RETREAT AT HOME
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Retreat at Home "President Johnson has repeatedly reaffirmed to Congress and the country the position he proclaimed in his...
...Senator Robert F. Kennedy: "Time after time, the cuts [proposed by the President] will be felt most by those least able to afford them—the disadvantaged, particularly the disadvantaged children who live in the vast urban ghettos and the rural hollows of the nation...
...and of the roughly $93 million authorized by Congress for health research construction grants, only $15 million appears in the President's budget...
...These authorizations, it must be noted, were defended by the Administration last year as irreducible minimums necessary to put the programs into effect...
...Urban planning grants for the new Department of Housing and Urban Development are only $35 million of the $117 million authorized...
...Senator Joseph W. Clark: "At the moment, it seems unlikely that we shall be able to build much on the beginnings of the Great Society because of the increasing costs of the war in Vietnam...
...in the face of deepening involvement in an Asian war...
...Senator Wayne Morse recently analyzed some of the specific cuts urged by President Johnson...
...The $1.6 billion by no means represents the full amount of cutbacks proposed by the President...
...We believe, moreover, that John Kenneth Galbraith was on sound ground when he told the convention of Americans for Democratic Action, in discussing the domestic achievements of the past few years: "We owe more to his [the President's] sound emperi-cism than to the compelling forces of liberal doctrine...
...we stand now to see the Great Society fizzle out in Vietnam...
...Instead, the President has asked for $1.75 billion...
...In recent weeks its committees have been restoring some of the President's cuts although it is too early to tell at this stage to what extent Congress will prevent the architect of the Great Society from mutilating his own creation...
...We are finding ourselves right in the position of seeing our domestic program devoured not by its Republican opposition but by our own party...
...Moreover, the Chief Executive called on Congress to chop the Federal milk subsidy for school children from $103 million to $21 million and to slash the appropriation for the hot lunch program now in operation in 71,000 schools...
...The result has been a disturbing retreat on the home front at the very moment when the modest beginnings of the Great Society most need to be nourished and supported...
...There is cause to wonder whether we are facing up to our responsibilities...
...Ford, who is the head of the world's third largest manufacturing complex and holds $70 million worth of company stock, seemed to be endorsing the approach of higher taxes on the more affluent when he said: "Those who are more fortunate, including the leaders of the business world, have a duty to their country and themselves to join the war on poverty, on discrimination, on ignorance, on employment...
...If the threat of inflation is that great and imminent, it seems to us that the course of action far more consistent with the goals of the Great Society would be to increase taxes on an ability-to-pay basis rather than slash funds for those who have the greatest need...
...The economists are seriously divided among themselves...
...As Erwin Knoll, an astute Washington correspondent, explained in the April issue of The Progressive, Mr...
...the Fair Deal of Harry Truman ended in Korea...
...Johnson has turned conservative...
...While I believe that we can have both guns and butter so long as the level of escalation is held down, which is not happening, an expanding war will cut deeper and deeper into the Great Society programs...
...Is it to be the fate of Democrats once again that our promise of a better future, of a realistic assault upon the dislocations of a changing society, are to be sacrificed on the altar of war...
...The New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson was lost for a generation in the holocaust of World War I; the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt was swallowed up in World War II...
...His study, based on official figures of the Budget Bureau, showed: Under the Economic Development Administration, for example, of half a billion dollars authorized for facility grants, only $170 million was requested by the President...
...Leading Democrats in Congress have watched this development with mounting concern...
...A memorandum prepared for the House Appropriations Committee by the Bureau of the Budget recently showed that the President's budget for fiscal 1967 falls about $1.6 billion below the $3.9 billion authorized by Congress last year for about twenty-five Great Society programs...
...The inspiration and commitment have disappeared...
...The funds under this legislation are specifically for the purpose of improving the education of disadvantaged children...
...construction of community mental health centers was reduced from the $65 million authorized to $50 million...
...There are too many people in poverty, too many unemployed, too many living in slums, too many victims of prejudice and discrimination...
...this is the insidious result of the Vietnam war...
