Comes the Nixon Revolution

Editorial

PROGRESSIVE "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Comes the Nixon Revolution Whatever judgments future historians are likely to draw about Richard M. Nixon's Presidency,...

...Six—Reorganization of the Executive Branch, with seven of the existing Cabinet departments combined into four new ones...
...The Pentagon's research funds are to be increased from $5.2 billion to $7.2 billion, and the increase, we can be assured, will be used to develop new weapons that now dance, like visions of sugar plums, in the fertile imaginations of the military planners and their industrial partners...
...Who says Republicans are not attuned to the New Politics...
...For all the talk about inflation in the President's State of the Union message, his budget, and his Economic Report, nowhere does he acknowledge— or give any hint of recognizing—the central fact that the nation's economic ills, like so many of its domestic travails, are primarily the result of the war he inherited, made his own, and shows no sign of ending...
...Advance speculation suggests that the President's proposal will entail reliance on the private insurance industry, and will stop far short of establishing a universal system of protection against the ruinous costs of health care in America...
...The President has taken to calling himself a convert to Keynesian economics...
...The former Secretary of the Interior, Walter J. Hickel, learned the hard way that the White House has little affection for those who take their environmental responsibilities seriously, and his successor is not likely to make the same mistake...
...Representative Henry S. Reuss, the Wisconsin Democrat who is one of the most knowledgeable commentators in Congress on economic affairs, believes the Administration is "disregarding inflation in its frantic effort to induce a nine per cent growth rate," and adds: "While the Administration budget is jiggered so as to give the appearance of a precarious 'full employment balance,' the budget is likely in practice to produce a whopping 'full employment deficit/ and an actual deficit closer to $25 billion than the $11 billion actual deficit predicted...
...Four—Measures to upgrade health care...
...Nixon's budget is based on the most optimistic—and perhaps the most unrealistic—economic forecasts, but it makes no provision for the possibility of an arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union...
...The specifics of Mr...
...This crisis exists, first of all, because this most affluent land has failed dismally to meet the most elemental needs of millions of impoverished citizens...
...Its greater component, the "special revenue sharing" of about $11 billion, is merely a rearrangement of some 105 currently funded Federal grant programs in such areas as education, transportation, urban development, law enforcement, and manpower training...
...Aside from the fact that there is nothing "revolutionary" or "great" about this goal, Mr...
...Briefing reporters on the budget, Budget Director George C. Schultz explained that "being overly precise (about the costs of the war) would overly disclose the President's precise strategy...
...The bulk of the deficit in Mr...
...Gomes the Nixon "revolution," we'll all eat platitudes...
...Nixon's own White House staff has been organized and reorganized in the past two years, and functions essentially as it did before—except that it has grown larger...
...What he means, apparently, is that he has espoused the most discredited distortion of Keynesian doctrine: the notion that massive investment in armaments and an occasional military adventure are the sure cures for an ailing economy...
...His failed to state the problem as well...
...Assuming continuing troop withdrawals, the war should cost something less than $10 billion in fiscal 1972...
...Edwin L. Dale Jr., "The Budget Gap—Nixon Receives an A for Credibility," The New York Times, January 31, 1971...
...Once again, the President's budget contains no cost figure for the war, although such an estimate obviously must have figured in the Administration's calculations...
...In general, then, insofar as decisions and judgments made at this stage are important, this budget appears to receive fairly high marks for credibility...
...It would also overly disclose the fact that the Pentagon is rapidly consuming the so-called "peace dividend...
...Over the past two years their plight has been aggravated by the Administration's economic policies...
...Nixon's program have not been disclosed at the time this is written, but his Administration's past performance offers little reason to expect a genuine commitment to the drastic measures needed to cope with the environmental crisis...
...The President's plan is, at best, an attempt to patch up some of the most intolerable defects in an inadequate system—and to do so by imposing new burdens on the poor without bringing them up to even a minimal standard of subsistence...
...Such recklessly destructive programs as the supersonic transport plane and the Alaskan oil pipeline remain prominent in the Administration's plans...
...Three—New steps to improve the environment...
...PROGRESSIVE "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Comes the Nixon Revolution Whatever judgments future historians are likely to draw about Richard M. Nixon's Presidency, they will not find him guilty of undue diffidence in merchandising his Administration...
...Like a detergent manufacturer about to market a "new, improved" product, the President pulled out all the stops in ballyhooing his recent State of the Union message...
...Nixon—used to inveigh...
...Well, we have pondered the President's State of the Union message and the substantive documents that accompanied and followed it—the proposed Federal budget for fiscal 1972 and the Economic Report—and we find that the President remains faithful to the philosophy of the Madison Avenue image-makers who infest the White House staff: put the emphasis on packaging and promotion, and never mind that the product is the same old shoddy goods...
...Other such messages have been faulted for failing to state the solution...
