Peace, Progress & Pork

It all began in January when George Magoffin Humphrey, as one of his top aides said later, "tossed a match into the barn and sure started a fire." Treasury Secretary Humphrey's warning that high Government spending would in the long run bring on a depression "that will curl your hair" caused hair to stand on end all over the U.S. Editorial writers cried of "idiot spending," and budget figures rolled sonorously across Chamber of Commerce luncheon tables from coast to coast. Congressional mail pouches swelled; New York's Republican Senator Irving Ives totted up 2,155 budget-cutting letters and postcards last month. Talk about the cost of Government even reached Broadway; in Li'l Abner Marryin' Sam sang: Treasury says the national debt is climbing to the sky,/And Government expenditures have never been so high. But out of all the commotion came only the same old reasons why the budget is hard to cut: peace, progress and pork.

Plows for Afghans? Everyone stood foursquare for peace, but the most popular target of budget-cutters is a basic part of the U.S. peace program: foreign aid. In Boston the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce planned a budget-cutting demonstration in the form of a "second Boston Tea Party." Cried Milling Executive Paul Rothwell, chairman for the tea party: "It's silly to send tractors or plows to Afghanistan when the people there don't know how to use them."* Across the U.S. and across the economic scale, a Seattle fabrication-plant employee echoed: "Instead of giving all that money to foreigners we'd better start giving some to our own people."

Neither the big businessman in Boston nor the worker in Seattle seemed to realize that only a puny portion of foreign aid is for genuine economic assistance (in the sense of "plows for Afghanistan"). In the $3.8 billion mutual security budget for the current fiscal year, for example, only $385 million is listed for such purposes. Nearly all the rest goes for military aid and "defense support" and, as such, is more defense than aid. No one said much about cutting defense. Who wants to be against strength?

What About America? In a nation bursting at the seams with population growth and economic expansion, the price of progress reaches deep into the budget. President Eisenhower addressed himself sharply to that point before the Republican Women's National Conference in Washington last week. He had, he said, been talking to the heads of several great U.S. corporations. Each pointed to his own firm's increased budget as proof that "we are a growing company." Asked Ike: "What do you think America is?" The company heads said their budget hikes ranged from 6% to 10%. Well, said the President, "ours is up 3 1/2%"

Who, Me? When it came to pork, many a budget-cutter squealed in anguish. A delegation of Georgia businessmen arrived in Washington to demand that their Congressmen vote wholesale economies, only to be asked if they thought appropriations for Georgia projects should be knocked out. "Oh no," cried one. "We want you to cut the hell out of everybody but us." In San Francisco the Chamber of Commerce issued a resounding call for budget slashes. What about the proposed $45 million federal courthouse in San Francisco? Snapped a Chamber of Commerce official: "We don't consider this pork-barreling in any sense. The new federal building is essential."

By last week the fire in the barn had even singed the man who threw the match. To the chairman of a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee came a letter urging the Senate to restore $8,205,000 (to replace overage Coast Guard aircraft) that the House of Representatives had whittled from the Treasury Department's budget. The pleader: Treasury Secretary Humphrey himself.

Amid all the commotion, the opinion had grown up that the Eisenhower Administration's $72 billion budget was a monstrosity. Actually, said a commentator on the scene, it is more like a woman who, at 1301bs., is ten lbs. overweight. What is needed is a careful, sensible slimming diet--not the amputation of an arm or a leg.

* But the respected, nonprofit, nonpolitical Committee for Economic Development, made up of businessmen and educators, last week came out for more, not less, foreign aid, called for a long-range program of supplying capital (chiefly in loans) for sound development projects in underdeveloped free world nations that are making "honest efforts at self-help."

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