An Irresponsible Budget

January 29, 1951

Senator Byrd was using the language of restraint when he declared that President Truman’s budget of $71,000,000,000 for the next fiscal year was “the very height of fiscal irresponsibility.” Mr. Truman no longer seems to attach any meaning to figures, or even to pledges. He has repeatedly promised “rigid economy in nondefense activities.” And he solemnly continues his lip-service to “strict economy” in the very budget in which, as Senator Byrd points out, proposed nondefense spending is increased “to the highest level in the history of the nation.”

Mr. Truman threw in practically the whole Fair Deal spending program—compulsory health insurance, bigger unemployment benefits, Federal subsidies to education, including nursery schools, more public power projects, including the St. Lawrence Seaway, more government housing, more handouts to foreign countries for “economic recovery,” and on top of all this, the Brannan farm plan, the year-to-year cost of which is indeterminable.

It may be doubted whether Mr. Truman seriously intended this as a budget or meant it only as a campaign document—so that, in 1952, he can tell the pressure groups that he asked for everything, and only a niggardly Congress denied it.

The response of Congress to this budget was much milder than it should have been. Senator Byrd’s estimate that it could be sliced by $7,000,000,000 was very moderate. Representative Taber’s contention that it could be cut by $4,000,000,000 was even more so. I hazard the guess that with proper Federal policies and proper administration of spending, the whole $16,000,000,000 difference between the proposed $71,000,000,000 of spending and the $55,000,000,000 of prospective tax yields could be cut, making it possible to balance the budget without increasing taxes any further. And the result could be both more production and better defense.

Mr. Truman still talks of government expenditures as if they came out of some fourth dimension, and bought more things than were bought before. All they do is to change the direction of spending. What the government pays out to Paul it must take from Peter. What it spends on government project X it must take away from unborn or unexpanded private projects Y and Z. For every speech Mr. Truman makes on how many “new needs” he is meeting by his $71,000,000,000 of expenditures, millions of mute inglorious taxpayers could make a speech on how many old and new needs they will be unable to meet because these billions will be taken away from them.

It is not enough for government to prove (though it seldom attempts even this) that every dollar it spends meets some vague “need” or other; it must show that every dollar it spends meets a greater need than it would have met if the man who earned it had been allowed to spend it on his own family or for his own projects.

Nor should we allow the magic word “defense” to save a proposed expenditure from serious scrutiny. Once Congress permits the Administration to set up a sacred and untouchable category of expenditures, it will find the Administration shoving every proposed expenditure possible under that category. Today “defense” covers a multitude of fiscal sins.

If there is any fiscal responsibility in Congress itself, it will return Mr. Truman’s 1952 budget to him without approval, and request him to submit a responsible, balanced budget with a certain specified number of billions sliced off the expenditure side. It will bind itself, in return, not to increase by its own appropriations either the total or any individual item of this revised budget. But it will not bind itself not to make any further reductions in individual items when the individual appropriation bills come before it. And its separate committees—including the Armed Services and Military Affairs Committees—will increase their technical and research staffs and make a far less perfunctory scrutiny of expenditure requests than they have in the past.