Banner Graphic, Volume 11, Number 104, Greencastle, Putnam County, 3 January 1981 — Page 7
Naming of Watt to Interior reflects contempt for nation's needs
By JOHN B. OAKES c. 1980 N.Y. Times NEW YORK environmental extremist James G. Watt to be Secretary of the Interior, Ronald Reagan has demonstrated his contempt for the office itself, for the needs of the country, and for the advice of the most respected environmentalists of his own party. Reagan’s nomination of Watt as the nation’s No. 1 trustee of the public lands is like putting a fox in charge of the henhouse The only possible explanation for this grotesque appointment is that the President-elect intended it as a sop to his supporters from the land-hungry radical right. Concentrated in the Western mountain states, they are far more interested in loosing Federal controls over the public lands for their own purposes than in protecting the environment from the
Social insecurity
Quiet talk about reducing future benefits to those who are working now
By EDW ARD COWAN c. 1981 N.Y. Times WASHINGTON A few members of Congress and a handful of aides have begun discussing vays to scale back the Social Security benefits to be paid in the future to people who are now working. This politically sensitive topic is being quietly examined because, if the current method of financing is continued. Social Security is expected to incur large deficits in the first half of the next century, perhaps as early as the year 2010. Those deficits are expected despite several scheduled rises in the payroll tax in addition to the increase that took effect Thursday. For 1981, the tax paid by employees and employers will be 6.65 percent on the first $29,700 of earnings. In 1980 it was 6.13 percent on $25,900. The only way to cure the expected deficits is to reduce expenses benefits, in this case or raise more revenues, or both. Congress has been loathe to grasp this nettle of a problem because its members see little political profit in either alternative, and possibly much risk. “It’s difficult to take the pain for something when you’re not going to get the benefits,” said an aide to the Senate Finance Committee. The financing problems that beset Social Security are usually divided into shortterm and long-term ones. The long-term deficit is the more difficult but less urgent of the financing problems. There is time to deal with it. although there are not many years to waste. A more pressing if less difficult problem is finding additional money to pay old-age and survivor benefits in the 1980 s. The oldage trust fund, which pays these benefits, could run out of money by the summer of 1982. Social Security benefits are paid from three trust funds: the old age and survivors fund, the disability fund and the insurance fund. By law. revenues from the payroll tax, which is paid by employers, employees and self-employed persons, go into the
U.S. surrenders to 'Christmas bombing'
Instead of dimming Christmas tree. Carter should mine harbors
Bv WILLIAM SAFIRE c. 1980 N.Y. Times WASHINGTON Now would have been the time for President Carter to walk away from negotiations with the outlaw nation that is holding United States foreign policy hostage. Instead, he has just offered to increase the appeasement. Iran’s zealots practiced their own brand of “Christmas bombing” a propaganda barrage at Christmastime intended to wring the hearts of Americans at the plight of our captive countrymen. America’s news media cooperated effusively. The result was a televised human-interest spectacular, with Iran dangling its wares our diplomats in front of the opinionconsumer public, complete with price tag for early delivery. Patience under such provocation is a vice Over a year ago, when those concerned with national honor suggested that an act of war should be answered by a blockade, another act of war. the response of the self-flagellating set in the White House and State Department was to counsel patience and restraint. We have seen the result of our policy of unprecedented weakness: the diplomats still imprisoned, the aggressor nation presenting ransom demands for $24 billion, and the United States held up to ridicule. The latest “concession” from Iran seems to be that the U S. turn over its right to decide its national interest to some third-party arbitrator Incredibly, Carter is acquiescing. The central issue is not now, and never has been, the freedom or the safety of those 50, or some other 5,000, Americans; rather, it was and is the ability and the will of the government of the United States to defend its vital interests and the lives of
degradation that is relentlessly pressing in upon it. James G. Watt, of Colorado, who has built his recent career on attacking such controls, is one of their very own. As a professional confrontationist, he is hardly the kind of secretary that Reagan’s own task force on the environment had in mind. In a report sent to the president-elect some weeks ago but never released, the 14 distinguished members of the Republican task force, several of whom have held high public office, urged Reagan to consider “protecting and enhancing the environment” as one of the “major concerns” of his presidency. While recognizing the “competing claims" of the need for economic development, for energy, for new technology, and for jobs, the task force called for “a spirit of cooperation, not confrontation.” It asked for sensitivity “to the delicate balance of our ecosystems,” to the “irreversible harm we can do to our natural surroun-
