Energy Week that was
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington I3Y last Friday, the conclusion of what we might call Energy Week, our spearless leader looked almost as drained as a Punctured gasoline tank and for the first time in his short reign a bit unsure of himself. At his end-of-the-week press conference he was saved from answering seri°us questions by the fact that, after two Major speeches on energy, the reporters were getting bored with the subject and knew less about it than he did. Nevertheless, the President had intro• duced the nation to his long-promised 'coMprehensive' energy plan, the largest single, peacetime intrusion by the central government into both the private sector, and Private lives since the New Deal. First reactions went from I-suppose-we-have-to-do-it to suspicious silence. Carter tried to allay ine scepticism by explaining on his televised fireside chat the beginning of the week that
know that many of you have suspected
that some supplies of oil and gas are being Withheld. You may be right, but suspicions about the oil companies cannot change the tact that we are running out of petroleum.' , It is just that fact, which must be accepted i° make this poorly-thought-out programme appear reasonable, that many doubt. They remember the 1973 oil embargo and the pictures on the television ,..news of scores and scores of loaded oil tankers anchored off the Atlantic coast unable to land their cargoes because every oil storage facility was already filled. Subsequently It de ve topc—d that the gasoline shortage which had millions of drivers waiting in lines ntlie gas pumps wasn't caused by a lack of but by the decision of the oil companies n. ot to refine it and by the government's own inability to allocate the available supply efficiently.
The President did his best to overcome
tn credulity. He had the CIA make public a report analysing world oil supplies in the most lugubrious terms. The CIA's reputation, however, for knowing which end is !I? couldn't be poorer. These are the chaps Who weren't able to distinguish between dead water buffalo and dead Vietcong b ,back in the body count days of the SouthSt Asian war; the same fellows who tried to do away with Fidel Castro by putting a depilatory in his scuba diving suit. may the strolling players of the CIA L ay say to amuse us, the best information here is that proven world oil resources have su,ueen growing faster than growth in con._mPtion. This fact made it seem Mr Carter w.as straining his larynx as well as hyperbole decision he told the viewing audience, 'Our
cmsion about energy will test the character of the American people . . . this difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war".' Back to the playing field with you, my lad, and anyhow American politicians dearly love a crisis. They don't have the imagination to know any other way to be great but in turbulence and tension. As kids they saw too many war movies of Churchill orating against a background of London burning.
The testing of our character is deemed wholesome by men like Mr James Schlesinger, the President's archangel of energy, who sees us as a fat, self-indulgent people in need of discipline for the salvation of the soul. Mr Carter himself for good and sufficient born-again reasons is drawn to penitential politics, Good Friday government in which Easter Sunday never dawns, but White House calls for sacrifice by the populace can't obliterate the Rube Goldberg complexities, contradictions, ambiguities and impracticalities of the much-promised comprehensive plan. The heart of it is a series of tax gimmicks, the most hotly debated being one which would add a nickel a gallon to the cost of gas unless consumption dropped. This strange contingency tax arises from the government's ignorance of how much elasticity in demand there is for the product. More confusing yet, Mr Carter then proposes to rebate the tax he has just collected. Another tax would be placed on large cars that get low miles per gallon. The money collected from wealthy car buyers would then be given to people purchasing lighter, smaller vehicles that get more miles per gallon. Apparently the administration's proposals were formulated in such haste that the government didn't realise this would cause a major auto safety problem with the lawyers, doctors and government energy conservation officials in their big Cadillacs crashing into middle-income farmers, factory workers and computer tenders in their newly purchased cars. In addition the President is asking for an ocean spray of complicated changes in the income tax law to subsidise measures designed to cut fuel consumption at home and at work. This is a nation with income tax forms that are currently so difficult to understand and fill out millions must pay to have it done for them. The Carter proposals further complicate the job of computing your tax which would be depressing enough in any event, but it's psychosis-making from a President who campaigned all last year on tax simplification. Moreover, the economic effects of this jumble of taxes, rebates, credits and exemptions is absolutely unknown. Some say it will start a recession; others claim it'll trigger a boom. The government asserts it will cause a half-point rise in inflation but otherwise be neutral in its impact; but neither numbers nor, reasoning are advanced in support of these arbitrary reassurances. What's for certain is that during Energy Week the Dow-Jones average of blue chip industrials on the New York Stock Exchange dropped twenty points and automobile dealers complained that customers were staying out of their showrooms in army-sized numbers.
The silliness and the haste of the plan's specifics aren't as threatening as the presumption of its comprehensiveness. A comprehensive plan for a nation as large and as populous as this one with as many climates and differing geographic regions is beyond the power of American government to carry off. Every 'national' programme the government is presently engaged in, from railroad regulations to public health, is distressed. Indeed during the not too distant election campaign the anti-Washingtonian Peanut made much of his promise to bring some measure of efficacy to a government that is generally thought to be the country's single largest impediment to universal prosperity. Now, before he's demonstrated he can shape up the performance of one department or agency he wants to enlarge Washington's power, and by means of a plan, so technically poor, it serves to underscore the bureaucratic incompetence which will administer it.
At a grander level some people are wondering why the plan is based on the assumption the United States should cut foreign oil. purchases and rely as much as possible on domestic fossil fuels. The world's number one trading nation, so rich in so many ways, can afford to pursue an entirely different strategy. It could be discouraging domestic production and buying all of this one time-only, limited natural resource from any nation willing to sell it. That fact that the United States would still be in pos session of enormous oil reserves would allow it to enter the market to break the world price downward whenever it's decided those Arabs are getting too rich again. That's exactly what the United States did several years ago when it got a bee in its bonnet that the price of gold was too high.
Correction. Last time I reported Mr Joseph Califano, the amiably rich, ex Coca-Cola lawyer who functions as the Sec retary of Health, Education and Welfare had signed a peace pact with the lame, the halt and the blind petitioning him for some crumb of comfort and succour. Not so. They are back, an orderly mob of miserables in wheelchairs, birth defect spastics, deformed and maimed crippled victims of war, automobile traffic and misapplied chemistry in the food supply. In the mornings the Sec retary sneaks out the back door of his house to avoid them as a guard warns the gimps in front of Califano's home that the lawn is private property, trespass upon which, either by wheelchair, crutch or prosthesis, is forbidden.
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