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SPENDING. This is the area of clearest-cut contrast. The American Enterprise Institute, a Republican-leaning thinktank, figures that by fiscal 1975, a Nixon Administration would be spending $301 billion a year, but the budget of a McGovern Administration would be almost $85 billion more than that. Under Nixon's budget, military spending would rise from $76.5 billion now to $84.5 billion in fiscal 1975, even assuming an end to the Viet Nam War. The rise would be necessary to cover retirement-pay costs and the expense of new weaponry. The rise in civilian spending would be held to only the automatic increases in the cost of present Nixon programs and plans. McGovern would vastly expand nondefense expenditures while struggling to slash the defense budget by $30 billion. In fact, he has probably underestimated the cost of his own defense plans. The A.E.I, economists guess that he might actually hold Pentagon spending $21 billion below what Nixon would allow.
These estimates are best read as guides to the candidates' intentions rather than as hard predictions. Nixon last week lost his fight to have Congress impose a $250 billion ceiling on spending in this fiscal year. He can achieve the same result now only by refusing to make expenditures that Congress has ordered, in such areas as manpower training and pollution control. Treasury Secretary George Shultz promises that Nixon will try to withhold enough appropriated money to limit spending to $250 billion, but the President's legal authority to do so is already being challenged in the courts. The President and his aides have been maddeningly vague about which programs they would cut how much in future years to offset the rise in military spending. In a recent TV interview, White House Assistant John Ehrlichman specified elimination of only the eleven-man tea-taster program, which costs the Government all of $100,000 a year.
Given the legal or political untouchability of rising outlays for Social Security, veterans' benefits, unemployment compensation, interest on the national debt and myriad other items, there are only a few areas where Nixon could cut deeply. The biggest is grants-in-aid. These grants, amounting to $43 billion this fiscal year, go to states and cities for school and hospital construction and services, mass-transit, urban renewal and many other programs. Reducing them would rouse angry opposition from Governors and mayors, who might lose more than they would gain through revenue sharing. Whether a re-elected Nixon really cuts severely depends in part on the size of his majority at the polls. The bigger it is, the freer he will feel to take an ax to social spending.
The prospective McGovern budget also contains as many uncertainties as a stock market forecast. No less than $63 billion of the amount that the American Enterprise Institute calculates that he would spend in fiscal 1975 represents the estimated cost of a Senate bill that he co-sponsored to have the Government take overpayment of most hospital and doctor bills. But McGovern has been notably silent about just who would pay how much to finance his health-care plans. Beyond that, the Senator has a confusing habit of mentioning the same figure in different contexts, leaving doubt as to whether he is proposing a series of programs or merely applying several names to the same ones.