Tape 200 - Jimmy Carter: presidential prospects, economic advisors, economic positions, background
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- | Hello, this is David Francis, | 0:02 |
financial editor of the Christian Science Monitor. | 0:04 | |
I'd like to welcome you again, | 0:07 | |
on behalf of Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, to a visit | 0:09 | |
with MIT's Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Samuelson. | 0:13 | |
Well, Professor Samuelson, it begins to look | 0:17 | |
like the next president of the United States | 0:19 | |
will be Jimmy Carter. | 0:22 | |
This week of mid-June he has pretty well sewed up | 0:23 | |
the Democratic nomination, | 0:27 | |
and a poll by the New York Times | 0:29 | |
would indicate that even a sizeable number of members | 0:31 | |
of the minority Republican party | 0:35 | |
intend at present to vote | 0:36 | |
for the former Georgian governor come November. | 0:38 | |
Of course, I suppose some event could change this pattern | 0:42 | |
in the next three-plus months, | 0:46 | |
but if Mr. Carter is elected, | 0:48 | |
what will it mean for the nation's economy? | 0:51 | |
- | Well, David, I think it's a little premature to elect | 0:57 |
as president a candidate who hasn't yet quite received | 1:02 | |
the primary nomination from his own party, | 1:06 | |
and as you know, one thing about the polls, | 1:10 | |
like the stock market, is that they do oscillate | 1:13 | |
and this is certainly | 1:16 | |
the beginning of a | 1:20 | |
of a high point for Jimmy Carter. | 1:22 | |
He's regarded as a man of mystery. | 1:26 | |
People say one thing about Carter is | 1:31 | |
you don't know where he stand on the issues | 1:33 | |
except that he wants to be president. | 1:36 | |
I think that, from a Machiavellian viewpoint, | 1:39 | |
that may have been one of his great virtues. | 1:43 | |
One of the reasons why he's been so successful. | 1:45 | |
I wrote several months ago | 1:50 | |
a Newsweek column | 1:54 | |
on precisely this syndrome in Carter. | 1:56 | |
I didn't, in discussing the fact | 2:02 | |
that Carter was all things to all men and to all women, | 2:04 | |
I didn't pass any editorial judgment against that | 2:09 | |
or in favor of it, | 2:13 | |
although I think some of my readers thought | 2:15 | |
that I wouldn't have said that except by way of criticism. | 2:17 | |
I'm not sure. | 2:21 | |
Seems to me that Carter wants very much to be elected, | 2:23 | |
and many people regard that in a politician | 2:29 | |
as an undesirable trait. | 2:32 | |
I'm not sure. | 2:36 | |
I think that a person who has a healthy respect | 2:38 | |
for the views of the electorate | 2:42 | |
is, in many ways, what one wants in a democracy. | 2:45 | |
The last thing one wants is a person | 2:48 | |
of extremely strong independent conviction, | 2:51 | |
which, of course, if it's on the side of the angels, | 2:55 | |
may be absolutely marvelous. | 2:59 | |
But, as so often happens in this mundane world of politics, | 3:01 | |
the person of independent convictions | 3:07 | |
may be a person with unfortunate and stubborn convictions. | 3:10 | |
And so, the first thing I ought to say before discussing | 3:16 | |
the particular economic advisors of Jimmy Carter, | 3:19 | |
and before discussing his record | 3:23 | |
in Georgia and in this campaign, and what that may suggest | 3:27 | |
with respect to the probabilities of his future actions, | 3:33 | |
if he were elected, | 3:37 | |
I think that I'll emphasize | 3:42 | |
that Jimmy Carter is a man who has grabbed for the middle. | 3:46 | |
And you've quoted that New York Times poll | 3:52 | |
which showed that quite a number | 3:57 | |
of Republicans were prepared, | 3:59 | |
if their one of the two candidates is not nominated, | 4:02 | |
to go over to | 4:07 | |
to Carter. | 4:10 | |
Well, | 4:11 | |
in some ways that could be | 4:13 | |
what would be recommended for a candidate. | 4:16 | |
He should be able to have pulling power, | 4:19 | |
not only upon the stalwarts and faithful in his own party, | 4:21 | |
provided he doesn't lose them or diminish their enthusiasm | 4:25 | |