...In our view, the contents of the President's annual report to the American people were best summed up by The Washington Star's distinguished columnist, Mary McGrory, who wrote: "Richard Nixon's State of the Union message was truly an historic first...
...Nixon chose to carry on the practice he inaugurated last year of deferring any discussion of the war to a later, lesser message to Congress—a procedure whose only purpose is to reinforce the absurd notion that it is possible to discuss the nation's domestic affairs in isolation from the pernicious and pervasive effects of the war...
...The last Congress had to override White House objections to a comprehensive automobile pollution measure...
...In the meantime, the Administration has announced increased premiums for the elderly who rely on the rudimentary system now in effect...
...Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, advertised the speech in advance as "a blockbuster—the most important document since they wrote the Constitution...
...The Administration's economic assumptions are a matter of controversy among expert economists, but some responsible spokesmen, at least, believe they carry a potential for disaster...
...In terms of the President's own priorities, they are quite right...
...While the Pentagon claims more than $75 billion of the Federal budget, the Governor pointed out, "there will never be enough money to cope with local and state problems...
...How much more can a citizenry demand of its government...
...Peace is not part of the Nixon "revolution...
...Most of the difference is being swalInterpretation Gap To be blunt about it, almost nobody believes President Nixon's budget except the high officials who put it together—and it's probable that even some of them have their doubts...
...It merited no discussion in the President's message, although the Administration was, at the very time he delivered it, cranking up its latest exercise in escalation...
...Two—Acceptance of the "full employment budget" concept as a device to stimulate the economy...
...The President promised a "new American revolution," no less, and pledged to return "power to the people...
...Hey, man, this cat says he wants to lead the revolution" What, then, of the Nixon "revolution...
...Here, too, the details are still to be disclosed, but it is known that the Administration has been searching frantically for an alternative to the comprehensive system of national health insurance which might, perhaps, introduce a measure of equity into the nation's wholly unsatisfactory health care system...
...Nixon's welfare plan fails to address itself in meaningful fashion to the genuine crisis besetting the welfare program...
...Hobart Rowen, "Credibility Is Lacking in Nixon Budget," The Washington Post, January 31, 1971...
...Nixon's "full employment budget" will go not to the domestic programs that could, indeed, help bring about full employment, but to further expansion of the nation's bloated defense budget...
...What generation gap...
...Five—Revenue sharing with state and local governments...
...The President himself, not to be outdone, announced that he would propose "by far the most comprehensive, the most far-reaching, the most bold program in the domestic field ever presented to an American Congress...
...It cost $30 billion two years ago...
...lowed up by the new war gadgets that glitter in the President's budget—missiles and bombers and tanks and submarines...
...This is the most prominently promoted of the President's "great goals," and, as might be expected, the least significant...
...The principal effect of "special revenue sharing" would be to remove many of the Federal standards that now govern these programs—and therefore to make it even more likely that their benefits will be withheld from the poor, the minorities, and the decaying central cities...
...The Progressive will explore these "great goals" in greater depth in the months ahead...
...No shift in priorities is disclosed in the President's proposed $229.2 billion budget, except for the shift back to higher military expenditures...
...The announced increase of $1.5 billion is only the tip of the iceberg, for it conceals the fact that huge amounts formerly spent on the Indochina war are being quietly diverted to the procurement of new, unneeded, and potentially dangerous weapons systems...
...As Governor Patrick J. Lucey of Wisconsin recently told the Joint Economic Committee, revenue sharing will have little impact so long as America maintains "the irrational expenditures being made for the machinery to make war...
...The "full employment budget," of course, is merely the same old system of deficit spending against which Republicans— including Mr...
...This is the kind of organizational chart work of which the President is so inordinately fond—and which has so little real meaning to the processes of government...
...The hucksterism was continued in the message itself...
...The program President Nixon has projected for the next two years, and on which he presumably plans to run for re-election in 1972, is one of razzle-dazzle packaging, bureaucratic sleight-of-hand, and reassuring rhetoric designed to disguise the Administration's continuing failure to cope with —or even understand—the nation's problems...
...What the nation desperately needs is not a reshuffling of its bureaucracy but a reordering of its priorities...
...for the present here is a cursory glance at them: One—Approval of the President's welfare reform plan and some three dozen other measures left over from the last Congress...
...The problem, of course—the corrosive problem that has eaten away at the nation's domestic life and poisoned its relations with the rest of the world for most of the past decade, is the continuing and expanding war in Indochina...
...The President set forth "six great goals" for the next two years, and invested each with the most momentous significance that the White House's stable of speech writers could muster for the occasion...
...Nixon's proposed "general revenue sharing" of $5 billion in new funds faces an uphill fight in Congress, whose conservative fiscal watchdogs contend that the Federal Government has no spare revenue to share...

Vol. 35 • March 1971 • No. 3


 
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