AS THE ECONOMISTS SEE IT

Reactions to the Carter plan from TIME'S Board of Economists:

Most emphatic in support of the energy package is Joseph Pechman of Washington's Brookings Institution, who has repeatedly urged the adoption of two of the program's main elements: an additional federal tax on gasoline and an excise tax on big gas-gulping cars. Pechman concedes that the plan will add "moderately" to the inflation rate, but contends that somewhat higher prices are part of the cost the nation must pay to resolve its "most serious problem." The program should have little or no impact on economic growth, Pechman asserts. Harvard University's Otto Eckstein also believes the plan is workable. If enacted by Congress, he says, the package would add no more than seven-tenths of one percentage point to living costs between now and 1980. Automakers would be hurt, but not disastrously. Though sales of small models would climb under the plan, Eckstein sees a net sales drop of 300,000 U.S.-made cars a year and Detroit sales in dollar terms running about 4% a year below what they would otherwise be through 1980.

Walter Heller of the University of Minnesota, Arthur Okun of Brookings and Washington Consultant Robert Nathan, all Democrats, see potential flaws in the plan. The program's proposal to return money collected in higher gas and crude oil prices in the form of tax credits to consumers will, in Okun's view, boost living costs, kick up wage demands and add to the Consumer Price Index. All three members would prefer that the Government use the additional tax revenues to help keep the C.P.I, down--either by paring payroll taxes or by returning the money to states to allow them to lower sales taxes.

Far from satisfied with Carter's energy proposals are the Republican members--Alan Greenspan, who was President Ford's chief economic adviser; Beryl Sprinkel, executive vice president of Chicago's Harris Trust & Savings Bank and Murray Weidenbaum of St. Louis' Washington University. Their main complaint: the program's failure to put enough emphasis on increasing energy supplies by eventually lifting all controls on oil and gas and letting the market determine prices. Says Sprinkel: "It's backward economics. We're not allocating enough resources for investment." In addition, Greenspan fears that the program will create a new bureaucracy, add to businessmen's uncertainty and result in a continuing lag in much needed investment in plant and equipment in all segments of industry. Says Greenspan: "The view that somehow this program is going to enhance growth is to me an utterly noncreditable notion."

Even so, Okun believes the program is essential if the nation is to have "insurance against an energy catastrophe. The question now is whether the American people will have enough maturity to act before the crisis hits."

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