THE POOR PAY FOR VIETNAM
Knoll, Erwin
THE POOR PAY FOR VIETNAM by ERWIN KNOLL IT WAS a few nights before Christmas and a group of Washingtonians betook themselves to nearby Rockville, Maryland, to sing some carols. The carolers...
...The new budget, he noted, provides for "the possibility of an extension of combat beyond the end of the fiscal year...
...For fiscal 1968, he has proposed expenditures of $1.86 billion—a sum that would, in the words of a conservative Republi can Congressman, "actually amount to a budget cut" since it would have to "stretch out" for a longer period than last year's appropriation...
...Shriver, go to L.B.J...
...It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods...
...But it is a bit higher than the President's supple mental request for $1.5 billion to re place aircraft lost to "combat attrition" in Vietnam...
...There is a need to pause, to reassess, to realign and coordinate the incipient programs that are in admitted disarray...
...Then he stood by while Congress appropriated $1.61 billion...
...The contrast is stark between the hortatory demands for war appropriations and the diffident requests in behalf of domestic welfare...
...The saving will just about cover the 1967 supplemental costs for vehicles and ammunition in Vietnam...
...H The President's Model Cities Program (the name was changed from Demonstration Cities to avoid the unfortunate and unintended echo of racial protest) contemplates expenditures of $2.3 billion over the next six years —or about one month's worth of Vietnam costs...
...With regard to the latter, Mr...
...Obviously, the priorities have shifted...
...It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness...
...All the resources needed"—a formidable commitment...
...nor can the American people be expected to think very hard or do very much about improving their schools and communities when they are worried about casualty lists and the danger of a wider war...
...I can assure you that no Administration would more eagerly utilize all the resources that these programs require than the Administration that started them...
...As the underground would say, the carol got down to the nitty-gritty...
...Allowing for inflation, the sum is reasonably close to the $10 bil lion-a-year budget that was once en visioned for the Johnson Administra tion's War on Poverty...
...Besides, some of the President's aides and associates add, it is not just a matter of money...
...There is no easy answer, for the baroque complexity of Federal bookkeeping is strikingly suited to flexible analysis...
...And except that there is no way of ascertaining how much of the composition and the mood of the Ninetieth Congress are attributable to the war...
...This was the essential message of the President's subdued, almost apologetic, almost credible State of the Union address...
...11 For OEO, the President requested $1.75 billion last year...
...It will move our programs forward but not at the accelerated pace we would expect if we were free of the fiscal restraints that the war imposes...
...Johnson regards Model Cities as the most promising of his recent innovations, and the one that may take over many of the functions of Sargent Shriver's flagging Office of Economic Opportunity...
...There is a kind of madness, too, in the facile assumption that problems can be indefinitely deferred, that ghettos will go away, that last summer's three dozen riots will not be repeated...
...Tf Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Act provides special school assistance for the children of the poor...
...His articles have appeared in Commentary, Esquire, and The Reporter...
...They were overblown, to be sure, as campaign oratory tends to be, but they had a noble ring...
...Tell him what the poor folk say...
...This is the central fact in the intricate calculations of the Administration's proposed budget...
...Their hopes, built on the splendid promises of Administration rhetoric, have fallen casualty in War Zone D. Their aspirations, spurred by a thousand proud official speeches, have gone up in smoke in the oil depots of North Vietnam...
...An increase in Social Se curity benefits, a program of nursing home construction, a few patches here and a few appropriations there, and the safe harbor would be attained...
...But he prudently conceded that "unforeseen events can upset the most careful estimate," and Budget Director Charles Schultze told reporters, "I don't want to go on record that under no conditions will there be another supplemental...
...But the nation has many commitments and responsibilities which make heavy demands upon our total resources...
...THE POOR PAY FOR VIETNAM by ERWIN KNOLL IT WAS a few nights before Christmas and a group of Washingtonians betook themselves to nearby Rockville, Maryland, to sing some carols...
