Bipartisan Errors

July 9, 1962

What is most disheartening about Mr. Kennedy’s reaction to the deepening crisis of confidence is his complete inability to admit past error or the possibility that he could be wrong. His Yale speech, implying that all criticism of his policies has been made up of “stale phrases,” “myths,” “illusion and platitude,” “traditional labels and worn-out slogans,” and that he alone is interested in “the real problems of our time,” was not calculated to restore confidence but to undermine it further. He did not help matters when he said both before and after the House vote rejecting the farm bill that those who voted against it (including 48 Democrats) did so because they “chose to make a party issue of this matter instead of voting in the national interest.”

The truth is that the farm bill demanded by Mr. Kennedy and Secretary Freeman was incredibly bad. It was disgraceful that it passed the Senate. It should have been defeated in both houses by an overwhelming vote. It would have imposed the worst regimentation in our history on the growing of wheat, corn, and other grains, with Draconian economic punishment against any farmers who dared to violate its provisions.

FARM FIASCO

Eisenhower’s broadside against the whole Kennedy economic program contained many a truth. Its central truth was that the present Administration’s difficulty stems “primarily from an inadequate understanding of our American system—of how it really works.” But Eisenhower’s own remarks were marred by partisanship. For the misconceptions and bad policies he attacked were only exaggerations of unsound policies accepted in his own Administration.

The policy of farm price supports, overstimulating production and creating unsalable surpluses, plus the attempt to offset these consequences by acreage and marketing controls, began in the Roosevelt New Deal. But it was continued by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, with ever-mounting problems, because neither they nor successive Congresses had the courage to stop it. The economic problem is not at all baffling. The situation can be cured by abandoning and reversing the policies that created it. It is merely necessary to halt all further price supports; and to sell the surpluses back to the farmers themselves, on a pro rata basis, below the free-world price, leaving it to the individual farmer to decide whether to hold or resell, and how much to plant under the new conditions. But neither party has had the courage to suggest anything like this. So the problem mounts.

CANADIAN CRISIS

This applies also to the stockpiling program. Democratic investigators seem chiefly eager to expose Republican errors. But the policy was and is bipartisan. On Jan. 31, Mr. Kennedy advised that the Federal stockpile of strategic materials be reduced, but as Senator Byrd has pointed out, the $8.7 billion figure of Feb. 1 actually increased by the end of March.

The 26 budget deficits and the inflation of the last 32 years have also been bipartisan. All that Mr. Kennedy and his advisers have added is the doctrine that deficits are often necessary and “appropriate.” As a result of similar policies Canada has just had an exchange crisis. Part of its countermeasures—to cut government spending and to raise the discount rate—are correct. But the added duties on imports, and the borrowing of more U.S. dollars from us and from the International Monetary Fund, are at our expense, and will only intensify our own balance-of-payments problem. Yet the whole IMF monetary system, now stumbling to a crisis, has bipartisan support.

And so with a whole series of other policies—excessive taxation on corporations, double taxation of dividends, niggardly depreciation allowances, confiscatory rates on higher personal incomes, business prosecution under unpredictable interpretations of vague antitrust laws, and Federal labor laws that encourage union demands and strikes to get out of hand.

These bipartisan errors, many of them of more than 30 years’ standing, are having cumulative evil consequences. Will either party have the courage, before it is too late, to reexamine or repudiate them?