531,600 Tons of Dollars

By Hugh Sidey

There is no person in Washington who understands completely the meaning of $531.6 billion. The arguments last week about Jimmy Carter's national budget were surrealistic political rituals designed more for personal identity by the combatants than real evaluation of where we are headed. The AFL-CIO's George Meany stormed that the whole budget was an attack on "average Americans." Former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Wilbur Cohen called the small adjustments in Social Security "tragic, unsound." And by the end of the week, Congress's Black Caucus had declared the budget "immoral." Each critic seemed blindfolded, feeling a leg of the elephant and calling it a tree.

The sheer immensity of the amount may be partly to blame. Bo Cutter, the man from the Office of Management and Budget who directs the preparation of the budget, has made it a point to remind his staff repeatedly that a million dollars is a lot of money. In the hundreds-of-billions environment, a million dollars can be lost like a rolling penny heading for a sewer grate. Cutter has had his staff calculate some other reminders: a million dollars' worth of quarters stands almost as high as Mount Everest; the number of stacked quarters in this year's budget would extend as far as five round trips to the moon. In dollar bills, the Carter budget would weigh 531,600 tons.

No society on earth has ever produced so much wealth and given it to the Government, which then returns most of it in services for its citizens. This year's budget is greater than the gross national products of all but three of the 159 other nations around the globe (the three: West Germany, $650 billion; Japan, $900 billion; and the Soviet Union, $1.2 trillion). Joe Califano, the Secretary of HEW, who is constantly dieting, jogging and going to football games like a lot of other Americans, will manage $199.4 billion, which by itself exceeds the budget of every other organizational entity on the face of the earth with the exception of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Fort Knox, repository of the world's gold, never at its peak (1942) had such wealth in its vaults (the 445.3 million oz. of gold in Fort Knox in 1942 would be worth a mere $104 billion even at today's prices).

Has public money lost its meaning? Some institutions measure their effectiveness by the amount of tax dollars they can get, not how well they are used. Politicians run on the amounts they get for their districts, not what the dollars do. In the mounting political debate, the billions of dollars become objects moved around on a game board in a contest between parties and ideologies. The people involved seem to worry more about how they play the game than about the national interest.

One budget officer who sat through the process with Jimmy Carter is deeply concerned about something he calls "programmatic exuberance." By that he means that almost any program once begun has to be expanded, unproved, enriched or its sponsors are instantly indignant. There is little room in the politics of money for admission that spending may be bad or unneeded--that the initial grand design may simply have been wrong. When Carter quite sincerely began to review programs, the people in OMB found that a number of powerful legislators implied that the very examination of the programs was "a denial of social justice," to use the words of one concerned budget man.

By almost every count Carter kept the progressive and compassionate nature of the U.S. Government intact in this budget: shaving and shifting a bit, but never depleting such vital areas as the poor, children, the aging and basic research. There are 1,075 programs aimed at helping people, forming a safety net that may not be perfect but that holds those in need beyond disaster.

Yet the chorus of complaints already raised suggests that we will soon be playing more brutally than ever the great game of billions, often losing sight of the national interest in the scramble for a favorable box score of big bucks.

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