...Sing of peace forever more, While the poor finance the war...
...But he made it clear that he also feels that they do not very much want to try harder on domestic problems," Moynihan said...
...for this year, it authorized an expenditure of $2.4 billion...
...Soon we'll have a war at home...
...Statistics in the President's latest Economic Report to Congress indicate that it would require $11 billion a year to lift 11.5 million American fam ilies and single individuals out of poverty—at least as that condition is austerely defined by government agencies...
...The Eighty-ninth Congress invested not $5 billion 800 million, but $9 billion 600 million, almost twice as much as all those other Congresses put together...
...The war—the Vietnam war that now costs $22 billion a year by the Administration's prudent reckoning and $30 billion-plus by unofficial computations in Congress—is eating up the funds that were to provide schools and hospitals and parks, cleaner rivers and purer air and saner cities for all Americans...
...The war, in brief, has supplanted the Great Society...
...It is useful, even today, to recall the words that were to usher in the Great Society...
...For each man kills the things he loves: Farewell, Oh Great Society...
...The Great Society," President Johnson said at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964, "rests on abundance and liberty for all...
...And furthermore, they point out pragmatically, the Ninetieth Congress is in no mood to embark on new ventures—or to bankroll old ones...
...No such wistful note marred the President's references to the war...
...Johnson explained, "I wish, of course, that we could do all that should be done—and that we could do it now...
...If the budgets of the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam were reversed, says the Reverend Dr...
...He gave the budget forty whacks And sent the chips to Saigon...
...The ratio of GNP devoted to the Defense Department is rapidly rising...
...I know that you will want to continue your firm support of the nearly 500,000 American fighting men who are bravely defending the cause of freedom in Southeast Asia," he told Congress when he asked for a supplemental war allocation of $12.3 billion...
...They sang: Hark the Herald Angels sing, Glory to the new born king...
...By last fall, the President was confiding to White House visitors that the Great Society was "just about wrapped up...
...The Administration's arguments are sound, except...
...But that is just the beginning...
...And perhaps the minstrels of the underground could be forgiven for marching around Sargent Shriver's home, singing, "Soon we'll have a war at home," a few nights before Christmas...
...But the President's new budget requests an appropriation of precisely half of that amount...
...Congress recognized that the $1 billion it appropriated for the program last year was woefully inadequate...
...The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talents...
...For this reason he has asked Congress to provide full funding of the first-year authorization of $400 million—somewhat less than the $582 million in the Pentagon budget for military housing...
...A cash comparison of Great Society goals and Pentagon realities helps to put both into perspective...
...Last year, the Administration underestimated by half the funds it would allocate to the war in fiscal 1967...
...The shift was reflected in the State of the Union speech—the speech into which the President inserted, at the last minute, one pallid reference to the Great Society...
...My own view," Fulbright continued, "is that there is a kind of madness in the facile assumption that we can raise the many billions of dollars necessary to rebuild our schools and cities and public transport and eliminate the pollution of air and water while also spending tens of billions to finance an 'open-ended' war in Asia, but even if the material resources can somehow be drawn from an expanding economy, I do not think that the spiritual resources will be forthcoming from an angry and disappointed people...
...With a nervous eye toward Congressional budget-cutters, Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler points with pride to one of the budget's most questionable virtues: that without the expenditures for Vietnam, the government "would be running large and rapidly expanding surpluses...
...The cost would be slightly higher than the $47.2 billion budgeted for the war in fiscal years 1965 through 1968...
...And it amounts to half of the Vietnam war costs pro jected for fiscal 1968 by the Administra tion...
...Senator J. William Fulbright, Arkansas Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described the situation more than a year ago in a lecture at the University of Connecticut...
...It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race...
...It has certainly affected the mood of Lyndon B. Johnson...
...The new budget, says Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare John W. Gardner, is "responsible . . . carefully designed to be non-inflationary...
