Looking for Ideas That Work

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency/Hugh Sidey Looking for Ideas That Work Ninety-six top thinkers, ranging from Hanna Holborn Gray, president of the University of Chicago, to George Gilder, the supply-side guru, worked their way through dozens of seminars, breakfast discussions and banquet speeches last week, unleashing a deluge of ideas to get America moving again.

The army of analysts came to town for the American Enterprise Institute's Public Policy Week and used the occasion to advocate everything from taxing Social Security benefits for high-income elderly to junking Ronald Reagan's New Federalism because it runs, says Stanford Historian David M. Kennedy, "against the tide of history." While all this was going on, Reagan was holed up in the White House, listening to his assistant Edwin Harper describe the intriguing, if intimidating, prospect that the U.S. economy was a creature that could not be managed either by Keynesian or supply-side theory.

Meantime, Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis' idea to hike gas taxes 5-c- per gal. to repair highways and bridges was making progress in Congress. And Reagan threw his weight behind the notion, hatched in the Department of Agriculture, of using surplus grain as a payment for not producing new grain.

Wherever one looked in Washington last week, there was intellectual ferment. Some ideas were not doing well, notably the plan to dense-pack the new Peacekeeper (MX) nuclear missile. But that is part of the process. The A.E.I. 's slogan for Public Policy Week was "Competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society."

Within the next few days, Reagan's economic advisers will present to him more than a dozen fresh ideas for doctoring the economy. He is sure to try a few of the still secret proposals. Indeed, in the White House there is the feeling that within the next couple of years the time will be right to reform health care and Social Security and to adopt a flat-rate income tax. There is even some muttering against the 20-year-old triad strategic-defense structure (bombers, land-based missiles, submarines). Reagan aides believe that in the future, high costs and new technology will induce the U.S. to concentrate more on submarines and to venture into space.

Nor is the churning limited to Government. Two weeks ago, a small group gathered for dinner in the Watergate Hotel to plan a drive to limit each President to one six-year term in order to get the politics of re-election out of governing. The group included such political opposites as Lloyd Cutler, who was counsel to Jimmy Carter, and William Simon, the conservative Secretary of the Treasury under Nixon and Ford. Milton Eisenhower, Ike's brother, summed up the evening: "The presidency is not working."

Felix Rohatyn, the Wall Street wizard who helped rescue New York City, is gaining advocates for a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation, reminiscent of the one nation's Franklin D. Roosevelt used. Rohatyn's idea is to rebuild the nation's antiquated private industrial base and public facilities. The problem, says Rohatyn, "is whether the ideas can catch up with the realities before disaster."

In fact, Washington has always had plenty of ideas. Building a consensus and moving always the right moment is the critical element. Special interests are always ready to pounce on the new and novel. The single six-year term for the President is opposed almost universally by political science professors who have built careers studying the present system and who believe the four-year accountability invigorates the Government. The firms that make farm machinery and sell seed grain are resisting the surplus-grain-payment idea. The reality that new Government programs designed to help people may, because of the towering deficits, create more economic chaos than they relieve breeds skepticism for every proposal.

Harry McPherson, one of Lyndon Johnson's brain trusters, got a call from a distraught Congressman the other day. The Congressman pointed out that if the entire Federal Government was abolished except for defense, Social Security and interest on the debt, we would still be in the hole $40 billion to $50 billion a year.

The good news is that more people than ever know it-- and are thinking about it

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