in coming out for the vote and getting other people to vote, | 4:29 | |
but he must also be able to get the shiftable vote. | 4:32 | |
And so I believe that | 4:37 | |
at this time you're right in emphasizing | 4:39 | |
that Carter's | 4:42 | |
prospects look extremely good. | 4:45 | |
For one thing, the Democratic party | 4:48 | |
which has always been subject to jokes by Will Rogers | 4:51 | |
and by Mr. Duly as being without any unity, coherence, | 4:54 | |
or really any definitional existence | 5:00 | |
except that it's not the Republicans. | 5:04 | |
It was thought that it would, | 5:07 | |
in 1976 as in 1972, | 5:10 | |
be riven by dispute. | 5:13 | |
There were so many candidates, you couldn't keep track | 5:16 | |
of the number of Democratic candidates. | 5:18 | |
But now that the bandwagon has begun to | 5:20 | |
to roll, and in one afternoon everybody began to get on it | 5:26 | |
to give Carter what looks to be like the majority he needs | 5:31 | |
on the first ballot, it appears that you have a purring, | 5:35 | |
happy, unified Democratic party which, | 5:40 | |
certainly from a standpoint of the Republican chances, is | 5:44 | |
is somewhat ominous. | 5:49 | |
Well, I think we can count upon the Democratic party | 5:51 | |
to create some of its own internal dissensions, | 5:53 | |
and perhaps the convention in New York | 5:56 | |
will have some young people with long hairdos | 5:59 | |
engage in some disruptive actions | 6:04 | |
so that there will be some dissent. | 6:06 | |
But Governor Carter now looks strong. | 6:10 | |
One guesses that, for a little while, | 6:13 | |
the winds are gonna blow in his direction. | 6:17 | |
He's gonna look stronger and stronger in the polls. | 6:19 | |
There was an interesting article | 6:22 | |
that some of my listeners may have seen | 6:24 | |
in the New York Times or syndicated by the New York Times | 6:27 | |
by William Safire. | 6:32 | |
William Safire is the token conservative | 6:33 | |
on the op-ed page of the New York Times. | 6:36 | |
He was a | 6:40 | |
Nixon man. | 6:42 | |
He was on the conservative side of the White House staff | 6:44 | |
at that time. | 6:47 | |
And | 6:48 | |
he has | 6:50 | |
had what we economists call | 6:52 | |
the extra value of rarity on that New York Times op-ed page. | 6:54 | |
And I don't mean to say that Scotty Reston | 6:59 | |
is a dangerous radical, but | 7:02 | |
I do want to emphasize that what William Safire writes | 7:06 | |
is often rather different from what the others write. | 7:10 | |
And I find it interesting always to read viewpoints | 7:13 | |
which do differ from mine, | 7:18 | |
and William Safire, in his last piece, | 7:19 | |
the one I'm calling attention to, | 7:22 | |
has said just what I'm saying, | 7:23 | |
that Carter's gonna look very strong | 7:25 | |
in the polls for a while. | 7:26 | |
In fact, it's gonna be a case where the Republicans | 7:27 | |
are gonna say we can't win with either candidate, | 7:30 | |
therefore we can go for the man that we really like. | 7:33 | |
And William Safire said, which, David, do you think, | 7:38 | |
of the two Republican candidates, | 7:41 | |
is benefited by that trend we can't win anyway, so-- | 7:44 | |
- | Probably Reagan, I would say. | 7:47 |
- | Reagan is what, who I think, by the way, | 7:48 |
is William Safire's candidate, because | 7:50 | |
he regards | 7:54 | |
Ford as a weak | 7:55 | |
man, not with strong ideological conviction, | 7:59 | |
and that Reagan has that stronger conviction. | 8:03 | |
Well, that could, of course, be misleading | 8:08 | |
to go by the ups and downs, | 8:11 | |
and in this case the ups of Carter. | 8:14 | |
The Democrats are looking very good because they're unified, | 8:17 | |
for the moment, | 8:19 | |
and Carter has a lot of pull. | 8:21 | |
He has pull with blacks. | 8:26 | |
He has pull with hard hats. | 8:27 | |
He has pull with people who have religious conviction. | 8:28 | |
Of course, any one of these things may cost him something | 8:34 | |
with the complementary set in the populace. | 8:38 | |
But the Republicans, | 8:43 | |
