Gain Without Pain

This week the President sent to Congress 3 lbs. 12 oz. of arithmetic, his budget for fiscal 1959, and, as predicted, its spending total set a new peacetime record. The new mark: $73.9 billion, or $2.4 billion more than Ike's 1958 record-setter as it emerged, nicked and scratched, from last spring's clamorous Battle of the Budget. Reason for the $2.4 billion boost: upped defense spending.

Forecasting that the nation's economy will perk out of its present dumps and boom on to new peaks, the Administration estimated Federal income for fiscal 1959 (beginning next July) at $74.4 billion, with tax rates remaining unchanged. That would top 1958 income by $2 billion, and, as Ike promised beforehand, leave a budget surplus. But the black-ink estimate amounts to only $500 million, a mere razor's edge as sums in the federal budget go. And just to give the Administration some room to maneuver, the President asked Congress to lift the $275 billion statutory debt limit "temporarily" through fiscal 1959.

Missiles & Planes. Defense expenditures of $39.8 billion account for a whacking 54% of the budget. Atop that, the budget includes a $500 million defense contingency fund, to be spent as the President sees fit, so the real defense total is $40.3 billion, up $2.7 billion from the pre-Sputnik level. Missile procurement is listed for $600 million more, but aircraft procurement for $600 million less. Also up: nuclear submarines, research and development, construction of Strategic Air Command bases.

The budget calls for pay raises for skilled military personnel, but holds down the total pay outgo by trimming manpower about 3% from all three services. Most radical novelty in the new budget: the President's request to Congress for authority to switch as much as $2 billion in defense funds from one category to another "to modify and accelerate programs on short notice if new discoveries and developments indicate shifts are desirable." Present law bars transfers of funds from one service to another.

Military spending is only part of the nation's bill for security. Funds for the Atomic Energy Commission (up 11%), stockpiling and defense production expansion (down 25%) and foreign military aid (virtually unchanged at $3.1 billion) are largely national defense items. Economic development aid (up 30% to $783 million) might make sense even if there were no Communist menace, but is often justified as a cold war necessity. So are the U.S. Information Agency (up 8% to $108 million) and the Civil Defense Administration (down 5% to a very skimpy $64 million). If all these items are lumped with military spending as national security costs, the total comes to $47.3 billion, or 64% of the budget.

Cheese & Beef. Two massive budget items, unchanged from 1958 levels, can be chalked up to past national defense: $5 billion for veterans and $7.9 billion for interest on the national debt. The total bill for past and present national security adds up to about $60.2 billion, or 81% of the entire budget, leaving a mere $13.7 billion for everything else.

It was in this vast and varied service-welfare-housekeeping sector that cuts might have been looked for to balance increases in defense spending. In his Oklahoma City speech in mid-November, the President said that "savings of the kind we need can come about only through cutting out or deferring entire categories of activities." That warning drew from Democrat Adlai Stevenson, and the liberal camp, pained protests against dismantling the welfare state. But Ike's 1959 budget should soothe such fears: the welfare state comes through remarkably beefy.

Postage & Privies. The new budget proposes only two big cuts, and Congress may well balk at both of them: hacking the Post Office deficit a hefty $700 million by upping postal rates (e.g., first-class letter postage from 3-c- to 5-c-), and chopping Commodity Credit Corporation costs nearly $400 million, mainly by lowering agricultural price supports. The rest of the budget's civil sector, far from shrinking, actually looms some $600 million bigger than in 1958. The thinning of some welfare programs, e.g., privies on Indian reservations and aid to states for education of retarded children, is more than offset by the fattening of others. Some of these boosts are Sputnik-inspired: a 100% increase for the National Science Foundation, $75 million for a brand-new program of science scholarships and other aid to education. But some welfare increases seem unconnected with the cold war, e.g., $20 million more for "grants for construction of waste treatment facilities," an extra $37 million for "rural electrification and rural telephones."

Despite the President's State of the Union warning that "sacrifice" would be needed, his 1959 budget imposes no harsh austerity on U.S. citizens. Indeed, if Congress okays the budget intact, the average man who is not an Indian or a farmer is likely to feel a fresh pang of cold war sacrifice only when he buys a 5-c- stamp.

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