Nixon: Man Behind the Mask - Gary Allen |
The cornerstone of Richard Nixon's rise to political power was staunch opposition to both Communism and Socialism. In fact Nixon often equated Communism and Socialism; that was one of his traits that most infuriated Liberals. Nixon knew that Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto of 1848 had used the words interchangeably. It is not for nothing that Russia calls itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. As Nixon so eloquently stated it in 1952:
"There's one difference between the Reds and Pinks. The Pinks want to socialize America. The Reds want to socialize the world and make Moscow the world capital. Their paths are similar; they have the same Bible—the teachings of Karl Marx."
The basis of socialism is "big government"—bureaucracy, controls, deficit spending, and inflation. Socialism is the road to total government. When you get there you have Communism. Nixon once remarked,
". . . I don't want any part of any road—middle, right or left—which eventually leads to total government."
In a pamphlet entitled "The Nixon Stand," Nixon said:
"If I were to pick one major issue in this 1968 election in which the candidates have a basic disagreement, it is with regard to the role of government. There are some who believe the way to a better society is for government to get bigger and bigger—which means the rights and responsibilities of people will get smaller and smaller . . . "
"The choice we face today," he maintained at one point in the campaign, "very simply is this: Do we continue down a road that leads to big government and little people, or do we take a new road, one that taps the energies of the greatest engine of productivity the world has ever seen—the engine of American industry and American private enterprise? . . . Private enterprise, far more efficiently than the government, can provide the jobs, train the unemployed, build the homes, offer the new opportunities which will produce progress—not promises—in solving the problems of America."
In opposing "big government" Nixon was not only doing what was morally right, he was doing what was politically right. An August 1968 Gallup Poll showed that 46 percent of Americans felt that "big government" was the "biggest threat to the country." This was contrasted to only 14 percent who felt that way in 1959. Gallup commented: "Although big government has been a favorite Republican target for many years, rank and file Democrats are nearly as critical of growing Federal power as are Republicans." However, a clue as to what would actually happen during the Nixon administration was given in the February 3, 1969 issue of the Wall Street Journal:
"A trio of Nixon Administration Cabinet officials gave a partial picture of how "Great Society" programs will fare under the Republicans.
"There won't be any attempt to dismantle the Johnson Administration programs, nor will there be a major effort to expand public spending for them.
"Instead, there will be a general tidying up through much Governmental reorganization, a minimum of new legislation and a major effort to involve private industry, voluntary agencies and other nongovernmental entities in the cause of social change."
And NEA columnist Bruce Biossat revealed that despite all the "very sincere" campaign rhetoric:
"No one in the top Nixon entourage really imagines that the federal government is going to be reduced in size. Its bigness in a big and growing country is accepted as inescapable. The task is to make the bigness work and, critically, to persuade the American people that federal actions—and the lesser actions of state and local governments—really end up getting things done which affect people who have problems they need to have solved.?"
In other words, the Nixon administration gave up on fulfilling that campaign promise even before Inauguration Day. This might lead one to believe that Nixon and his cohorts were never very sincere about doing battle with the Democrat-instituted welfare state in the first place. There was a time when Richard Nixon denounced such "me-tooism" in no uncertain terms. He told a Los Angeles crowd on April 20, 1949:
"There are some who believe that the only way we can win is to go down the road with the Democratic Party on a me-too basis, except that we should go them one better. It is true that such a program might win for us, but in winning this way, we would be abdicating our responsibilities to the people."
But it was obvious by Nixon's appointment of such welfare-staters as Robert Finch and George Romney that the Great Society was home safe. We were going to have efficiently administered socialism under the Elephant Brigade. Surely anybody could run a bureaucracy more efficiently than the spendocrat donkeys. After taking office, however, the GOP found that trying to make socialism efficient was like trying to make the Pacific dry.
The Nixon administration abandoned its solemn pledge to fight big government, and began expanding it on all fronts. This move was indicated in the staccato-style "Newsgram" in U.S. News & World Report of February 2, 1970:
"As Mr. Nixon's plans, sketched in his state-of-the-union speech, take hold: Washington will move even deeper into people's lives. For example—Education, over the long haul, will be financed more by Washington. School districts are showing they want additional U.S. money to save local taxes.
"Welfare, under the program drawn up by Mr. Nixon, is to be based on more uniform standards set in Washington, money paid out by Washington.
"Housing, once a local matter, is to rely further on federal decisions. Much the same goes for health. The drift forecast by high officials is toward some sort of national health-payment arrangement eventually.
"'Consumerism,' as it begins to work, is seen as pointing toward additional federally set standards for goods used by nearly everybody. It's to be federal money that pays for many new local police facilities.
"'New Federalism,' as conceived by Mr. Nixon, is based on returning more money collected by Washington to the States. But it is to be Congress and the President who decide on the tax rates that produce the money.
"What the nation seems to be approaching is general agreement that big problems are to be handled via Washington. Reform movements in this country almost always follow that path. Mr. Nixon's is no exception. That thinking will accelerate as the nation becomes more populous, urban areas sprawl across State lines, business and communications ties tighten.