...Senator Abraham Ribicoff, who has conducted extensive, illuminating and—so far—unproductive hearings on the plight of the cities, believes that a ten-year, $50 billion program could rebuild or replace the 4.5 million substandard housing units that now stand in the nation's metropolitan areas...
...While war and space go on apace, Both funded in entirety, The needs of poverty and race Are of the chopped variety...
...The carolers were the organized, militant poor of the capital who call themselves "the underground," and the home they chose to serenade was Sargent Shriver's...
...In concrete terms, the President simply cannot think about implementing the Great Society at home while he is supervising bombing missions over North Vietnam...
...Another Washington bard, an officer of a human rights organization, composed his own lament and called it Ballad of Receding Goal...
...This year, the President assured Congress, he is "in much better position to determine our future requirements in Vietnam...
...It is a place where man can renew contact with nature...
...It is a challengeconstantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor...
...One verse went something like this: Lyndon Johnson took an ax To make inflation bygone...
...And it obscures what is probably the single most significant fact about the Federal budget: that in relation to the growing gross national product, the total allocated for all non-military purposes has dropped considerably since the post-World War II years...
...It was reflected in the budget and in the spate of special messages the White House has dispatched to Congress since January...
...The red ink on the budget was hardly dry before members of Congress noted that current monthly spending in Vietnam already ex ceeds the budgeted rate...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former Assistant Secretary of Labor who now heads the Harvard-MIT urban study center, listened to the State of the Union address and noted that the President said he believed Americans would not withdraw from the battle for social progress...
...nor is the Congress much inclined to debate—much less finance—expanded education programs when it is involved in debating—and paying for—an expanding war...
...Charity begins at home, We want gigs to call our own, Young adults are on the roam...
...Precisely how heavy is the impact of the Vietnam war on the Great Society...
...Then he directed Shriver to cut $32 million in programs and delay spending $109 million more...
...It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time...
...He said: ". . . Although it may be contended that the United States has the material resources to rebuild its society at home while waging war abroad, it is already being demonstrated that we do not have the mental and spiritual resources for such a double effort...
...It also matches the more modest of the various "free dom budgets" that have been proposed by civil rights leaders...
...It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community...
...As it turned out, this impressive total for "educating our children" included the $2 billion spent by the Pentagon for training of military personnel, most of the budget of theOffice of Economic Opportunity, the Agriculture Department's Extension Service, the operations of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, and a handsomely varied list of other foreign and domestic efforts which the Budget Bureau classifies as "education, training, and allied programs broadly defined...
...ERWIN KNOLL is the White House correspondent for the Newhouse National News Service...
...But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work...
...Except that one can only speculate whether the accomplishments would have been so lean and the confusion so rampant if bold Great Society programs had been launched with ample —or at least adequate—funds, in place of the cut-rate pilot projects, models, and demonstrations that have been dangled from so many shoestrings...
...With similar dexterity, the new budget notes a total expenditure of $25.6 billion for "poor people under all Government programs...
...And not only the hopes and aspirations of the poor...
...And he affirmed in the budget message that "in Vietnam, as throughout the world, we seek peace but will provide all the resources needed to combat aggression...
...Martin Luther King Jr., "the generals could be forgiven if they walked off the battlefield in disgust...
...However, other aircraft needs for Southeast Asia—training planes, spares, and replacements for planes lost to non-combat attrition— send the total up to $3.7 billion...
...The figure— about one third of the total budgeted for the Defense Department—includes not only funds for education and training, health, economic development, and public assistance, but also such earned benefits as Social Security payments and veterans' pensions...
...Some months ago, for instance, the President told a Washington audience that the nation's first eighty-eight Congresses "invested $5 billion 800 million for education, or an average of $33 million per year in educating our children...
...The poor are financing the Vietnam war, and to a degree that could not have been foreseen a year ago even by President Johnson...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
