Reaching for the Moon

June 12, 1961

The May 25 message of President Kennedy to Congress is a profoundly disheartening document. At a time when total planned Federal expenditures (including social security) are already in excess of $100 billion a year, when we are already anticipating serious deficits, when taxes on enterprise and investment are already so burdensome that they are reducing incentives and employment and slowing down economic growth, and when we have already piled up enough inflationary tinder to threaten a grave new inflation, Mr. Kennedy calls for bigger spending, bigger deficits, and more burdensome tax rates. His latest proposals increase the inflationary threat still further.

Since he came into office, Mr. Kennedy has put in requests for over $6.5 billion additional spending for the current fiscal year and the fiscal year to end June 30, 1962. A small part of this addition is for defense. But most of it is for new or expanded “welfare” programs, including increased foreign economic aid, increased social-security benefits, medical care for the aged, Federal aid to education, housing, and urban renewal, increased funds to farmers, to veterans, to unemployed workers.

EXPENSIVE STUNT

And now, on top of all, the President asks us to spend $7 billion to $9 billion over the next five years, and perhaps $40 billion over the next ten years, to land a man on the moon and get him back.

Why? So far as the scientific value is concerned, Dr. Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Research and Development during World War II, some time ago characterized the man-in-space program as “a vastly over-rated stunt. . . . There is nothing a man can do in space that can’t be done better and more cheaply by instruments. Suppose it cost $1 billion to put a man on the moon. For the same money you could support 1,000 research projects for 40 years. We need more basic research in physics, chemistry, and biology. We need to finish the job of handling arthritis. We need to know more about the genetics of viruses. I believe we can spend money to better advantage on earth than by shooting it into space.”

If the scientific value of this stunt is minimal, compared with the cost and with the potentialities of alternative projects, what other purpose would justify it? Propaganda? Instead of trying to outdo the Russians with Buck Rogers marvels, it would be enormously cheaper and more effective to make more propaganda use than we have so far dreamed of making of the freedom and productivity achieved under our private-enterprise system—a freedom and all-around productivity with which no socialist or Communist system can compete at all.

SACRIFICE–FOR WHAT?

The President speaks of the need of making sacrifices. But sacrifices for the mere sake of sacrifice don’t make sense. We must sometimes give up what is good today to achieve a greater good tomorrow. Mr. Kennedy is asking us to sacrifice what is good to achieve something of much more questionable value. Monetary stability, the welfare of consumers, the incentive to earn more and produce more, are not minor goods. Before we give them up, we should take a hard look at what we are offered instead.

And we cannot get a quart out of a pint jug. Whatever resources are devoted to new purposes and new projects must be withdrawn from old purposes and old projects. There is no economic fourth dimension. Mr. Kennedy sometimes talks as if there were, and as if it were created by government spending. But whatever the government spends on new programs it must either take from old programs or take from Americans in increased taxes. This means that alleged new needs can be met more adequately only if old needs are met less adequately.

True economy means wisdom in spending. It means saving on what is less necessary or less urgent in order to devote limited resources to what is more necessary or more urgent. It means putting first things first, establishing priorities. When the American people are urged to make sacrifices in their living standards in order to shoot a man to the moon, it is time to ask what has happened to our national sense of proportion.