"States are seen to be hunting a new role, not really sovereign. 'Conservatives' will object. 'Liberals' will complain Mr. Nixon isn't moving fast enough. But the President will try to please the center majority.
"Traditional pump priming—very easy money, big Government spending—would risk a new burst of inflation, it is reasoned. Planning, instead, is emphasizing Government training programs for the jobless.
"Next step would be new methods of inducing companies to hire the newly trained. Tax incentives. Government subsidies will be mulled. The day when Government guarantees everyone a job may not be far off.
"When it comes to the federal budget, about to be unveiled, note this: Seeds being planted now by Mr. Nixon and Congress point to bigger spending in years beyond 1971. Specifics are beginning to take shape."
The idea that, because the country is getting bigger or we have more technology, the government is forced to become Big Brother is fallacious. Actually, the bigger the country, the less able the central government is to govern efficiently.
During the 1960's, the size of the federal government, and of federal spending, fairly exploded. Roger Freeman, a scholar at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and a former member of the White House staff, pointed out:
"More than half of the $129 billion increase in federal expenditures between fiscal 1953 and 1971 was applied to social purposes, less than one-fifth to defense. Defense meanwhile shrank from 64 percent of the federal budget to 36 percent, from 13.6 percent of the Gross National Product to about 7.2 percent."
In other words, the share of federal revenues and of the Gross National Product allocated to national defense has been cut almost in half since 1953. Most of the huge savings were applied to social purposes, with education one of the main gainers.
Columnist Paul Scott revealed that under Nixon defense spending is shrinking, while spending on social welfare programs is expanding:
While everybody has been talking about the need for reordering national priorities, a dramatic change in government spending already has taken place.
For the first time since World War II, federal expenditures this year for health, education, welfare and labor programs will exceed defense expenditures.
This highly significant change in national priorities was highlighted by the recent passage in the House of appropriation bills for the Departments of Labor, and Health, Education & Welfare.
These giant money bills, the largest in history, contain an estimated $74.3 billion for social programs. This compares with the $73.6 national defense spending budget now pending before Congress and which is expected to be reduced further. In 1953, federal expenditures for national defense totaled $49.4 billion as compared to $7.1 billion for the government's social programs.
Some diligent soul who made a count of the number of federal administrative agencies came up with more than 2,400—most of them, probably, un-Constitutional. Congressman William Roth (R.-Del.) assigned to staff members the task of calculating the number of federal aid programs in existence, and the total came to 1,315 as of September 1969, 225 more than the previous year. According to Congressman Wright Patman there are nearly 1,600 advisory committees and commissions in the executive branch alone. By early in his administration, Richard Nixon had added forty to the total.
Of these 5,315 programs, bureaus, and commissions, Mr. Nixon announced that he had found fifty-seven that could be dispensed with. For example, Mr. Nixon believed that the Republic could survive without a bureau of tea tasters. But, alas, at last report, most of the fifty-seven bureaus, including the doughty tea tasters, had survived the axe, proving once again that old bureaus never die, and they seldom even fade away. It is not as if there were not plentiful targets for Mr. Nixon's scalpel in the budget and the bureaucracy if he were sincerely interested. But Richard Nixon came to Washington not to bury big government, but to multiply it.
The major cause of the phenomenal mushrooming of big government has been the fantastic expansion of "Welfare" in all its forms and guises. During his successful quest for the Presidency, Republican candidate Richard Nixon told the National Alliance of Businessmen:
"As we look through the ages—and welfare is not new—we have found that inevitably when such programs continue and escalate in any society, welfare tends to destroy those who have received it and to corrupt those who dispense it."
It was sixteen months later, as President-elect, that Mr. Nixon again addressed himself to the subject of "Welfare." This time he was speaking before an assembly of the nation's Governors at Colorado Springs:
"We confronted the fact that in the past five years the Federal Government alone spent more than a quarter of a trillion dollars on social programs—more than $250 billion. Yet far from solving our problems, these expenditures had reaped a harvest of dissatisfaction, frustration and bitter division. Never in human history has so much been spent by so many for such a negative result . . . "
Mr. Nixon was not exaggerating. U.S. News & World Report for January 13, 1969, revealed that the number of Americans receiving "Welfare" had jumped over 50 percent during a decade of unparalleled prosperity, and by the end of 1968 it totaled nearly 10 million persons. The Washington Evening Star informed us that "Welfare" rolls across the country were proliferating at the astonishing rate of 200,000 per month. In its issue of February 3, 1969, U.S. News added:
"In the past eight years, federal spending for education, old-age pensions, health, handouts to the poor and all other "social welfare" has jumped to 61 billions a year. Add the more than 51 billions spent by State and local governments for similar aid, and the bill exceeds 112 billions a year.
". . . It is 40 percent more than the U.S. spends annually for defense, including war in Vietnam.
"In addition to the $112.4 billion spent by government at all levels for "social programs," private welfare outlays amount to another $50.7 billion—a total of $163.1 billion.
