Reagan's Sacrifices at Home and Abroad
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Washington-USA REAGAN'S SACRIFICES AT HOME AND ABROAD BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington "I've made my sacrifice," 1 President Reagan told Con-M gressional skeptics in the Oval Office last month when...
...would bring down unemployment, thereby easing pressure on automatic spending programs...
...But "getting out front" is no substitute for the careful analysis, painstaking negotiations and quiet compromises that brought genuine results in, say, the Camp David agreements and the 1979 Vienna Salt II summit...
...And that doubt would have done more to alter the true strategic balance in Central Europe than any number of cruise missiles...
...A week later, Solidarity was "suspended" by the first military coup in Eastern Europe...
...and would increase tax collections as a result of the new-found prosperity...
...For the cost of a nuclear submarine, Reagan could have given Warsaw a hefty stake in keeping its windows open to the West...
...Inconvenient facts like these are never put forward at White House "backgrounders" on the project...
...No realistic outcome to such talks would have removed Poland from the Warsaw Pact...
...The problem won't be tackled seriously until after incumbents get past Election Day...
...against a grave challenge to its existence...
...The road to a genuine solution is a capital investment boom...
...When he goes on the stump this fall, the President will undoubtedly ascribe his shortcomings to a legacy of fiscal abuses that could not be undone in the 20 months he has had to set matters right...
...Try as they might, the Democrats have been unable to pin a Herbert Hoover label on Reagan...
...If nothing is done, Social Security and Medicare alone will account for two thirds of the growth in nonmilitary spending between now and 1986...
...To help Solidarity spread its message, a Swedish labor organization shipped a complete TV station across the Baltic...
...Despite Reagan's easygoing, I'm-just-a-cowboy manner, there is a decided arbitrariness to his foreign policymaking...
...In barring foreign subsidiaries of American companies from supplying the Soviet Union with equipment to build a natural gas pipeline to Western Europe, he has only dealt a blow to nato...
...There is a way out...
...corporate technology...
...A similar philosophical obtuseness and lack of verve is evident in Reagan's foreign policy record...
...He was referring to a week's postponement of his California vacation, duly lengthened on the other end...
...The President has yet to recognize that he sits 8,000 miles away from brutal, if cautious, oligarchs who preside over an industrial machine that leads the world in the output of steel, concrete and energy resources...
...Early last December, the beleaguered government in Warsaw was turned down flat when it begged the White House to approve $200 million for chicken feed to preserve egg production the following spring...
...Perhaps this would have prompted General Wojciech Jaruzelski to bargain in good faith with the frustrated unionists and thus finally fulfill a promise the Communist authorities made at Gdansk...
...Even now, at substantial extra cost, the Russians are bending the route of the pipeline several hundred miles southward to detour around sabotage-prone Poland and to reward hard-lining Czechoslovakia...
...The working plan calls for both winners and losers to return to a frosty Washington and tear a few holes in the social safety net that the President pledged to keep intact...
...So far, Reagan has focused almost exclusively on quick-fixes and short-term savings...
...Meanwhile, the economic mess is sapping the nation's world standing in ways that no amount of military spending can redress...
...The risks were nonetheless clearly worth taking...
...So the pipeline will belnrilt...
...The important cost will be further rips in the already tattered Atlantic alliance: The Europeans will continue to do business as usual with the Soviet Union as they gear up for a trade war with Washington...
...some of them are still being used to pub-lish regular underground editions of the union's journal under the noses of the Polish military...
...become an active partner with business and labor in fundamentally reforming the American economy...
...Yet the Kremlin could never have thoroughly relied on such an erratic ally...
...By and large, the members of this genuine working-class movement believed that change was possible within the confines of theSoviet orbit if decent peoplepulled together to reform the system...
...It would serve everyone's interests if Reagan were to scrap his primitive anti-Communism, his shallow economic theories and his narrow-minded view of the role of government????and to start living in the real world...
...In "background" briefings, Reagan's handlers proudly describe this trait as "getting out front" on an issue...
...Others argued that such help would only confirm the Soviet's worst fears and prompt an invasion...
