>Political Chimera
NYT - Oct. 8, 1975
With the economy still subject to dangerous imponderables as it emerges from a severe slump, it is deeply unfortunate that President Ford has chosen to play political and ideological games. His tax message is not the serious program of a responsible leader; it is a political chimera projected by a candidate playing for votes in a year‐off election instead of seeking realistic answers to the challenge of unemployment and inflation.
By conditioning his tax‐reduction proposals on an equivalent cut in public expenditures, Mr. Ford starts from a premise he knows to be unrealizable. As was immediately pointed out by Representative Brock Adams, Washington Democrat and chairman of the House Budget Committee, there is no way to slice $28 billion out of the Federal budget unless Social Security, veterans' pensions, food stamps, education and defense are substantially reduced. The President postponed until January his specific proposals as to how these existing programs could be “revised, consolidated and held below their projected levels.”
Yet Congress must act by Dec. 11 on taxes if withholding schedules are not to revert to the higher levels in effect before the temporary tax cut was enacted last spring. There is no realistic prospect that Congress will legislate a further tax cut based on an expenditure ceiling without knowing what expenditures are to be held down. Mr. Ford knows this perfectly well, but he is demagogically assuming that the public does not.
In the budget that the President submitted at the beginning of this year, he recommended a ceiling on the cost‐of‐living increases for Social Security recipients, far‐reaching changes in Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, and other reductions in programs that most Congressmen of both parties regard as untouchable. With the exception of a cutback in the comparability increase for Federal employes, Congress has refused to go along with any of these recommendations. To meet Mr. Ford's latest fiscal targets, Congress would have to impose much more draconian sacrifices in an economy where prices are rising at a rate close to 10 per cent, principally because of higher food and fuel costs and tight‐money policies.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/08/archives/a-political-chimera.html