Reagan cuts back
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Bold, overdue, daring, radical, vital are but some of the adjectives being flung at Ronald Reagan's economic programme made officially public a few days ago. Although it may be all of that and more, it is also the largest redeployment of government expenditure from civilian to military purposes since 1940. What Mr Reagan and his colleagues taketh away from school expenditures and airline subsidies they returneth in missiles.
It is hard to see how a shift in military expenditures from 24 per cent of the budget to 32 per cent in three years could take place without the cuts, but it is also hard to see how, with their open-ended bomb-buying spree, the Reaganisti are going to reach their goal of pruning back the Government's sham of 23 per cent of the total national income to 20.4 per cent in the same period of time.
So far the yowls and howls over the reductions have been rather more pianissimo than was predicted. The trade unions, at least the ones representing government employees, have been whimpering and the spokesmen for other suddenly threatened groups have not exactly been enthusiastic, but, in public at least, their mood is almost resigned. Lobbyists are like torpedoes, however. They move under water and out of sight, so that you never know you've been hit until you see the hole in your legislation. Scores of torpedo sightings have been reported, their vector being toward the little Congressional sub-committees who must act on the Reagan proposals before too much time passes and the laws of political entropy cool down this week's boiling enthusiasm until nothing is left but the tepid plasma of compromise.
Many of the cuts the President is asking for can be criticised only for not being severe enough, although in some instances he is asking Congress to commit merited euthanasia on such governmental edifices as the Economic Development Administration, an outfit that makes imprudent subsidised loans to sick companies. Then there are leftover agencies that no longer serve a purpose like the Rural Electrification Programme that has been hanging around since Franklin Roosevelt's time. The nation is now completely wired, and there really is no reason the programme wasn't put to sleep 30 years ago.
The angriest fighting is over the reduc tions in the direct aid to 'people programmes', such as food stamps, which are issued to lower income persons to allow them to buy almost anything they want in the supermarket. The liberals are reacting bitterly to the proposed cuts and are not being very reasonable: middle class college kids have been getting stamps and using them to buy Perrier for years. The liberals are also concerned over the proposal that government-guaranteed, low interest loans to college students should be tampered with. In actuality, tens of thousands of students have taken out these loans, gone through university and never paid them back.
As the colleges came to understand that many of their students had, de facto, had scholarships conferred on them, they raised their tuition fees and made less than their customary feeble efforts to hold their expenses in check. In fact, in a number of areas the Reagan proposals are, by putting a cap on expenditure, going to apply some pressure on a variety of institutions to stop living like drunken playboys. Whether these cuts will hurt truly poor people, and by how much, is difficult to say because we cannot ascertain how much aid has• been getting through to the poor people and how much has been embezzled by the poverty pimps.
Other parts of the Reagan proposals are open to severe critism, not because of the cuts themselves, but because they have been done mindlessly and without policy. Subsidies to bankrupt railroads are to be dropped — good enough — but scandalously low interest rates (2 per cent) to solvent roads are to be kept. Why? Subsidies to airlines are to be chopped — good enough — but subsidies to the trucking industry are to be kept. Why? In the end, though, one ought not to be over-critical. President Reagan, who fled to his California ranch the day after slinging his fiscal machete at a joint session of Congress, is the first man since Calvin Coolidge to take this hydra on. The wonder is not that he has not yet learned to do it well, but that he is doing it at all.
But while what he is doing at home commands respect, his foreign policy is veering off into the absurd. It has not registered on people yet that he is proposing to turn the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation from a defensive league to keep Europe safe into a multinational roving armada parolling the waters of South-west Asia. The speech by the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Frank Carlucci, given in Munich the other day, has not been widely reported. He told a military policy conference there that 'Force deployments in South-west Asia by the European members of the [NATO] alliance together with supporting facilities, should be strengthened and coordinated with US military activities in the region.' The proposal to put a North Atlantic alliance in the Indian Ocean is but part of a confused effort to stop the reds, near reds, pinks, carnations or anyone else giving off energy in that part of the world.
That it is frantic and unplanned is a source of pride to the administration. 'The President has said many times,' Edwin Meese, Mr Reagan's principal adviser, reminded us the other day, 'he would like potential or real adversaries to go to bed every night wondering what we will do the next day.' Some potential or real American citizens go to bed wondering much the same thing. From hour to hour you don't know what concerns them: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, El Salvador; but wherever it is, their tone is always near hysterical.
On the plus-side is the emergence of Alexander Haig as an entertaining, homicidal oaf. His mastery of Pen tagonian, the dialect of the military efficiency expert, is unrivalled. He likes to `definitise' his answers or to 'context' them for clearer understanding, lest he have to adminster a 'careful caution,' something he is loath to do, 'epistornologicallywise' since he prefers to enunciate 'nuance-al differences.'
Of late, he's been expending a lot of language on El Salvador; at a recent briefing, the General said, 'I wish to assure you we do not intend to have another Vietnam and engage ourselves in another bloody conflict where the source rests outside the target area.' Considering the size, the location and the paucity of El Salvadorians, armed or unarmed, one would have thought it impossible to turn the place into another Vietnam. We have had a century of experience invading and occupying those little states down there. We may not be able to build a fuel efficient car but we do know how to take over a banana republic. If the general does turn El Salvador into another Vietnam, he is even more talented than supposed. In this turgid hour comes the formation of the Committee for the Free World, led by Norman Podhoretz and that familiar group of old radicals, ex-radicals and others who match the political idiocies of their youth with new examples of poor judgment in their declining years. Among the many famous, heavy-headed signatories is Irving Kristol, professor of 'social thought' whatever that may be, at New York University. Professor Kristol is so agitated about the slackness of the martial spirit in the armed services that he has published an open letter to the Secretary of Defence, an excerpt from which should make a fitting close to this dispatch: May I recommend that, on Memorial Day next, you reinstitute the tradition of a proper military parade? . There is nothing like a parade to elicit respect for the military from the populace . . . I could weep every Memorial Day when I watch those high-school bands go by, led by nubile versions of the Dallas Cowboys( cheerleaders, the spectators few and only ,casually interested.'
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