I think, should not sell themselves short. | 8:46 | |
One thing, I'm speaking as an economist, | 8:50 | |
not as a political science expert, | 8:52 | |
but one thing that people should realize | 8:54 | |
is that there's a function | 8:58 | |
for each of the two political parties. | 9:00 | |
People said, you remember, after the Goldwater disaster, | 9:03 | |
the debacle, the Republican party is dead. | 9:06 | |
Yet the Republican party, like a phoenix, | 9:10 | |
came back to life and actually, | 9:13 | |
in '68 elected a president and again in '72. | 9:15 | |
After the '72 disaster, McGovern, | 9:19 | |
people asked is the Democratic party dead. | 9:21 | |
Now they couldn't be quite so emphatic in | 9:25 | |
bringing out the black cloth for the Democratic party | 9:31 | |
because it still had such a preponderance of | 9:35 | |
regulars who register as Democrats, | 9:40 | |
even though party regularity is not as important | 9:43 | |
as it used to be. | 9:46 | |
But what isn't realized is that the Republican party | 9:47 | |
could die a thousand deaths, and then, at the next election, | 9:51 | |
it would come back in strength because there needs to be, | 9:55 | |
in any democratic political system like ours, | 9:59 | |
I'm speaking teleologically, but you can bet on it, | 10:02 | |
there needs to be a representation of the business interests | 10:05 | |
as well as representation | 10:09 | |
of the poorer part of the population. | 10:10 | |
So it'll always reconstruct itself. | 10:12 | |
What you don't know is whether the Whig party | 10:15 | |
of the pre-Civil War will turn into the Republican party | 10:17 | |
of the post-Civil War and of Abraham Lincoln, | 10:19 | |
but it's really the same party. | 10:22 | |
Now you'll say against me | 10:25 | |
what about the Liberal party in Britain. | 10:26 | |
What about Lloyd George who, after World War I | 10:29 | |
when he was riding very high, actually ruined that party? | 10:32 | |
Well, it's true, but the Liberal party was squeezed | 10:36 | |
between these two great polar economic interests, | 10:39 | |
the Conservative party and the Labor party. | 10:43 | |
And you didn't get those parties eliminated, | 10:49 | |
and so I don't think that the Republicans need, | 10:52 | |
realistically, regard their cause as | 10:57 | |
as lost. | 11:02 | |
There's plenty of time for Carter to make mistakes, | 11:03 | |
and there is a very sizable part of the American population, | 11:07 | |
even if it registers Democratic and thinks of itself, | 11:12 | |
if it thinks of itself in connection with any party, | 11:16 | |
as more connected with the Democratic party | 11:19 | |
than the Republican party, who repeatedly vote Republican. | 11:20 | |
Sometimes, of course, it's an attractive candidate | 11:27 | |
like Eisenhower who brings them out, | 11:29 | |
but sometimes it's the | 11:30 | |
it's the issues | 11:33 | |
which, within the Democratic party, | 11:35 | |
the Democrats cannot stand. | 11:38 | |
We have here in Massachusetts, | 11:42 | |
perhaps the most Democratic state in the Union, | 11:44 | |
the only one which went for McGovern, | 11:47 | |
we have an awful lot of Democratic stalwarts | 11:49 | |
who've always voted Democratic, | 11:52 | |
who are very bitter about the busing issue. | 11:54 | |
I'm thinking of the ethnic whites in the inner city | 11:58 | |
who don't at all like integration | 12:02 | |
of the schools accomplished by busing, and those people are | 12:06 | |
ready at the asking for a Reagan | 12:12 | |
or for a Eisenhower, for a Republican to take them away | 12:15 | |
from their characteristic Democratic allegiance. | 12:18 | |
Well, let's go-- | 12:22 | |
- | Okay, let me-- | 12:24 |
- | Yeah. | 12:25 |
- | Go from here to advisors. | |
- | Right. | 12:28 |
- | It's often said | |
that you know a man somewhat | 12:29 | |
by his friends or advisors. | 12:30 | |
How do you-- | 12:32 | |
- | Right. | |
- | Reckon-- | 12:33 |
- | Well, | 12:34 |
let me mention the names of five advisors of | 12:36 | |
of Carter who are personally acquainted with me, | 12:41 | |
whom I know very well. | 12:46 | |
I'm now not talking about the inner Georgia circle. | 12:47 | |