...It was no doctrinaire liberal but Henry Ford II who warned last month that the United States "must move more rapidly to solve its social problems and thereby eliminate the conditions that breed anger and frustration and blind rebellion...
...The regional medical program was cut from $90 million to $43 million...
...to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society at home...
...Gardner Ackley, chairman of the President's Committee of Economic Advisers, recently revealed that business earnings after taxes shot up eighty-eight per cent in the five years from 1961 through 1965 and that first-quarter profits this year were soaring twelve per cent higher than in the corresponding period last year...
...We do believe that the vast majority of Americans would prefer to see Congress enact progressive, ability-to-pay taxes, if necessary, than to starve the domestic programs so urgently needed to provide a measure of hope and opportunity for the millions of Americans who live in wretched poverty...
...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Retreat at Home "President Johnson has repeatedly reaffirmed to Congress and the country the position he proclaimed in his State of the Union message in January: "This nation is mighty enough...
...During the past month four of them spoke out sharply: Senator J. W. Fulbright : "The war in Vietnam is snuffing out the American social revolution envisioned by the Great Society...
...the $160 million authorized for rehabilitation loans is not funded at all...
...funds at the rate of $12 billion a year...
...The "duty" to which Mr...
...for all higher education programs nearly $700 million is authorized but only $402 million requested, and for the National Defense Education Act, less than half the $500 million authorization was'requested—specifically, $239 million...
...The Progressive does not believe that Mr...
...Just last year we finally enacted a massive program of Federal aid to elementary and secondary school children...
...Ford referred must clearly include the willingness for the affluent to pay higher taxes in this era of unprecedented prosperity...
...It is this retreat from the concept of the Great Society that Congress has rebelled against...
...for the war on poverty in Appalachia, only two-thirds of the funds authorized were requested, an underfunding of $100 million...
...But above all, the Johnson Administration should re-examine its policy toward the costly and fruitless war in Vietnam which, as Senator Ful-bright warned, "is snuffing out the American social revolution...
...We do not know if a tax increase is necessary to ward off inflation...
...neighborhood facility grants are reduced from $88 million to $25 million...
...Corporate profits and individual incomes have never been greater...
...It is safe to say, however, that the Administration requests this year would have been significantly higher if the war in Vietnam were not consuming U.S...
...Johnson has become so completely and obsessively involved in the war in Vietnam that—as even his aides confess—he rarely thinks of anything else...
...No tax increase, however it might ease the strain on the budget and reduce the threat of inflation, could conceivably compensate for the war's disastrous drain on money, material, and manpower—not to mention the nation's dwindling moral reserves—that is sapping the life of the not-so-Great Society...
...See box on Page 6.) Senator Wayne Morse : "I fear that the struggle to maintain the momentum of the domestic program on which we were swept into office two years ago will be increasingly uphill...
...In the case of the war on poverty there was Administration talk last fall—by Sargent Shriver among others—of a $3 billion appropriation...
...The Administration has asked for about half-a-billion dollars less than Congress contemplated when it passed the law, and nearly a quarter of a billion dollars less than the Department of Health, Education and Welfare told the Bureau of the Budget it absolutely had to have...
...Some major programs—the war on poverty and the elementary and secondary education act—had no funds authorized last year for fiscal 1967...
...in the Office of Education, of the $416 million authorized for school operation expenses in impacted areas, only $67 million was requested...
...That is, the amounts budgeted by the President fell about $1.6 billion below the ceilings authorized by Congress...
...Johnson, in his fiscal 1967 budget now before Congress, proposed to slash appropriations for a number of Great Society programs below the amounts that had been promised last year and, in most cases, actually authorized by Congress in the historic first term of the Eighty-ninth Congress...
...Now, five months into the Congressional session, the President is fighting a rearguard action in a desperate effort to prevent Congress from requiring him to honor his commitments to building the beginnings of a Great Society...
...But Mr...
...When confronted with criticism of this character, Administration spokesmen are prone to reply that the budget cuts for social welfare, education, housing, health, and related programs are necessary to combat inflation...
Vol. 36 • June 1966 • No. 6