...As matters stand, both the lame-duck Congress and its successor will probably raise taxes again, cut the defense budget some more and take another whack at Federal grants????all in keeping with the fashionable theory that only such self-flagellation can prevent interest rates from rising anew...
...A boom of the kind that is necessary cannot be stimulated in today's post industrial society, however, unless the Federal government commits itself to spending billions of fresh dollars on developing human resources: higher education, job training, effective social services...
...This would rapidly increase domestic growth...
...After all, things are tough out there: Some 11 million Americans are officially out of work, not counting another 5 million or so who aretoo discouraged toseekajob...
...Moreover, the elite in this capital????the ones who readily gobble up taxpayers' dollars from behind an economic moat????have taken to conceding that the Democrats went too far in building a welfare state...
...The President's ingenious plan for restoring democracy in Poland, by contrast, is worse than a nonstarter...
...Reagan immediately announced that anybody who failed to discern the Kremlin's influence in the Polish military's crackdown was softheaded on Communism...
...Although the Russians surely were heartened to see the Polish counterrevolution come along, Washington has yet to deliver any persuasive proof that the coup was actually hatched in Moscow...
...The truth is that the President never wanted the Siberian pipeline built...
...But nearly all the easy money has already been saved????a dirty little secret never mentioned by those who harp on cutting the budget by combating waste, fraud and abuse...
...It has been on view as well in his proposal for the Israelis to hand over the West Bank to the Palestinians...
...Not that it much matters: Hooverism is less of a bugaboo now that a majority of the electorate is too young to recall the Great Depression...
...The nation seems likely to be paying the price for the President's ideologically rooted inaction long after he is gone...
...Take his approach toward the Polish crisis and the consequent split in the Atlantic alliance...
...Reagan sent nothing...
...Of the total, only about 4 million are receiving unemployment insurance...
...That proved too much of a challenge for the shaky officials in Warsaw, who never allowed it to go on the air...
...Trying to have it both ways, though, he implausibly insists that this same superpower is unable to fashion rotors for commercial compressors, allegedly a proprietary secret of U.S...
...Reagan is not advertising that his August tax-raising maneuver has done little to correct the underlying shortfall in Federal receipts...
...could not afford it...
...Reagan contends that the Soviets possess missiles of such stunning accuracy and thrust that he has had to launch a crash program in order to defend the U.S...
...One suspects the Reagan Administration would make even deeper sacrifices to avoid turning the November elections into a referendum on the failure of its economic policies...
...Still others argued that Solidarity needed curbing because it had destabilized Poland and put approximately $28 billion in Western loans in jeopardy...
...He tried in vain to cajole the Europeans out of it during the 1981 Ottawa summit, months before Solidarity was driven underground...
...These are precisely the areas, though, where the Reaganites have disproportionately slashed their budgets...
...Also required are vast public capital outlays for improvements in such sectors of everyday life as mass transit...
...Admittedly, it cannot be said for certain that Reagan could have preserved the union had he given the Poles some timely aid...
...And the actual Reagan rollbacks have been more modest than their accompanying rhetoric...
...From this side of the Atlantic, the AFL-CIO sent printing presses and typewriters...
...Even if the public investments were made, Reagan remains unprepared to Andrew J. Glass, a frequent contributor to these pages, is chief of the Cox Newspapers' Washington bureau...
...But don't bet on it...
...Two years ago, when Reagan was still a Presidential candidate, seething unrest in Poland's Baltic ports erupted into an unprecedented sit-down strike...
...A few of his advisers claimed the U.S...
...Judging by recent polls, at the moment there is more voter sympathy for this excuse than any politician has a right to expect...
...Indeed, most close observers remain convinced that Jaruzelski acted largely on his own...
...Washington-USA REAGAN'S SACRIFICES AT HOME AND ABROAD BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington "I've made my sacrifice," 1 President Reagan told Con-M gressional skeptics in the Oval Office last month when he sought their support for higher taxes...
...This led to the creation of Solidarity, the first free-trade union in the history of international Communism...
Vol. 65 • September 1982 • No. 17