This, said U.S. News & World Report, accounts for almost 20 percent of the entire U.S. output of goods and services. The same source informs us that 36 percent of all federal spending, and 44 percent of all state spending, now falls within the category of "social welfare." This makes expenditure for such handouts second only to that for national defense.
Yet, U.S. News noted, despite these absolutely staggering figures, "all ideas with official backing seem to point in only one direction: toward bigger, costlier relief experiments." At the federal level alone there are now 112 poverty aid programs, handled by eleven separate agencies; sixty-nine vocational programs, operated by eight different federal agencies; and forty-three separate programs for children, administered by five different agencies.
While millions of jobs go begging, the number of those on "Welfare" is increasing nationally at an annual rate of 10 percent compounded. Yet the Wall Street Journal reported on April 24, 1969:
"President Nixon has asked his top domestic policy experts to explore a deeply perplexing social phenomenon . . . In short, the Great Society enlarged the demand for welfare and also increased its supply.
"'My main conclusion is that the increase in the caseload is a good thing. More eligible families are getting assistance, so the system is in this sense working better,' sums up one White House welfare specialist. This judgment is shared by many other Nixon Administration officials.""
Assuming that President Nixon's figure of $50 billion per year for "Welfare" over the past five years was approximately accurate, the average American family pays about $1,250 per year in direct and indirect taxes to support those who can't or won't support themselves. This means the average productive American has during the last half-decade paid out $6,250, and worked approximately 3,000 hours, to support these programs. Yet, assuming that there are approximately four million families in America living in poverty, every one of these families could have had a tax-free income of $12,500 per year with the amount of money already being spent.
Probably as much as one-half to three-fourths of this money goes for overhead and salaries for the povertycrats, with probably less than 25 percent of "Welfare" expenditures ever reaching the hands of the poor. Even so, although figures vary from state to state and according to the size of the family and other circumstances, monthly direct cash payments to "Welfare" recipients in industrial states now average $250 to $300 per family unit—more income than is provided by the Congress for many of our military families.
In addition, according to U.S. News & World Report of April 28, 1969, a total of 3.8 million Americans each year now receive from the taxpayers some 24.7 pounds of free food per month—including flour, canned meat, raisins, butter, lard, and seventeen other staples.
The federal Food Stamp Program (which has been greatly expanded) provides food at a discount of roughly 33 percent to 2.9 million Americans who have been enticed onto the dole. In addition, 2.3 million children receive free school lunches from the government and an additional 16.7 million get subsidized lunches, while 200,000 youngsters receive free breakfasts under a recently initiated program. Most of these giveaway schemes have received Congressional appropriations for expansion approximately 25 percent during the coming year.
It has been estimated by U.S. News & World Report that in order to equal the value of cash, food, medical and recreational services available without charge and tax-free to those who find it convenient to live idly on "Welfare" at the expense of their working fellows, the average taxpayer would have to earn in excess of $7,000 per year. The difference is the 2,000 hours of toil which the working taxpayer must put in each year to earn a living, while the "Welfare" people sit fatly on their government checks.
Exactly one year from the day the Republican Party nominated him for President, Richard Nixon summarily preempted national television time to spell out "his" revolutionary new "Welfare" program. The President damned the current system in the strongest terms and proposed that the variegated state welfare programs be replaced by a federal minimum floor for "Welfare" recipients in every state plus subsidies to the "working poor" and a gigantic job-training program. The President's scheme was described in U.S. News & World Report for August 25, 1969:
"If enacted by Congress, the Nixon proposal would more than double the number of people on relief, triple the number of children receiving assistance and add almost 4 billion dollars to the federal costs of welfare in the first full year of operation. At that time, according to Administration estimates, there would be at least 22.4 million people receiving Government aid, or 1 out of every 9 Americans . . .
"Relief recipients in the nation would then exceed the total population of such a large State as California—19.3 million—or New York—18.1 million. Total cost to taxpayers would run around 15 billion dollars a year in federal. State and local funds."
According to Ted Lewis of the New York Daily News, much of the philosophy behind Nixon's proposals came from Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, John Gardner—a key Insider and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, who has recently organized "Common Cause," a grass-roots lobbying organization aimed at establishing a total Marxist state through federal legislation. According to Lewis, Mr. Nixon sent the following note to HEW Secretary Finch:
"John Gardner's Godkin lectures (attached) express better than anything I have yet read what I hope will serve as the basic philosophy of this administration. I commend them for your weekend reading. Sincerely, RMN."
[Note: The lectures referred to were delivered at Harvard College by LBJ's onetime HEW Secretary Gardner, who quit the Johnson cabinet in a dispute over welfare methods . . . "None of the significant tasks can be accomplished", said Gardner, "if we are unwilling to tax ourselves."]
Then Presidential Assistant Daniel P. Moynihan, a Liberal Democrat and member of the board of directors of the socialist ADA, who was largely responsible for drafting the Nixon 'Welfare' program, commented:
"What the President really has done is make an historic and fundamental assertion of national responsibility to provide minimum incomes to poor people, stop taxing them, start supplementing their incomes and help the states find enough resources to do this."