opinion
LARRY GIBBS Publisher
trust funds. Benefits can be paid only from the funds, and if the funds are empty, benefits cannot be paid. Congress thought it had cured the shortterm financing problems by passing legislation in 1977 that mandated several increases in the tax rate and the taxable wage base. Unforeseen problems have been caused by the economy. High unemployment has reduced the number of people paying taxes to the trust funds, and the acceleration in the inflation rate has driven up benefits. Old-age, survivor and disability benefits are increased each July by the percentage rise in the Consumer Price Index for the 12 months up to the preceding March. The cost-of-living increase last July was 14.3 percent. Social Security specialists on the House and Senate staffs would like the members to channel more money into the old-age trust fund in 1981. The most likely action would be the shifting of money from the disability benefits fund and possibly from the health insurance fund, which pays the hospital care part of Medicare. The moving of money from one fund to another has appealed to Congress because it does not require a tax increase or a reduction in benefits. There is no consensus among either Democrats or Republicans on what to do, although virtually all members would oppose another tax increase.
its law-abiding citizens wherever in the world those interests or individuals may be threatened. President Carter has already paid for his weakness with his job. (Indeed, his departing party line is that his political defeat was solely due to a faulty helicop-
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dings,” and to the current “waste of nonrenewable resources and the destruction of the systems on which renewable resources are based.” That task force report, with its many specific policy recommendations, evidently has been tossed into Reagan’s wastebasket. In striking contrast to the spirit of the report. Reagan has chosen, as the Cabinet officer mainly reponsible for protecting the nation’s natural resources, a front man for some of the principal exploiters of those resources. For the last three years. Watt has headed the Mountain States Legal Foundation. a so-called public-interest law firm, in Denver. It is partly paid for (on a tax-deductible basis, of course) by some of the best-known extractive industries in the West, covering the spectrum from lumber and grazing to mining and oil, with a host of large banks, contractors, and utilities thrown in for good measure.
ERICBERNSEE Managing Editor
The heart of the financing problem is that over the next 40 years the ratio of workers to retirees will decline from about 3.3 to 1 to about 2 to 1. At the present tax rates the revenues paid into the old-age trust fund would be insufficient to pay for prospective benefits. “There are only two things to do.’’ a Republican Congressional aide commented, “raise taxes or cut benefits.” Members of Congress see no political mileage in either course and some contend that the situation may be inflamed if the problem is discussed in such bold, politically unpalatable terms. The problem, says Rep. Barber B. Conable, R-N.Y., is that “people come to Social Security with their mouths open ready to yell rather than with their minds open ready to think.” Conable is the ranking minority member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which handles Social Security. An aide to Sen. Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican who will be the new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the lawmakers must find ways to trim the benefits to be paid to future retirees because “people aren’t willing to pay more taxes”. A Senate aide suggested that unless there was public pressure on the Congress to shore up Social Security, lawmakers might again choose in 1981 to deal only with the near-term problem.
ter.) By now, even the softest Carterite must understand that unrestrained restraint is self-defeating, and that the fanatics in Iran have been strengthened by their ability to manipulate the media to humiliate a superpower. Instead of caving in further, he should
As chief legal officer of the foundation, Watt has been in the forefront of many of the recent environmental battles in the Mountain States on the antienvironmental side. He has fought the Interior Department’s belated efforts to curb the use of grazing on the public domain. He has proved his hostility to the national wilderness system, which as secretary he will be sworn to protect. He has attempted to prevent even the temporary “locking up” of pristine wilderness lands while their possibilities for the enjoyment and use of future generations are being studied. Always in the name of free enterprise and individual liberty, he has even attempted to block in the courts the effort of the National Park Service to restore some semblance of serenity to such particularly fragile areas as the deep canyons of the Colorado River that have been entrusted to its care.
