February 8, 1973
Page 4071
ADDRESS BY SENATOR MUSKIE
Mr. HART. Mr. President, I invite the attention of Senators to a speech made last Friday by the senior Senator from Maine. The speech constituted a reasoned, full-scale response to this administration's astounding budget proposals. In particular, it pointed out that the administration's promise of special and general revenue sharing was a false one since it results in shifting the burden of domestic problems from the Federal Government to already overburdened State and local governments.
I ask unanimous consent that the speech be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
REMARKS OF SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE BEFORE THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS COMMITTEE OF THE NATIONAL LEGISLATIVE CONFERENCE
WASHINGTON, D.C., February 2, 1973.
I want to discuss the Administration's efforts to decentralize authority and emphasize local responsibility. With the serious reservations I will discuss in a moment, I do endorse the development of more responsible and responsive local government. We all acknowledge that the means on which we have been relying to deliver Federal assistance have been imperfect.
Recipients have too often been throttled in red tape. Federal programs have grown faster than the ability of counties, cities and States and even the Federal Government to coordinate them. Too often, ambitious national programs have not met all their worthy objectives.
So we must work harder to identify those areas where Federal efficiency in collecting revenues can be effectively matched to grass roots appreciation of our real problems. We must provide the most flexible kind of Federal support in those fields where a community's own work best answers its own concerns.
But I think we should ask some hard questions about this President's approach to this general and easily applauded goal.
First, does the new budget really deliver on that promise to help local initiative or does it, as I suspect, simply shift to local taxpayers new burdens that will only deepen popular resentment of government?
Second, are we really ready to abandon the national commitment to attack the enemies Lyndon Johnson identified as "poverty, ignorance and disease"?
And finally, is a philosophy that relies so heavily on the supposedly benign side-effects of self- centered energy truly adequate to impel the growth of a society which has not yet fulfilled its brightest prospects or its greatest ambitions?
The way I have asked these questions strongly suggests the answers I will give. Basically, this President views government as a necessary evil. In contrast, I see it as an instrument for the common good, a weapon that can restore our sense of shared purpose and of great, national enterprise.
Starting from that broad disagreement, let me go to the specific problems of the Fiscal 1974 budget, the practical expression of the President's philosophy. At the outset, it should be said that the general idea of a Congressionally fixed limit on spending will prove acceptable, even if this President's ceiling figures do not. I can assure you that the Congress accepts its responsibility to set spending priorities and to match full-employment revenues to government outlays, whenever possible.
But I frankly regret that the budgetmakers failed to apply the same tough standards to defense spending that they imposed – wholesale, it seems – on social programs. Here, the Congress may prove more skeptical than this President, particularly in relation to funding levels for the Trident submarine and the nuclear carrier and in relation to the overemphasis on command and support personnel for the Army.
Beyond the possibilities of further savings, I am disturbed – but not surprised – at this President's failure to offer the tax reforms he promised us last year. I have already submitted a comprehensive but moderate program to end or restrict the worst inequities in the tax code. My proposals would reform 24 unjustifiable tax shelters for the wealthy and produce estimated new revenues of $18.6 billion by 1975. The bullet this President will not bite – the people's demand that income taxation correspond to ability to pay – is one the Congress will have to discharge unaided.
I also suspect that State legislators, especially, will remember another Presidential pledge this budget fails to honor: the campaign-year promise of Federal property tax relief. I am not aware of any significant change for the better in the way such taxes are administered or any major reduction in the pain they generate. But the President's budget not only offers no relief from high property taxes; the unexamined consequences of this budget could easily increase their burden.
It is also necessary to be frank about one grave deception in the budget. Not only has this President scuttled his own welfare reforms, he has given us only rhetoric about his promise to provide a national health insurance plan.
