, a fitting judgment of China's use of war as an instrument of pedagogy appeared in the following wire service dispatch of February 27: Peking--A wall poster condemning the Chinese invasion of Vietnam and calling for an unconditional withdrawal has appeared on "Democracy's Wall" here...
...the problem is corporate power expressing itself in a variety of ways...
...Its novelty lies primarily in its ability to draw simultaneous support from a variety of social groups, each of which has taken a stand against the regime in the past but only in isolation...
...authors' and especially editors' names were a closely guarded secret to be revealed only simultaneously with their arrest...
...In a $2 trillion-plus economy, those savings are of no great consequence and, in any case, the problem is not the aging with too much money, or workers with too much money...
...By contrast, social insurance taxes and contributions accounted for 31 percent and 21 percent...
...Some unions—the Teamsters, UAW—maintain that they will need a 10 to 20 percent increase in pension money, or in health funds, to fill significant deficits in these programs, or merely to stay in place...
...For 149 didn't we witness how societies prevailed over authoritarian governments in Portugal, in Greece, in Spain, in India to some extent...
...THAT STATES TAKE all this seriously is proved by the fact that 40 states now offer some sort of tax break on corporate income or property taxes for new or expanded business...
...the Prime Minister of a much smaller country, who first arrived in Palestine as an NCO in the Polish army, gets into the news headlines every other day...
...But let there be no mistake—nothing in this world is free, and freedom, of all things, is perhaps the dearest to come by...
...The "uncontrollability" of federal outlays, however, is a false issue...
...And even though the Chinese Communists have not discarded Marx, Engels, and Lenin for Peirce, James, and Dewey, they have acknowledged, what Kruschchev once discovered, that ideology puts no goulash on the worker's table...
...The editors' names, addresses, and telephone numbers are printed in each issue, the majority of authors write under their own names, and no subject matter is taboo...
...Daytoday decisions on the shop floor concern not only productivity levels but, especially among young workers, an awareness of "quality of work-life" problems...
...Jimmy Carter is faced with a new, structural crisis of the system...
...The Chinese then invaded Vietnam...
...passed the bounds of reason...
...The author, writing under the pseudonym "A State Employee," said a big country like China should not be hitting back at a little country like Vietnam...
...The operation was successful...
...A more basic point made by theorists such as Heller and Solow is that the "gap" between actual and potential GNP must be closed...
...It does so not out of ill will but because it literally cannot understand what is happening today, for its ideology does not allow it to mention, or even see, the decisive role of corporate power in this crisis...
...Rep...
...Raising expenditures would also be contrary to the Administration's resolve, already expressed in its 1978 budget message, that it aims to "decrease" the "share of the Nation's GNP taken by the Federal Government...
...Let us hope they understand this while there is still time...
...The result was to increase by a few percentage points, from 1970 to 1975, the share of the federal income-tax burden borne by the top 5 percent of taxpayers and reduce by a similarly small number of percentage points the federal income-tax burden borne by the lowest fifth of the income scale...
...by wringing some of the inflation out of the economic system...
...a Polish Jew was awarded the last Nobel Prize in literature...
...Mao understood then, as Teng does today, that the Soviet Union, not the United States, is a menace to China...
...In consequence, authoritarian regimes grow increasingly alienated from the societies over which they preside...
...But then, the problem here is not simply Europe and Japan...
...In 1953 total revenues generated at the state and local level amounted to $21 billion...
...Dynamism is absent, quasi-stagnation has set in, but this is a far cry from collapse...
...From 1975 to 1978 the assessed value of owner-occupied housing in the state had risen by 84.6 percent...
...152...
...Also without precedent is the movement's mode of operation, which consists of ignoring the partygovernment establishment and of acting as if constitutionally guaranteed rights were indeed the basis of the Polish People's Republic's legal system...
...Implementing this decision would have resulted in an annual shift of $265 million in taxes from corporations to homeowners...
...By 1975, the tax burden on the average family had nearly doubled to 22.7 percent of its income...
...In troubled Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia...
...Why does all this activity thrive in Poland and where might it lead...
...Taxation problems may need further thought, but there already are some proposals, however limited they may be compared to those put forward by Jerry Wurf, president of AFSCME, who suggests cuts in property taxes for low- and middle-income homeowners, and higher and more progressive state and local income taxes in order to increase revenue of state and local governments...
...The confidence it once inspired—that no-matter-what, the Party's political monopoly cannot be wrestled from it— has turned into a sour feeling of being stuck with a responsibility that simply cannot be discharged...
...The Chairman answered this by saying that when Soviet Premier Kosygin came to see him, he agreed to take 1,000 years off the 10,000 he thought would be the duration of the Soviet-Chinese conflict...
...The relative increase in budget outlays over the past two decades or so has been entirely due to increases in transfer payments, such as old-age pensions, Medicare, and unemployment insurance...
...Even though the budgetary process becomes more centralized, it is in large measure shaped by forces beyond the control of the President and the Office of Management and Budget...
...and a Polish cardinal was elected to the papacy...
...It enlists "budget restraint" as part of its anti-inflationary plan, also claiming that "some slowing of economic growth is...
...But the presence of a few courageous people in Warsaw does not explain everything...
...It seems to me that my brief interpretation of the new turn in China is not altered by the war...
...q References Philip Morrison and Paul F. Walker, "A New Strategy for Military Spending," Scientific American, October 1978...
...At this very moment, stripmining restrictions, protecting our natural heritage, are being held in abeyance for the same reason...
...We spend more on jewelry than we do on Food Stamps and almost as much on advertising as on public education...
...On the contrary, a recession becomes an incitement to raise prices in order to maintain profitability on the basis of a declining volume...
...It has long been the "wisdom" of the capitalist system that, as Arthur Burns recently put it to the American Enterprise Institute, "however regrettable recessions may be, it is a mistake to view them as simply being pathological phenomena...
...The labor movement is here to stay, but "its outlook is not cheerful...
...to restructure the federal agricultural support system so as to favor family farmers rather than agribusiness and allow the consumer to get the benefit of unrestricted output...
...America might as well do it right and do it now...
...Again, one hastens to acknowledge that Teng is nearly 75...
...Jimmy Carter is, in short, engaged in a "war against inflation" that is both socially cruel and economically ineffective...
...But many major confrontations are still to come: 400,000 Teamsters will ask for a new contract by the end of March...
...Control over budgetary finance, and particularly over stabilization policy (which uses the budget as its instrument) has likewise increasingly eluded the executive office...
...the old order is cracked, the new order has not yet emerged...
...At an interim gathering of organizations called by Douglas Fraser of the UAW in October 1978, he said flatly that "the political system in this country is simply not working, the lobbies are taking over...
...An amazing variety of uncensored publications appear in different towns, catering to a diversified audience...
...Things of significance also are happening to Poles in Poland...
...The government, for example, is prepared to deliberately undervalue gains accruing through cost-of-living adjustment clauses that are written into union agreements...
...But demands will have to bend, if there are not to be major confrontations and strikes...
...to develop a full-employment plan rather than planning for a recession, as is now the case...
Vol. 26 • April 1979 • No. 2
