The Governors and mayors who have listened to President Johnson's repeated pleas for cuts in state and local spending may not have been wearing earplugs, but the effect is the same. Nowhere is the Administration's anti-inflation drive being more firmly or more brusquely rebuffed than in the nation's statehouses and city halls.
Observing the accelerating pace of state and local government spending—up 125% in the past decade and now about equal to federal spending, excluding outlays for such items as pensions and interest payments—the President's economists saw a ready target for the economy ax. They argued that many state and...