The response from the Left to the President's Family Assistance Plan (FAP) proposal was nearly unanimous approval. Republican Battle Line quoted a Democratic leader: "If this plan goes through, Richard Nixon will take over Hubert Humphrey's constituency and George Wallace's too."
Writing in the Chicago Tribune for August 17, 1969, Walter Trohan quoted another top Democrat: " 'I wish we had thought of it,' a top economic advisor for Lyndon B. Johnson told this commentator. 'It's a marvelous vote catcher.'"
The New York Times' James Reston, spokesman apparent for the Establishment now that Walter Lippmann has hung up his typewriter, was even more effusive:
". . . He [Nixon] has been denouncing the "welfare state" for 20 years, but he is now saying that poverty in America in the midst of spectacular prosperity is intolerable and must be wiped out . . .
"A Republican president has condemned the word 'welfare,' emphasized 'work' and 'training' as conditions of public assistance, suggested that the states and the cities be given more federal money to deal with their social and economic problems, but still comes out in the end with a policy of spending more money for relief of more poor people than the welfare state Democrats ever dared to propose in the past.
"This is beginning to be the story of American politics . . . And now on the most controversial question of domestic policy, he changes the rhetoric, the philosophy and the administration, but proposes more welfare, more people on public assistance, which will take more federal funds than any other president in the history of the Republic . . .
"Nevertheless, Nixon has taken a great step forward. He has cloaked a remarkably progressive [sic] welfare policy in conservative language . . . He has repudiated his own party's record on social policy at home and even his own hawkish attitudes abroad, and this tells us something both about the President and the country.
"For he has obviously concluded that the American people are for peace abroad and for a more decent distribution of wealth at home, and the chances are that this will prove to be both good policy and good politics."
A week later Reston crowed that Nixon was "zig-zagging to the left." The New Republic's T.R.B. also formally welcomed Nixon into the Fabian underworld with a column titled "Nixon Outsmarting Democrats":
"Most important, for the first time in U.S. history he accepted the idea of a national minimum income for all Americans. It would cover not merely the poor-who-get-aid but the previously excluded 'working poor.' We have waited for it all these years. This is a new ball game; it's here and it's irreversible.
". . . The disparity between the haves and have-nots is so great that no random plan can deal with it, we think, and it can only yield to a national, comprehensive plan. Mr. Nixon may not realize it, but that's what he has started . . . And the plan does provide a platform to build on. This is the first national minimum income program for all Americans. It's the start of systematic income maintenance. Every sign points to the direction in which the country will go."
The socialist New Republic was not shy about calling a shovel a shovel. It cheered that the President's proposals amount to "creeping socialism." One read with a gasp:
"It must have been quite a scene, the Camp David cabinet meeting at which President Nixon informed the Neanderthal men that he had accepted and would assert creeping socialism, the principle of the Federal Government guaranteeing a minimum income to all disadvantaged Americans."
The Washington Post's Roscoe Drummond went even further, commenting:
"Whatever happened to conservative Richard Nixon? Here he is in the lead for the most far-ranging, groundbreaking, daring, social-welfare reform since the early years of the New Deal . . Strange to contemplate but the time may come when people will think of Richard M. Nixon as the Republican Franklin D. Roosevelt of the 1970s!"
Newsweek also called the plan "Nixon's New Deal" and quoted elated Leftists in praise of the proposals:
"'I'm both amazed and pleased,' applauded Walter Heller, John Kennedy's chief economic advisor and pioneer advocate of Federal welfare minimums . . . Some Johnson Administration veterans stared enviously at plans thought too radical in their time. Campaign supporters of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy spotted causes that their own candidates had championed . . . It was the finest hour in a much-buffeted six months for Pat Moynihan and HEW's Secretary Robert Finch . . . Richard Nixon . . . confided to a friend his conviction that [referring to Disraeli] 'Tory men with liberal principles are what has enlarged democracy in this world.'"
It is ironic that Richard Nixon should quote the man who started England on the road from empire to mini-state, if less so that RMN should be praised for his Liberalism and compared with FDR.
Of course, it is the "forgotten Americans," to whom Nixon appealed so successfully during his campaign, who will have to pay for what will amount to 20 million additional drones on the "Welfare" rolls. In its issue of August 25, 1969, U.S. News & World Report noted:
"Once on the books, programs are rarely, if ever, cut back . . . Experts are already talking about 30 to 40 billion dollars a year as eventual cost for a fully developed system of minimum income for all."
Frank S. Meyer, the remaining hard-line Conservative on the staff of National Review, characterized the President's plan in these words:
"The Nixon welfare program is a program for progressive pauperization of an increasing section of the American people. It was just such pauperization that was one of the outstanding causes and symptoms of the decay of Rome. For 'bread and circuses,' substitute a federal dole and a television set in every welfare home."
