Trials of a Bureaucrat

...As I have indicated, this is a useful book for specialists in politics and social welfare...

...Califano, trapped between Carter's tepid efforts to keep his promise to the UAW and Senator Edward M. Kennedy's use of the health issue to improve his own Presidential prospects, never succeeded in designing a plausible health program...

...Frank Moore, who did such a horrible job as Congressional liaison that for a time Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill refused to talk with him...

...or James Mc-Intyre, who was not equipped to master the Office of Management and Budget...

...Here less progress was registered than in welfare reform...

...The arithmetic is inexorable...

...The price that Carter paid to the United Automobile Workers for their timely endorsement of him in the 1976 primaries was endorsement of a national health plan...

...Certainly he worked hard and prayed hard...

...The trouble is, and has been, that decent benefit levels can be combined with strong work incentives only at much larger expense than is politically feasible...

...The best stories, in truth, concern Lyndon B. Johnson, a giant among politicians, not Jimmy Carter, a midget by comparison...

...He fails to recognize that once economic growth falters and resources to finance government dwindle, only two internally consistent policy attitudes are available...

...In terms of Califano's effort to comprehend his own policy frustrations and his own inability to extend the Great Society, however, it is not very successful...

...Although the prose is superior bureaucratese, the author indulges less frequently than his readers would enjoy in the recital o f good stories about the ex-otic human fauna with whom he dealt and struggled...

...For such reasons, Nixon and Carter both compromised on a benefit reduction of 50 per cent, allowing industrious individuals to keep half of each dollar earned...

...A sad message for a sad political period...

...More generous arrangements, though, create new difficulties...

...One, the evident Reagan prescription, is to turn politically sharp right, repeal some Great Society programs and reduce the scale of others...

...The chapters on civil rights, education, Social Security, disease prevention, and abortion are useful summaries of the recent record in each field...

...Unfortunately he was also appallingly ignorant, not least about the difference between his native region and the rest of the country...

...LB J would never have tolerated people like Hamilton Jordan, who refused to answer telephone calls from Cabinet members...

...Joseph A. Califano's relentless tour of the huge domain at Health, Education and Welfare, where he presided for two and a half turbulent years of the Carter Administration, will tell you vastly more than you really want to know about meetings convened, agencies reshuffled, speeches delivered, squabbles over bureaucratic turf adjudicated, and policies tediously formulated...

...The chapter dealing with this is a clear, sophisticated explanation of the intractable conflicts among welfare reform objectives, which defeated Nixon's Family Assistance Plan and its successor, Carter's Program for Better Jobs and Income...

...The President was probably intelligent...

...This is a tax rate on earnings identical with the maximum levy upon ordinary wages and salaries, alleged by all good supply-siders to be a powerful deterrent to additional effort on the part of ordinary, respectable taxpayers...

...Obviously he continues to seethe over Carter's abrupt dismissal of him (and three Cabinet colleagues) in mid-1979, but contempt and pity usually seem more appropriate to him than anger...

...Absent, as the lawyers say, a democratic Left of any consequence, Americans last November did not enjoy the opportunity embraced last month by their French counterparts-A gamble on an administration of moderate Socialists...

...Califano must have irritated Carter and his Georgians quite often by implying such a contrast between the two Presidents he served...

...Although PB JI died in Congressional committee, it was a fully articulated design that in several respects improved upon Nixon's FAP, notably in its administrative simplifications and provision for new jobs...

...If working welfare clients are allowed to keep 7 5 cents out of each added dollar of earnings-A benefit reduction rate of 25 per cent, then some families will be subsidized until their earned income touches $20,000, just about the 1980 national median income-manifestly a political impossibility...

...His encounters with organized doctors, insurers, hospital administrators, and other health services suppliers convinced him that national health will be enacted, if at all, only when it protects the interests of existing interest groups...

...The other requires a shift to the political Left, with the frank embrace of egalitarian income redistribution and public control of much of the private sector-notably energy, health services, and housing...

...The dreadful fact is that truly comprehensive welfare reform, which treats the poor humanely and genuinely encourages them to seek work, requires substantial redistribution of income to both the welfare population and the working poor...

...Accordingly, like other dispirited liberals, Califano is reduced to regrets about his former leader's incompetence, and to despondent recognition of the power of interest groups to thwart the best efforts of enlightened reformers like himself...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Unless, like me, you happen to be a political junkie, beware...

...Califano exerted relentless pressure upon his misguided leader to modify the expenditure constraint and to comprehend the complexities of the subject...

...Suppose that benefits for a family of four are set at two-thirds the poverty level, currently about $7,500, as both Nixon and Carter suggested...

...Nevertheless, if a welfare client is actively to seek work, he, or more likely she, must be permitted to benefit financially from paid employment, for any sensible soul who loses a dollar of welfare benefits for each dollar of wages will stay on welfare...

...Five thousand dollars do not purchase a lavish style of life, even with food stamps and Medicaid thrown in...

...Itis astonishing that a political pro like Califano, trained at LBJ's knee, innocently embarked on an anti-smoking crusade with all the fervor of a Smokenders alumnus without careful calculation of the political costs to a Georgia President and to himself...

...His initial instruction to Califano, for example, was to prepare a proposal for sweeping welfare reform (one of Carter's numerous campaign promises) that would provide adequate benefits, stimulate work incentives, and cost no more (preferably less) than the Federal share of welfare under existing arrangements...