The promise is there, but not one penny is requested for its realization in Fiscal 1974. In fact, this budget actually cuts projected spending for national health insurance to less than one-fourth the level projected in last year's budget. Where the 1973 estimates forecast a total of $6.5 billion for such a program in the Fiscal years 1974 through 1977, this President now proposes to delay the program another year and to set aside only $1.6 billion for the same period.
Let us look at the above-board implications of the budget.
If the Federal Government is to slash categorical aid for disadvantaged school children, for vocational education, even for school milk programs, does that mean that the widely recognized need for such help has disappeared? It does not. It only shifts the pressure to fund such programs out of Washington and onto you.
If the Federal Government is to shrink its efforts to train and place the unemployed, does that mean joblessness – and the local consequences, including higher crime rates and welfare costs – will wither away? It does not.
If the Federal Government is to restrict its funding for local sewage waste treatment projects, does that mean our Nation's rivers have suddenly reverted to purity? It does not.
If the Federal Government is to abandon its experiment in direct aid to community mental health facilities or force elderly Medicare recipients to scrape up more money they do not have to meet steadily rising medical costs, does that mean sick people will be better cared for? It does not.
What this does mean – and everyone of you should think carefully about this point – is that the demand to finance these same, enduring obligations will be made now on local financial structures that are already ill-equipped to meet existing burdens. This is not tax saving. It is tax shifting, and don't you fool yourselves on it for one minute. Self-reliance means that State government, or local government, or those least able to bear the costs will have to pay the bills.
This President, of course, wants you to believe that his proposed special revenue sharing programs will match in the future the Federal contributions of the past. The sums may tally up on paper, but what will be the practical effects?
The money will go to the most powerful – and that means, by and large, the most privileged – elements in every local power structure. I energetically supported and I continue to support general revenue sharing, but I have been somewhat concerned by partial evidence of the ways in which its first fruits have been used. A survey of city officials by my Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations has brought some 75 responses – almost uniform in their frustration with the red tape surrounding many categorical aid programs and almost uniform in the evidence they give that few of this year's revenue sharing allocations are being spent on social services.
Congress gave communities many choices of what to do with the general revenue sharing funds.
Most used them for capital improvements, official salaries, public safety and tax relief. In one instance, the money is being spent to remodel a public golf course – a priority that, as a golfer, I commend, but, as a legislator, I question.
The fact remains that few local authorities chose freely to put their first general revenue sharing distributions into improved health care, into anti-poverty programs, into equalizing opportunities for the less privileged, into the problems which, left unsolved, spread far beyond any local boundaries. Communities were not, of course, permitted to spend the funds on education. And the fact is that, whether because of the law's restrictions or local choices of priority, if Federal authorities no longer honor our national, social responsibilities, no one will.
So let's be realistic. Are you and your colleagues in State and municipal government prepared to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable – the dual task the President wants to shuck off?
Are you ready to go home and tell local property taxpayers that their payments – exacted in so many States on the basis of arbitrary appraisals and by ill-equipped, under-qualified assessment officials – will have to rise?
Or are you willing to face the least advantaged of your constituents – the jobless veterans, the poorest ghetto dwellers, the old and the ill, the school-age children – and tell them to go to the rear of the line?
Do not deceive yourselves. These are the real choices presented by this budget. These are the real and radical alternatives offered by the New Federalism that President Nixon has concocted out of a philosophy that says it rewards effort when, in fact, it bestows added blessings on the affluent and added cares on the weak.
My own response – faced with the legitimate call for a more efficient Federal structure and for greater attention to the capacities of local government to judge and meet local needs – is to reform the grant process, not junk it. The record of our finest Great Society programs is a record of progress – not of instant success, not of full elimination of pervasive social title – but, above all, not a record of failure.
Moreover, special revenue sharing, I honestly fear, can become just a distorted and diffuse way of "throwing money at problems," with increased danger of putting the money into the wrong pockets and losing its targeted impact on our real, national demands.