Marxists have long cherished dreams of a federally guaranteed annual income for America. Previously Nixon had staunchly opposed the Marxist guaranteed annual income. "Nixon's the One" who said, while campaigning on May 15, 1968:
"One of the reasons I do not accept . . . a guaranteed annual income or a negative income tax is because of my conviction that doing so, first, would not end poverty, and second, while it might be a substitute for welfare, it would have a very detrimental effect on the productive capacity of the American people . . . that is why I take a dim view of these programs."
The American Conservative Union noted:
"Despite his flat denial that he was proposing a guaranteed annual income. President Nixon's "family assistance plan" is just that. Numerous welfare experts noted that this principle is central to Nixon's plans, and conservatives fear this will open the door to even higher minimum incomes guaranteed for all. Public opinion polls have shown the great majority of Americans opposed to such a scheme because of what liberals sneeringly call "the Puritan Ethic," the popularly supported theory that every man should work for an income."
A year later Nixonites were admitting that the FAP was a guaranteed annual income, a tacit confession that earlier they had been prevaricating.
While the Nixon scheme would replace the much criticized Aid for Dependent Children, it would only increase the incentive for reliefers to produce more children. Let us inspect the consequences of Mr. Nixon's breed-and-feed program.
Suppose a man and a "Welfare mother," who may be absolute strangers, decide to spend the night together communing with their natures. For his moments with this Venus, the man may pay by spending two months with Mercury, but the taxpayers will pay for that evening of pleasure for at least the next twenty-one years, and probably for the next seventy-five. In addition, the chances are great that the first illicit offspring will be the starting point for another geometric progression of "Welfare" recipients whose status will thereafter be "guaranteed."
What is the original father's responsibility? From a practical standpoint, none. To the mother, the child is a guaranteed annual meal ticket. What is your responsibility? We are told by Mr. Nixon that it is your responsibility over the lifetime of that child to labor thousands of hours, and to deny the fruits of your labor to your own children, in order to support the offspring of such brood-mothers. This is euphemistically called "having a social conscience." It has a more accurate name but, alas, that name is inappropriate for repetition here.
We are told that birth control will be introduced into the Nixon program at some point, but of course birth control tablets and devices are readily available now. It is not because of ignorance or poverty that they are not used. While the brood-mothers may be school dropouts, they are graduates cum laude of the university of the street, and are anything but ignorant when it comes to sex. They are simply in the baby business for fun and profit. And some of them are brazen enough to be proud of it.
In the best Orwellian fashion, Richard Nixon berated the centralization of power in Washington over the past thirty years, and then proposed to nationalize "Welfare" under Mr. Rockefeller's misnomer, "the New Federalism." Those already familiar with the result of federal intervention in public schools, labor disputes, legislative redistricting, and alleged job discrimination can hardly applaud now what they have opposed for so long.
Yet even as Mr. Nixon was beguiling the Governors with offers of federal money with no strings attached, John Price, a former leader of the Leftist "Republican" Ripon Society, now on the staff of Daniel P. Moynihan, was telling editors in Chicago on August twelfth that if the states refused to go along with federal "Welfare" standards, the Administration would have to "blackjack the states" by withholding funds until they complied.
The part of Mr. Nixon's plan that was most appealing to the public was the tying of "Welfare" funds to jobs or job-training programs. Yet this idea has more holes than Swiss cheese. As Human Events pointed out:
"The President himself left a large loophole for those who don't want to accept work by stressing that any job must be "suitable." Who will determine the "suitability" of a job? . . .
"What assurances, moreover, does the taxpayer have that those eligible for work will actually be forced to find work or seek job training? Will the Administration set up some tough enforcement machinery or, as is likely, permit soft-hearted social agencies to monitor this most important task?"
Want to bet? The President's "reform" invites even more cheating and fraud than is presently found in the "Welfare" system. Human Events reminded us:
"Moreover, the entire program could become a bonanza for chiselers and loafers—just as have many welfare schemes in the past. Applicants for family allowances, for instance, would not be subject to much scrutiny. To receive a government check, all they would have to do would be to fill out a simple statement of need, saying what they expect their income to be in the benefit year. Monthly amounts would be mailed directly to recipients from a central federal agency, without preliminary investigation."
Most Conservatives have concluded that the President's proposed reforms are no reforms at all. As with the war in Vietnam, Americans are offered a choice between false alternatives. Everything Mr. Nixon has said in indicting the current "Welfare" system is true, but his proposals for reform originated with the same Fabian Socialists who put the country into the current "Welfare" quagmire. It's an escalation of more of the same.
Regardless of the good intentions of many legislators, the only real solution to this nightmare—a salvation from the fate which befell Rome—is to take "Welfare" out of the hands of the politicians and social workers. After all, according to U.S. News & World Report, Americans voluntarily give $55 billion a year in private charity, and would give much more to truly good causes if they were relieved of the enormous current tax burden.
