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The voter rebellion has considerable justification. The U.S. urgently needs radical reforms in the way that it collects, apportions and spends tax money. But for the moment, the taxpayer revolt is only tightening an already merciless squeeze on the budgets of most of the nation's 81,299 governmental units. At a time when public officials should be planning to finance the pollution-control, mass-transit and slum-rebuilding programs of the future, they are having to struggle to stretch present revenues to cover immediate spending needs. Increasingly, they are failing.
Pray for Cash. The failure has been most conspicuous in Washington. Richard Nixon, who in the past has zealously denounced federal deficits, now admits that he is likely to run up the biggest three-year red-ink totals that the U.S. has ever experienced outside of the World War II period: an estimated $87 billion for fiscal years 1971 through 1973. The President argues persuasively that the deficits are necessary to spur a lagging economy. Even so, he has felt obliged to limit some programs that his Administration earlier had labeled top priority. For instance, the Labor Department has kept the number of people in its manpower-training programs below 1.3 million, although the persistence of a nearly 6% unemployment rate cries out for a greater effort to help provide the jobless with marketable skills.
Still, the Federal Government is in much better budgetary shape than many states and cities. For the most part, Washington has only been delaying or underfinancing desirable programs, rather than cutting back on absolutely essential spending. No such statement can be made about many states and cities. Some examples:
· Ohio last year closed all state parks for two months beginning in mid-August, cut average state payments for care of the aged in nursing homes from $11 to $10 per day per patient, and furloughed 3,000 state employees. Having thus dramatized a shortage of funds, Democratic Governor James Gilligan persuaded the Republican-controlled legislature to pass a one-half of 1% to 3% income tax and was able to increase budget appropriations by 27%, to $7.7 billion, for the two-year period ending in mid-1973. Even that leaves only a piddling $7,000,000 for a new program to open treatment centers for drug addicts, and the legislature turned down a Gilligan request to extend Medicaid to the working poor. Ohio limits these federal-state payments, for which states set the standards, to people on welfare, despite warnings from Ohio hospitals that they will have to stop taking some low-income patients unless the state pays for them.
· New York State, after taxpayers had defeated a transportation bond issue in November, awoke to the fattest projected nonfederal deficit in U.S. history: $750 million for the fiscal year ending in June. To shrink it, Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered payment of more than $350 million in state aid to local school districts delayed from March until July, so that it would count against the fiscal 1973 budget rather than the present one. The state this fiscal year has also closed two tuberculosis hospitals, a school for retarded children and a prison, and instituted a statewide freeze on hiring.
· New York City last week unveiled a tentative $10 billion budget