MONEY: Empty Pockets on a Trillion Dollars a Year

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expectations. Higher education once was looked on as a privilege reserved for the brighter sons of the affluent. Now it is coming to be assumed that every boy or girl who can get through high school has a right to four years of college, with public assistance if need be. Last week the Senate passed a bill that would give every college student the right to a grant of $1,400 a year, minus what his family could contribute. Untended illness used to be regarded as the unavoidable fate of the poor and aged. Today it is considered an intolerable, if still far too frequent outrage. Such demands, though fiscally troublesome, are just claims on a technological society that also wants to call itself equitable and humane.

Private Bias. A more complex issue is the rising expectations of government employees. Teachers, government clerks and other civil servants in the past struck a tacit bargain under which they accepted relatively low pay in return for easy work, short hours, job security and relatively high pensions. Now they are demanding —and increasingly winning—wages just about equal to those in private industry. The effect on budgets has been catastrophic. In New York City, the number of public-school pupils rose 16% during the past decade, but school spending zoomed 207%, largely because of higher teacher salaries.

Even these factors do not wholly explain the poverty of American public services. The most important cause is a set of national attitudes. From the earliest days of the republic, Americans have shown a pernicious bias in favor of private consumption and against public outlays. Business expenditures for new factories and machinery are looked upon as productive investments. Public spending for new schools, fire engines, libraries and playgrounds is regarded as an expense that may be unavoidable but should be held to a minimum.

This bias has led to a massive failure to perform what might be termed preventive maintenance, of people as well as things. Bigger investments in public transportation during the 1950s might have avoided the worsening commuter crisis of today. In the period when low-income blacks (and whites) were flooding into the cities from the countryside, higher spending for manpower training, public housing and remedial reading could have alleviated many currently explosive social and racial tensions. Society is now being presented with the bill for such errors —at inflated prices. To cite just one example, Federal Reserve Board Governor Andrew Brimmer predicts that the nation will have to spend more than $16 billion annually in the next four or five years to keep pollution within tolerable limits. Part of that might come from corporate treasuries, but much surely would have to be tax money. The cost certainly would be lower if the building of efficient sewage-treatment plants, low-polluting city incinerators and the like had begun a decade ago.

Another result of the bias in favor of the private economy has been a persistent refusal by Americans to tax themselves heavily enough to pay for public services. Though almost every American feels oppressed by taxes, the U.S. is in fact one of the most lightly taxed of all the industrial nations. Total U.S. tax collections equal only 31% of the country's gross national product v. 33% in Germany, 37% in Canada, 41% in Sweden and 43% in Britain. By no coincidence, most of these