The alternative to phasing our current system into a private one is to go the route of Rome and be overrun by armies of the poor demanding bread and circuses while threatening revolution. As taxes go higher and higher to support ever higher and higher "Welfare" benefits, more and more Americans, either by choice or because of circumstances, will desert to the ranks of the parasite class. Eventually the remnant of the American middle-class will be caught in a vise between the Fabians above and the proletarian army below.
The second major ingredient of the President's "New Federalism" is revenue sharing with the states. Although the first part of the "New Federalism" involves a large step towards centralization and nationalization of welfare, "revenue sharing" is promoted as a major step toward decentralization. As part of the propaganda to sell this program Nixon has stated:
"A third of a century of centralizing power and responsibility in Washington has produced a bureaucratic monstrosity, cumbersome, unresponsive, ineffective . . . After a third of a century of power flowing from the people and the states to Washington it is time for a new federalism in which power, funds, and responsibility will flow from Washington to the states and the people."
As usual, Nixon promotes more socialism, but describes the problems in very Conservative terms. Machiavelli and Orwell would have been proud of him. Theoretically, the grants to the states and local governments are to have "no strings attached," just as were Federal Aid to Education grants. But Nixon's aides privately admit the grants are just bait to further centralize power in the federal government. Even Mr. Nixon hinted at this when he made his proposals:
"Consider for a moment the name of this nation: the United States of America. We establish minimum national standards because we are united; we encourage local supplements because we are a federation of States, and we care for the unfortunate because this is America."
Only the most politically naive could believe that the Nixon program would actually decentralize power. As James J. Kilpatrick remarked: ". . . this power to control follows the Federal dollar as surely as that famous lamb accompanied little Mary." Nixon's revenue sharing program actually centralizes the power it pretends to decentralize.
The Supreme Court has ruled, in this instance quite logically, that whatever the federal government finances it can control. As soon as the states and local governments get hooked on the federal funds, the controls will be put on just as they were in education, agriculture, and every other field the government has attempted to take over by first subsidizing it. No political institution of any kind, at any time in history, ever gave away anything on a no-strings-attached basis. You can't decentralize government by centralizing the tax collections.
House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills has called the revenue-sharing plan a "trap" that "could become a massive weapon against the independence of state and local government." The plan, said Mills, "goes in the direction of centralized government." The Administration, for instance, does not propose to simultaneously phase out other programs while phasing in revenue sharing. Not at all. The revenue-sharing proposal will be just one more layer of programs piled onto the thousands that already exist.
The plan would not reduce state or local taxes, but merely add on to federal taxes. Indeed, according to Dr. Arthur Burns, it could raise state and local taxes. Republican Battle Line reported:
"Indeed, the revenue-sharing provision of the Nixon Plan might lead to even higher state taxes, admitted presidential aide Dr. Arthur Burns, because the Federal share paid to each state would be based on the state's matching taxes; the higher the state tax, the more they would get back from Washington."
Human Events added:
"There are other drawbacks as well. Some officials have admitted to a haunting fear of tax sharing because so many existing federal aid programs are "open-end." The cost to the U.S. government is limited only by the ability and willingness of states to come up with matching funds. What would happen, it is asked, if states were to use their tax-sharing money to match federal grants under old programs? Says one official: 'They could bleed the Treasury white with its own money.'"
Representative John Byrnes (R.-Wis.), the ranking Republican on Ways and Means, also looks at revenue sharing with a jaundiced eye. Speaking to a legislative committee of the Appleton City Council in Appleton, Wisconsin, Byrnes said:
"In the first place, there just isn't any federal revenue to share. We had a federal funds deficit of $10 billion in the 1970 fiscal year; the way Congress is spending money now we are looking at another deficit for this year at least as great and probably much higher. The federal government has nothing to share with the states except a federal debt of $380 billion.
"The crucial error in revenue sharing is that it encourages irresponsible spending. It does so by removing from one set of legislators the onus of levying taxes to pay for the spending they authorize, thus eliminating the best restraint we have against unjustifiable spending . . .
"The first path to wisdom is to recognize that all levels of government are squeezing blood from the same turnip—the American taxpayer, and that no gimmick, such as revenue sharing, to disguise which level is putting on the pressure, is going to make it any easier for him. "
Revenue sharing is another way of passing the buck figuratively and literally. The real problem is to keep government from spending so much money in the first place, not to find new ways to filch revenues from other government levels. If Richard Nixon were really interested in "returning power to the people," he would simply cut federal spending instead of escalating it as he has done. In the Nixon scheme of things, "power to the people" is really a sleight-of-hand procedure resulting in "power to the President."
While he is looking around for places to slice the budget, Mr. Nixon might consider the foreign aid program. Richard Nixon has always been a super-staunch supporter of foreign aid, since this is a CFR sacred cow. But during his campaign he implied (though, of course, he never actually stated) that foreign aid would be slashed during a Nixon administration. He told audiences that "the whole foreign aid program needs a complete reevaluation," and let his hearers come to their own conclusions as to what he really meant by the statement. On another occasion during the campaign Nixon proclaimed:
". . . All of America's foreign commitments must be reappraised. Over the past 25 years America has provided more than 150 billion dollars in foreign aid . . . I say the time has come for other nations of the free world to bear their fair share of the burden."
