Cancer --- On a Grand Scale

Cancer! The word sends tremors through anyone who hears it. It shatters nerves, stuns the minds, and sears the spirits of its victims. We all share in gratitude for President Reagan’s recovery from his encounter with it.

Now we turn our attention to another cancer, the monstrous government deficit that is eating away at the economic and social fabric of our society. Unless we cure it we shall implement the threat in the second commandment, “visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations”. Our children will bear the intolerable burden of debt we have created.

What is the diagnosis?

1. President Reagan and Donald Regan and their crew have created the greatest government debt in history. They are adding to that debt more than $3,000,000,000 every week on top of what we already owe.

2. From 1789 to 1981, one hundred ninety-two years, with seven international wars, one civil war, one skirmish with North African pirates, and frequent Indian wars, thirty-eight Presidents piled up a debt of approximately $850,000,000,000.

3. One President, Ronald Reagan, piled up another $850,000,000,000 debt in only five years. The budget for 1986 includes $131,000,000,000 for interest on the national debt. Half of that goes for interest on debt this administration has accumulated. It is borrowing money to pay interest on money it borrowed to pay interest on the previous year’s interest. That is the fast track to bankruptcy.

4. Reagan – Regan pushed through a tax reduction bill in 1981 which cut government income and taxes by about $160,000,000,000, mostly for the benefit of the more affluent corporations and individuals in our society. If those taxes had been collected, and if we had been spared the awful waste and mismanagement of Casper Weinberger’s Pentagon toy playhouse we would have been close to a balanced budget.

This is the diagnosis. What caused the cancerous growth? David Stockman, President Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget for four years, lays it all out in an interview in Fortune magazine.

1. In 1981 Reagan – Regan put into a computer their far-out economic theories along with the known laws of economics and the computer spit out a threat of huge deficits. Then they discarded the laws of economics and got the fictitious results they wanted. They sold these results to the American public and a salve for its economic sores.

2. The administration intended to create a huge, but unnecessary, budget deficit in order to get a lever to dismantle the human service and social welfare programs of the government, and retreat to the Hoover days.

3. No one in the administration had any real knowledge of what the budget numbers meant. They started with a deficit. They cut $160,000,000,000 out of income. They cut $50,000,000,000 out of expense. With a net loss of $110,000,000,000 they expected to get a surplus. Simple arithmetic should tell them it was impossible.

4. The President threatens to veto any attempt to government’s income. He stands squarely in the way of any effort, even by his own Congressional partisans, to deal responsibly with the deficits and the debt.

The American people bought a lot of snake oil from the political patent medicine peddlers in 1980 and 1984. Now we are faced with a debt cancer calling for major surgery. It is time to get away from Reagan – Regan economic quackery and get a competent surgeon to operate on the national debt.