Block That Tax Boost!

The village president of suburban Glenview, Ill. met with his board of trustees last week and took a "malicious pleasure in hacking and slashing," as he later confessed. What he hacked and slashed was spending items in the village's new budget, such as the library's request for $91,000 (cut by nearly one-third) and the building commissioner's request for a $2,500 car (cut to $1,800). Explained President Jack Mabley, who makes his living as a Chicago Daily News columnist: "There's a feeling of frustration and desperation among the taxpayers I meet, and this is one small way of doing something about it."

Evident across the U.S., in the midst of brisk consumer spending for new cars, power boats and vacation-bound plane trips, was an almost rebellious hostility toward threatened tax boosts and heavy governmental spending. "Wherever I go," said Boston Democrat John E. Powers, president of the state senate, "all I hear is 'cut that budget!' " Echoed Chicago Republican Albert Hachmeister, member of the state legislature: "Even parents of schoolchildren come to me and say, 'No more tax increases, please, not even for schools.' " Said San Francisco's Republican Mayor George Christopher: "It used to be a simple matter for a petitioner to get people to sign a petition for a new park. Today, I don't get these petitions any more."

When Massachusetts' Democratic Governor Foster Furcolo requested a chance to speak to General Electric workers at Lynn last month in defense of his embattled proposal to boost the state sales tax, they deluged him with 200 unfriendly questions, such as: "When are you going to forget your giveaway programs?" "Why don't you do something to stop the disgraceful, wasteful spending of the taxpayers' dollars?"

Clipping Coupons. Expressed in the hostility toward public spending were both longaccumulated annoyance at the bite of taxation and sharp awareness of the nibble of price upcreep. In response to a recent Los Angeles Times campaign urging readers to write to their Congressmen in protest against inflationary federal spending, more than 30,000 letters descended on California members of Congress. The Chicago Tribune printed handy "stop inflation" coupons, and more than 130,000 were clipped out by readers and mailed to Springfield and Washington.

Weariness of price upcreep made many a union member skeptical about the value of wage boosts won by unions. Admitted a United Auto Workers official in Detroit, on the eve of the threatened steel strike (see BUSINESS) : "My guess is that the steel strike will get as little actual support, from the public and from labor in general, as any strike ever got. The average working stiff is becoming much more realistic about these things."

Goalkeeper. The U.S.'s block-that-tax-boost, hold-those-prices mood went far toward explaining Washington's most remarkable phenomenon of 1959: the triumph of President Eisenhower's balanced-budget goal, despite the spending plans that Democrats brought with them when Congress convened last January. Back then, with Democrats showing the flush of November victory and the economy still showing traces of pallor, some of the President's own advisers warned that a balanced budget would be out of keeping with the trend and temper of the times.

But the President's goal, as Democrats found out in reading the mail from their constituents, proved to be astonishingly popular. In doing what he thought best for the nation's economic health, Dwight Eisenhower apparently was giving the people just what they wanted.

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