Naturally that implication was music to taxpayers' ears. Behind the scenes Nixon was taking a typically equivocal and cynical stand on the subject of foreign aid. Time magazine of July 26, 1968, reported that Nixon, at a breakfast of GOP Congressmen, gave this answer to a question on how to vote on the foreign aid bill: "If I came from a tight district, I'd vote against it. If I did not—and it would not defeat me I'd vote for it . . ."
This was the type of leadership, morality, and integrity that the nation's voters were being asked to rally behind. Time admitted: "Some Republicans were dismayed by Nixon's advice." It has long troubled Nixon supporters who worked closely with him that on many issues he had two opinions, a private one and a public stand that differed from it. This is why many of his strongest supporters from the early days have abandoned him. They could not take the two-faced actions any more. Some have gone beyond referring to him as "Tricky Dick" and have hung the appellation "Mr. Conniver" on him.
Once in office, Nixon asked for foreign aid to be raised by $900 million, declaring: U.S. assistance [to foreign nations] is essential to express and achieve our national goals in the international community—a world order of peace and justice. Note the phrases "international community" and "world order"—typical code words for "world government," with which Nixon always laces his foreign policy speeches. He has said:
"Foreign aid must be seen for what it is—not a burden, but an opportunity to help others to fulfill their aspirations for justice, dignity, and a better life. No more than at home can peace be achieved and maintained without vigorous efforts to meet the needs of the less fortunate."
We can carry the world on our backs, but we cannot stand alone. If we really wanted to help the rest of the world we would encourage them to cure their backwardness the same way we did—by replacing feudalism and socialism with the free enterprise system. Meanwhile, starving savages are not about to overrun the United States. Massed bodies are no substitute for technology.
At the same time he was announcing more foreign giveaways to further socialize the ninety-nine countries that receive our aid (including Communist countries), Mr. Nixon was also raising the national debt limit. But his request for $2.6 billion was just the tip of the foreign aid iceberg. According to Congressman Otto Passman, the bases for backing $1 billion from the foreign aid budget are summed up in three telling arguments:
"The interest on our staggering federal debt for this fiscal year is $15,958 billion," said Passman. "One-half of this immense amount is due to our foreign aid expenditures plus interest. During this worldwide spending spree, our gold holdings have been reduced from nearly $23 billion to less than $11 billion. Further, our balance-of- payments situation has become serious.
"It is an old strategem of the bureaucrats," Passman declared, "to fragment foreign aid programs by scattering them throughout the budget under different titles. In that way they hide them in order to cover up the real scope and immense cost of foreign aid. It took me many hours of digging and poring to put together this highly revealing list."
Vigorously opposing Nixon's proposed hike in foreign aid. Congressman H.R. Gross on June 11, 1969, declared:
"With the Federal debt at around $375 billion, requiring the appropriation of more than $17 billion this year just to pay the interest on the debt, with inflation chewing up the dollar, I am utterly amazed that demands should be made for another multi-billion dollar foreign giveaway program."
Typical of the impact of the Nixon administration on Republican Congressmen who in the past have steadfastly fought against the financing of socialism at home and abroad was their reaction to the Nixon foreign aid program. "I am bleeding over this thing," Congressman E. Ross Adair (R.-Ind.) said. His record showed that he had never voted for foreign aid during his eighteen years in Congress. But with a Republican president he admitted that he was under great pressure to go along with the new bill.
In September 1970, Nixon revealed what the "reforms" in foreign aid would be that he had talked about during the campaign. The idea, he explained, was to channel our foreign aid money through United Nations agencies so that the recipients would not feel compromised by living on our money. This "reform," advocated by Liberals for years, is another step toward the day when the amount of foreign aid money to be spent will be determined by the U.N. and not by Congress. Turning over foreign aid to the U.N. will be a giant step toward Mr. Nixon's "world order. "
One of the most scandal-ridden boondoggles in the history of the nation is the misnamed War on Poverty. Numerous investigations have shown that it is not only a cornucopia for crooks but, worse, has systematically been a source of funds for revolutionary militants. It is hard to find a major U.S. black militant, from Stokely Carmichael to Rap Brown to Huey Newton, who has not at some time been on the War on Poverty payroll. Republicans in Congress, with few exceptions, vigorously opposed the establishment of the War on Poverty, and many have called for its abolishment as various official and unofficial investigations have disclosed the anti-American attitudes of many of its employees. During his campaign, Nixon was full of derogatory remarks about the War on Poverty and strongly implied that under his "new leadership" administration this monstrosity would be abolished. On one occasion he declared:
"A current poverty program that should be eliminated is the Job Corps. This is one program that has been a failure. It sounds good, but it costs $10,000 a year to train a man for a job that may not even exist."
