Policies Askew

...To steal a phrase from a conservative tract for the times, this is presumably "how the world works...

...Let the boys (and a few girls) get on with the game, unfettered by the numbing rules that destroy morale and productivity...

...redirection of investment to non-defense uses...

...Pie-in-the-sky expectations of David Stockman devotees, of Arthur Laffer fan-tasts and other supply-siders are shattered by determined monetarists...

...To ignorance must now be added a kindred ingredient, faith, faith in the assiduous promotion and effectiveness of their singular nostrum: throw the governmental umpire out...

...If a generous employer rewards her with an extra dime an hour, she will, under Reagan provisions, lose her food stamp eligibility...

...The 22.5 per cent of households with incomes lower than $10,000 will lose an average of $240...

...That he has waffled on key issues or caved in to special interests is due at least in part, perhaps a large part, to the Byzantine infighting of the experts upon whom he variously relies...

...an incomes policy of selective price-wage controls, and full employment fully pursued...

...Her food stamp loss totals $ 1,188...

...The breadth of this Administration's skew mentality may not be so widely known...

...Patrick Lewis, an economist, is an associate professor of integrative studies at Otter-bein College in Ohio...

...If the supply-siders' bedrock devotion to incentives has merit, on what philosophical or economic grounds can it be assumed that such incentives will spur only the rich to greater effort...

...Ronald Reagan successfully conveys the public impression that his adherence to the principle of laissez-faire is as immutable as stone...

...Ronald Reagan must be the nicest President who ever destroyed a union, tried to cut school lunch milk rations from six to four ounces, and compelled families in need of public help to first dispose of household goods in excess of $1,000...

...A recently released Congressional Budget Office study has estimated the body count...

...In fact, the odious burden of government is being taken off only a few of our backs...

...Ten cents an hour is $208 a year...

...Against this scenario of failure, Lekach-man outlines his cautiously hopeful agenda for a resurgent Left: national planning...

...The marginal tax rate on her $208 is about 500 per cent...

...And it is from just that hand that supply-siders expect salvation...

...This, remember, is an Administration deeply troubled by the assertedly adverse impact upon incentives to work of marginal tax rates of the order of 40 to 50 per cent...

...Holding these disparate schools together—the supply-siders, monetarists, balanced budgeteers, and Moral Majoritarians—is the thin plank of government disintervention, hardly a platform on which to float even a dinghy of state...

...Today, in the new Gildered Age, economists are no longer at bay, they are at bat...

...Milton Friedman, monetarist prince, knows that inflation can be routed only if the economy is put through the wringer of prolonged recession and high unemployment...

...With a double-fisted grip on the money supply, the Federal Reserve, following Friedman's long-suffering advice, will sustain the high interest rates that stay the investor's hand...

...Patrick Lewis (J...

...To no one's surprise, the cuts in social programs will fall disproportionately on the poor...

...So begins Le-kachman's somewhat breathless new book, Greed Is Not Enough, as pat an epitaph for this "amiable gentleman's administration" as one is likely to imagine...

...With appropriate irony, John Kenneth Galbraith, who enthusiastically endorses Lekachman's book, has defined the essential Reaganomic aphorism: "The poor do not work because they have too much income, the rich do not work because they do not have enough income...

...Consider the situation of a woman with three children and no adult male on the scene...

...J...

...If she has a job at $5.25 an hour, she qualified (pre-Reagan) for $99 in food stamps...

...The specter of double-digit unemployment, ballooning military expenditures, stubbornly high interest rates, and a collapsed housing market may augur a brighter future for progressives...

...No book of recent vintage so scrupulously identifies the contradictions within and between the camps which curry favor and fame with President Reagan...

...Next year, if you are at the pyramid's peak among the 1.2 per cent of U. S. families with incomes of $80,000 or more, you can expect to receive an average gratuity of $15,130...

...The metaphors of sport fall short, however, for Reaganomics is not a game at all...

...Yet niceness can mask the most mean-spirited hypocrisy or blatant departure from principle...

...Greed Is Not Enough is more than a muckraking fit of pique or sour-grapes whining of the "outs...

...It is a massacre...

...Lekachman's grouchiness incubates in the heat of his commitment to equality, but his continual cut and thrust, cry and clamor, never obscure his argument: So deeply divisive are the theoretical and policy prescriptions of the contenders that the sucess of any one will necessarily sabotage the others...

...Six years ago, in Economists at Bay, Robert Lekachman noted that "ignorance of the real world is more than bliss: it is very nearly a prerequisite to a successful career in conventional economics...

...As Lekachman illustrates, the lash of a means test for the poor is always with them...

...Nothing novel in this, but it is worth being reminded that, like other capitalist economies, ours need not be locked in to the "American fixation upon private market solutions to public problems...

...In 1983, families with incomes below $20,000 will suffer almost two-thirds of the cutbacks but will receive only 15 per cent of the tax benefits...

...If so, Lekachman believes "the democratic Left will have reason to thank Ronald Reagan...