A Pain for Charlie

As the grand finale to its angry campaign against President Eisenhower's $71.8 billion budget, the Chamber of Commerce last week staged the loudest protest yet at its 45th annual meeting in Washington. There, before 4,200 delegates, the Chamber cried for a cut of $5 billion in the overall total. Training its heaviest fire on the $38 billion defense bill, which it wants reduced by $1.5 billion, the Chamber said that the idea that "all defense expenditures are essential to national security and are therefore untouchable" is a "myth."

There has been, said the Chamber, a "lack of unification in the armed services, a reluctance to respond to changes in warfare brought about by improved technology"--both "expensive pastimes for the American people." That was not all: the Chamber also listed a dozen other areas--the President's executive office, foreign aid, school construction,* even free school lunches--where costs could be pruned.

"Irresponsible." For its budget cutting, the Chamber found plenty of support in Washington. Trumpeted Virginia's Democratic Senator Byrd: "This is the most irresponsible budget submitted in my day." He urged that the budget be chopped back to 1955's level of $64 billion; then both corporate and income taxes could be reduced by about $6.3 billion. Added California's Senate Minority Leader Knowland: if the Administration is spendthrift, Congress is not. The lawmakers, predicted Knowland, will trim the budget by more than $3 billion.

Hearing the talk, other speakers, notably Massachusetts' Democratic Senator Kennedy and Vice President Nixon, hurried to the Administration's defense, tried to persuade the Chamber to lay down its budget-chopping ax. Nixon pointed out that 60% of the budget goes for national defense, that unprecedented population growth demands increased social spending, that the budget is balanced.

"Disgusted." But it was left to Defense Secretary Wilson to whack the Chamber where it hurt. Asked by reporters to comment on Chamber charges that his department has wasted "billions" in bungled buying, Charlie Wilson replied: "I said to some of my friends that I was disgusted about the Chamber of Commerce. Security can't be cheap, you know. It's all right to be supercritical if you want to, if you have any constructive suggestions. But I don't know how to get 4,000,000 [Defense Department] people to be smarter quicker." Defending the way his budget was made up last fall, Wilson noted the then critical Hungarian and Middle East crises. How could anyone say that there was no risk in the world? asked Wilson sharply. "My friends in the Chamber of Commerce." he snapped, "represent some of the richest people in the country. They have never been so prosperous. For them to squawk so much about the budget gives me a pain."

Shot back new Chamber President Philip M. Talbott, senior vice president of Woodward & Lothrop, Inc., a Washington, D.C. department store: Wilson's "pains do not refute our findings. Our members are not all rich. Many of them are having a difficult time making any profits at all in the face of high taxes."

This was a feeble answer in the face of the generally excellent first-quarter earnings (TIME, May 6). What the Chamber also did not recognize was the fact that the budget, high as it is, is still a smaller percentage of the Gross National Product than budgets in other years that have drawn comparatively little protest. In 1952 budget expenditures were 20.3% of the Gross National Product; the current 1958 budget would be down to 16.5%. In short, even though the budget has grown dollarwise, it is actually a far smaller burden on the economy than it was in the earlier period.

*For other news on school construction, see EDUCATION.

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