“We’re a reactive body,” said a Senate aide. “My hope is that the new administration will come up with the right kind of package. If they come up with negative things, every interest group will come out of the woodwork and pummel us to death.” “Negative things” means anything that causes the members and committee staffs to be “pummeled” by lobbyists and their constituents. No constituency, incidentally, is more feared than elderly people and their lobbyists, which are regarded as a force that can cause defeat at the polls. Since it was enacted in 1935 as a simple program to provide benefits for retired workers, Social Security has become a multifaceted income-maintenance system that is intertwined with the lives of nearly all Americans. Benefits are paid each month to 36 million retired workers and disabled workers, as well their spouses or survivors. In 1981, Social Security taxes will be paid by 107.8 million employees, six million employers and 8.7 million selfemployed people. As coverage has broadened, benefits have been raised and the number of beneficiaries has increased. Social Security has become a substantial fraction of the federal budget. For fiscal 1981, which began Oct. 1, Social Security payments are expected to cost $l3B billion, or about 21 percent of the budget. Because the benefits increase automatically with the Consumer Price Index, Social Security expenditures have been rising faster than most other categories of federal spending. One sign of the system’s problems is the payroll tax increase that took effect Thursday. Under present law. the tax will rise several times by 1990, reaching 7.65 percent. If the projected deficits are financed by the payroll tax in the same manner, the levy could rise to almost 15 percent by the year 2055. according to a worst-case projection by the actuaries at the Social Security headquarters in Baltimore.
have said that the offer made by the United States last month is our final offer; that it would remain open to Iran until the stroke of midnight beginning 1981. Then the offer would be withdrawn. The kidnapping nation would have, of course, ignored the deadline That would
By this appointment, Reagan has in effect given a green light to a radical kind of populist (but not popular) antienvironmentalism, the very antithesis of the conservative economic and social policy for which he is supposed to stand. He could hardly have been expected to name a Stewart Udall or a Cecil Andrus as Secretary of the Interior; but with Watt’s appointment, he is deliberately flouting that heavy majority of Americans who as the polls clearly show are deeply sympathetic to the environmental movement. It isn’t even good politics. Watt, not surprisingly, employs the old McCarthyesque technique of pinning on the enemy the “extremist” label that actually applies to himself. He uses upsidedown language in doing so. He attacks “extreme environmentalists” for their efforts to slow down the rape of the public lands. Such a slowdown, he says, will result in a
SOCIAL SECURITY: Will anything be left?
Congress has repeatedly shied away from trimming Social Security benefits in recent years. It ignored proposals from Presidents Ford and Carter to gradually eliminate survivor benefits to unmarried dependents 18 to 21 years old if they are full-time students. For nonstudents, benefits stop at age 18. Both presidents argued that those benefits, created in 1965 and not based on need, were unnecessary because of several forms of financial aid the government provided for students. Congress also ignored proposals by Carter to end the $225 lump-sum death benefit to survivors, which is not based on need, and to gradually eliminate survivor benefits for widowed parents of children 16 and 17 years old on the ground that such parents are no longer homebound and are
remove from the negotiating table our toogenerous offer, along with President-elect Reagan’s approval of it. In the three remaining weeks of his presidency. Carter would have the opportunity to apply the lessons he bought at such high cost: he should mine the harbors of Iran. That would be a symbolic gesture, since little oil is now being shipped out. but as symbolism it beats once again dimming the Christmas tree. Next, he should begin distributing some of the Iranian assets frozen in the U S. to the hostage families, at the rate of SI,OOO per day per hostage in captivity in the first year, SIO,OOO per day the second year, and so on. Reparations are not owed to any Iranians ; reparations are owed to the captured United States citizens. We can never turn back the clock to the status quo ante. Kidnapping as a national policy should not go unpunished. Third. Carter should order our rapid deployment force, such as it is, to the Persian Gulf for whatever military action turns out to be necessary in the next administration if Iran’s leaders do not awaken to Iran’s national interest. Fourth, he should notify our allies in Western Europe that further trade with Iran will be considered an unfriendly act by the United States, which is waging economic warfare to protect its own citizens and to uphold the safety of diplomats everywhere. Fifth, he should call in Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin to warn the Russians against intervening in Iran. A superpower has the right to apply coercion to free its nationals wherever terrorism strikes without provoking a reaction from the other superpower. Would these actions free the hostages?