But, as he has done with so many of his campaign promises, once Richard Nixon assumed office he reversed himself on the War on Poverty issue. The New York Times' super-Liberal Tom Wicker acknowledged:
"The President also has moved to extend the life of the Johnson-created Office of Economic Opportunity for another year, an even further departure from the Nixon campaign line. This appears to reflect a judgment—as Pat Moynihan puts it that the poverty program's 'goals are valid' and this Administration wishes to embrace them as its own goals."
In a special message to Congress on February 19, 1969, the President asserted: "From the experience of OEO, we have learned the value of having in the Federal Government an agency whose special concern is the poor." He then called for a one-year extension of the Office of Economic Opportunity, stating that "the OEO has been a valuable fount of ideas and enthusiasm . . . " On June 2, 1969, the Washington Post reported:
"President Nixon yesterday broadened his commitment to the Nation's war on poverty agency by asking Congress to extend its life for two years, instead of one year as originally intended."
This was followed on June 13 by a Washington Post report that:
"Donald Rumsfeld [Director of O.E.O.], far from presiding over the liquidation of the Office of Economic Opportunity, has moved in his first 18 days on the job to revive it as the dominant innovative force on most aspects of domestic policy."
A disgusted Indianapolis News commented:
"The Nixon administration covered itself with confusion this month when it forced through a continuation of the scandalridden "war on poverty" on its present footing.
"Despite the fact that Nixon campaigned against the jerry-built "poverty" set-up in the 1968 election, his regime lobbied strenuously to prevent needed changes in the program and torpedoed an amendment for which there appeared to be ample support in the U.S. House of Representatives . . .
"The net result of this is that the Nixon administration has salvaged one of the most discredited of liberal Democratic programs intact in obvious contradiction to the rhetoric which brought the administration to office. The "mess" that the new regime was supposed to clean up in this area goes on as before, with no structural changes other than a change of personnel at the top. This is an implicit violation of the trust reposed in the new regime by the voting public .
"As Rep. Edith Green, D-Ore., comments, the approach favored by Rumsfeld "did not have a single change—not a single change in the . . . program in terms of administration—in terms of structure—in terms of all the abuses that have occurred—and in terms of what I think are outright violations by [the Office of Economic Opportunity] of congressional intent . . . The only change in the bill was to say to the 0E0, 'We will give you an additional $295 million to spend in the way you want to spend it.'"
Yes the "Conservative" Nixon administration asked for $295 million more than the Liberal Johnson administration had been spending. Then, under the guise of "reforms," parts of the War on Poverty were transferred to other departments where they could be hidden more easily in bigger budgets.
In keeping the War on Poverty, the Nixon administration surrendered to blackmail. A column by Joseph Alsop of March 2, 1969, discussed the reason why Nixon has not abolished the Community Action programs under the Office Economic Opportunity. The Community Action programs employ about 29,000 non-professionals on a full-time basis. According to Alsop, a substantial majority of these people come from the urban ghettos, and the non-professional employees in the ghettos now constitute a new and powerful vested interest. Alsop then went on to say:
"The reason the vested interest was not tackled head on, which is freely admitted by the highest Nixon policymakers, was that "they would have burned the place down, if we'd terminated the programs just like that."
The Nixon administration has also made little or no attempt to clean the militants out. According to Human Events:
"Human Events also has it on unimpeachable authority that the OEO is still funding the Blackstone Rangers gang in Chicago and is supporting leaders of US, the paramilitary, black racist group headed by California's Ron Karenga. Karenga's group is considered one of the most dangerous black "Mafia" groups in existence.
"While Rumsfeld was unaware of it, OEO militants distributed numerous copies of an inflammatory "training" manual to every OEO regional office in the country. Called "Trainer's Manual for Community Action Agency Boards," the booklet stressed that recourse to rioting is a legitimate means for gaining proper community action.
"That the OEO employees have not changed under Rumsfeld was dramatically underscored last week when 1,000 community action leaders from across the country gathered at a three-day conference of the National Association for Community Development in Maryland.
"When OEO Director Rumsfeld asked the nation's community action leaders to avoid "tactics of confrontation," he was promptly denounced from the floor. The conferees, in fact, quickly adopted a position paper that accused the Nixon Administration of being the "enemy of the poor" and urged all Americans to join "the army of dissenters."
"In brief, the OEO does not look much better under Nixon than it did under Johnson."
We could go on for pages listing the federal programs formerly denounced by Republicans as boondoggles, that the Nixon administration has expanded. The Nixonites have made no overall attempt to squeeze the water out of bloated government budgets. Certainly there have been some instances in which the President, with great hoopla and fanfare, has threatened to veto a particular budget request, and a couple of instances in which he has actually done so. But these were so much "show biz." Even the budgets that replaced the vetoed budgets were higher than the LBJ appropriations that candidate Nixon so accurately denounced. This type of hoax is good for one's political image, and in the Nixon administration, image is all-important. Under Nixon, the welfare state marches on and on and on, becoming an ever bigger burden to the taxpayers who must carry the load. As a dejected Chicago Tribune admitted, "The more it changes, the more it remains the same."