I do believe we can and must streamline our assistance programs. I will soon reintroduce, as an example, the changes to the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act which the Senate already passed last Fall. With this legislation we can consolidate grant-in-aid programs within proper, broad functional areas, making it easier for local governments to decide their overall requirements and coordinate the Federal response with the agencies that administer the help given.
Further, my Subcommittee will hold extensive hearings this year into the Federal system and the ways that Governors, State Legislators, county executives, Mayors and City Managers can suggest to cut through bureaucratic regulations toward efficient and responsive government. The emphasis in these hearings – in contrast to the President's program – will be on a positive search for better ways to solve problems of national scope, not on abdicating Federal responsibility.
In this effort, I also intend to put heavy emphasis on open government. For despite the argument that secrecy augments efficiency, I insist that good administration must be founded on the fullest possible citizen awareness of and participation in the options and decisions of government at every level.
I have spoken of the practical problems in the Budget. Let me turn, in conclusion, to the broader issues I raised at the beginning of these remarks.
I do not read America's mood as this President does. His interpretation is narrow and negative. It stresses a frightened impulse to retreat from social responsibility. My own beliefs center on the openness of spirit that is still our dominant trait as a society. Americans still desire to lead ambitiously and to act imaginatively.
What emerges from this President's analysis is the view that Americans stand in the same relation to the State as children do to parents. From this fundamentally authoritarian position, President Nixon proceeds quite naturally to the belief that the government is involved in little more than the dispensing of enormous financial lollipops, bribes to placate willful brats, hush money to keep peace in the family.
Let me suggest a few instances of such behavior, not perhaps the ones the President has in mind.
There is, I have always thought, an undue measure of indulgence in the way we treat major defense contractors when their claims of higher costs overwhelm their estimates and delay their meeting of contractual obligations.
We manage, without apparent deep misgivings, to pamper a coterie of oil millionaires with depletion allowances more generous than any we would think of giving to ordinary mortals.
We reward industrial inefficiency with hastily arranged government loan guarantees. And we subsidize corporate farming and international grain traders with a series of sophisticated devices that somehow result in raising the price of our daily bread.
There are, obviously, a lot of different ways to be on welfare. There are people taking government handouts who, quite naturally, prefer to regard themselves as beneficiaries of official incentives.
Forget them for a moment. Each case is arguable, and the only real sin is self-righteousness.
This President's view of self-reliance might have fitted us in the early 19th Century, appropriate to an agrarian society in the process of boisterous expansion. But it cannot answer the needs of this modern world where the real frontier is the one between the slums and the suburbs, where the general store is a chain supermarket, where the wagon train has been replaced by the traffic jam and computer analysts are the new path finders.
Let us be honest about our potential. Individual initiative alone is not going to build the schools or train the teachers America's youngsters need.
Self-reliance cannot redirect a massive economy into new expanses of opportunity for those who live in shrinking rural communities or blighted ghettos.
Self-denial will not cure childhood diseases or conquer the heartbreak of an old age spent in solitary illness and enforced austerity.
To address these and other tasks is the mission of a confident people, acting together. The men who built the great medieval cathedrals of Winchester and Milan and Chartres knew such confidence for they were bound to each other by the link of a shared faith. We are tied by a common destiny and a shared faith that it can be magnificent.
To meet our imperatives, the great role of government is to unify, to inspire and to provide the leadership and some of the tools with which we go about our work.
But piecemeal attacks on great national problems cannot contribute forcefully to their solution.
We only invite further deeper citizen frustration by handing out trowels and asking people to move mountains.
We must embrace instead, and with a new will, the harder task of closing the great gaps in our social fabric, the disparities between rich and poor, between the races, between "private opulence and public squalor."
We will not achieve a more open society by rewarding our most selfish instincts. We can strive toward justice by appealing to America's conscience to heal division through common effort and mutual sacrifice.
We need instead a restoration of our most humane impulses and a new conviction that the will to idealism in our culture can be matched by the compassionate performance of our institutions.
That faith animates America. Honoring its dictates, we will make our society whole again.