A growing debate over the Government's obligation to help
"The idea that has been established over the past ten years, that almost every service that someone might need in life ought to be provided, financed by the Government as a matter of basic rights, is wrong. We challenge that. We reject that notion."
—Office of Management and Budget
Director David Stockman
That characteristically blunt comment sums up the Reagan Administration's side of an intensifying national debate about the President's plans to slash federal spending and taxes. As the draconian nature of the program has begun to sink in around the country, newspaper stories, TV shows and liberal critics in and out of Congress increasingly have portrayed the program as one that redistributes income from poor to rich—specifically by reducing benefits the needy have come to rely on while reserving the program's greatest tax savings for the already well-off. Implicit in much of this opposition commentary, at least in the Administration's view, is the premise that any such attempt is inherently unfair because the poor have a right to federal help financed by taxes that fall most heavily on the middle-class and affluent.
In reply, the Administration and its allies contend that no citizens poor or not poor, have any right to a given level of federal help. Taxpayers do have a right, the Reaganites say to hold on to as much of their income as the Government can spare while it collects enough in taxes to gradually eliminate the federal deficit and accommodate huge increases in defense outlays. In this view, a compassionate Government should continue to assist the disadvantaged, but the proper level of help has to be determined by the interests of society as a whole. Besides, the Administration says, the present level of spending is imposing costs, in inflationary deficits and taxes that hold back growth, which hurt everyone, including the poor themselves. Says White House Press Secretary James Brady: "There is an obligation by society to provide a floor for people, but as to writing into law legal entitlements on every possible service that is provided by the Federal Government, you have a policy that could bankrupt the country."
Oddly, this case to date has been made more explicitly and effectively by Reagan's journalistic and academic allies than by the Administration itself. Government services to the poor, editorializes the Wall Street Journal, "should be described by their proper name, charity." Writes Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. of the tax cuts: "If someone is paying 70% of his, repeat his, income to the Government, and you propose to reduce taxation from 70% to 63% [which would be the first-year effect of Reagan's tax plan], you are not 'giving' that man something. What you are doing, of course, is taking less than what you were taking."