January 2,1981, The Putnam County Banner Graphic
“crisis atmosphere” in the search for energy sources that will then lead to “the ravaging of our land and the destruction of our natural environment.” Watt’s theory seems to be: Better destroy the land now in the search for energy than do it later. The secretary-designate is not content to attack the “extreme environmentalists” for .merely destroying the environment. Again reminiscent of the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, he suggests that there is something sinister afoot. “What is the real motive of the extreme environmentalists?” he darkly asked in a speech a couple of years ago. “Is it to weaken America?” This is the man who will soon be in charge of America’s publicly owned natural resources its land and water and wildlife unless the Senate has the courage to say no.
able to work. A draft report by President-elect Ronald Reagan’s advisory group suggested that Social Security be made mandatory for! new federal employees all federal employees are now exempt and changing the formulas for calculating initial benefits and annual cost-of-living • J These ideas and others, including reforms to give women equal treatment witlt men. have been studied by several ad-' visorv bodies created by Congress in thg 1977 Social Security amendments. Following is a summary of the principal proposals for coming to grips with the* long-term issues: Bringing the 1.9 million federal civilian employees under Social Security' Federal employee unions have expressed vehement opposition to this plan, and there is no countervailing force in favor. Mem-; bers of Congress don’t have to pay the’ Social Security tax they impose on others | Partial or total financing of Medicare hospital bills from general tax revenues.! The argument is that these benefits are unrelated to a worker’s earnings and that there is no logical reason for financing them by the payroll tax. Partial financing of all benefits from general revenues. Advocates of thia proposal contend that the payroll tax is tod high and that the progressive income tax is a more appropriate financing vehicle. Opponents say that Congress, without the discipline of self-financing by the payroll! tax, would continue to vote for bigger benefits without making the hard decision about how to pay for them. Adoption of a value-added tax. This proposal for a form of a national sales tax! was advanced in 1979-80 by senior Congressional tax writers but got a frosty reception. The scaling down of benefits for future retirees is said to be more feasible than reducing benefits to people already receiving them. It is widely held that such changes should be made many years in advance so that people can adjust their retirement plans.
That is not the point: these actions would surely free United States foreign policy from its dangerous paralysis, and better position the Reagan administration to listen to the pleas of non-fanatic Iranians who will want the U.S. to return to the negotiating table. If our economic pressure causes the kidnapping members of Parliament to hold, spy trials or otherwise abuse their victims,: it is not beyond American power to make certain that is the last time that such a criminal Parliament meets. Is it in Jimmy Carter’s nature to start; this process? Or will he continue to; negotiate away our national honor? * | A loyal Carter supporter, whose eyes lit. up for a moment as he considered mining* the harbors in reaction to the latest? humiliation, responded sadly: “Thispresident is not inclined to use American* power.” President Carter still has the time' the moment could not be riper but hej is inclined to surrender to Iran's Christ-; mas bombing.
Their opinions are their own All columns appearing on the Opinion Page reflect the views of their authors and are not necessarils the opinions of the Banner-Graphic or its individual employees.
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