- | No. | 12:50 |
- | Of his campaign manager | |
and his advertising director, | 12:52 | |
although those people are very important. | 12:54 | |
My own experience with | 12:56 | |
the 1960 campaign of John F. Kennedy, | 12:59 | |
suggested to me that it's important | 13:03 | |
for an analyst | 13:08 | |
to know that a Samuelson as well as a Galbraith | 13:09 | |
was advising John F. Kennedy, | 13:13 | |
but it was also important to know | 13:15 | |
what the personal relationship was of Theodore Sorensen, | 13:17 | |
and of Kenny O'Donnell and of Larry O'Brien, | 13:20 | |
the so-called Irish mafia. | 13:23 | |
They're very important, | 13:25 | |
but they're unknown people nationally. | 13:27 | |
Not only unknown to me but unknown | 13:31 | |
to the politicians around the country, | 13:35 | |
so let's stick with that which is knowable. | 13:38 | |
The economists who have been mentioned | 13:41 | |
as writing position papers and meeting with Candidate Carter | 13:44 | |
have been Lawrence Klein, | 13:49 | |
who's the Benjamin Franklin professor, | 13:53 | |
a very prestigious chair, at the University of Pennsylvania, | 13:56 | |
and a great expert on | 13:59 | |
on computer models for predicting the economy. | 14:03 | |
The Wharton model is his creation. | 14:07 | |
Lawrence Klein. | 14:11 | |
My own colleague at MIT, a younger man, Lester Thurow. | 14:12 | |
Albert T. Summers, who's of the Conference Board, | 14:18 | |
a non-profit business-financed | 14:22 | |
independent economic research organization. | 14:25 | |
There we have three. | 14:31 | |
Martin Feldstein, a young economist at Harvard | 14:34 | |
of rather conservative viewpoints. | 14:38 | |
And finally, from the Harvard Law School, | 14:42 | |
an early adherent of Jimmy Carter, | 14:46 | |
and earliness in these matters sometimes counts | 14:48 | |
for something, like being for Roosevelt before Chicago | 14:52 | |
was a special category back in 1932, | 14:54 | |
is a good friend of mine, | 14:59 | |
Milton Katz at the Harvard Law School. | 15:00 | |
Now it's said that one of Carter's problems | 15:05 | |
is that he has no standing | 15:09 | |
with the effete eastern elite | 15:12 | |
establishment intellectuals. | 15:16 | |
Well, I would submit that these five people | 15:18 | |
will qualify pretty well as belonging to that group. | 15:23 | |
And I don't think that there will be any shortage | 15:28 | |
of volunteers now that the bandwagon has started to roll. | 15:31 | |
People want to sniff a winner and, unless he's really, | 15:36 | |
has a taint of leprosy about them, | 15:44 | |
there'll be no shortage of | 15:46 | |
of lieutenants, and majors, and lieutenant colonels, | 15:48 | |
and also some privates in the rank. | 15:52 | |
- | These people all strike me as being | 15:55 |
in the broad middle ground. | 15:56 | |
- | Yes, well, let's analyze that. | 15:58 |
- | Okay, okay. | 16:02 |
- | Martin Feldstein is really on the conservative side, | 16:03 |
and it says something for a candidate | 16:07 | |
that he's interested in the views of Lester Thurow, | 16:11 | |
my colleague, who, if he was in the middle, | 16:14 | |
but is just in the left of the middle. | 16:19 | |
And Marty Feldstein, | 16:21 | |
whom I would say is a little distance | 16:22 | |
to the right of the middle. | 16:24 | |
Martin Feldstein is an expert on medical economics | 16:27 | |
and on public finance, and he's very much concerned | 16:32 | |
with and rather against the kind of position | 16:37 | |
that Senator Edward Kennedy represents | 16:41 | |
in the public health field. | 16:43 | |
He's afraid of compulsory medical insurance | 16:45 | |
for the American people, Martin Feldstein is, | 16:48 | |
because he thinks it'll run to 70 or 80 billion dollars. | 16:50 | |
It's like adding | 16:54 | |
a third or a quarter | 16:58 | |
to the already existing budget, | 17:00 | |
and we know our hospitals are overcrowded. | 17:03 | |
I'm just quoting Martin Feldstein. | 17:05 | |
He said he doesn't think | 17:07 | |
this is what the American people really want, | 17:08 | |
but there's a danger under populace democracy | 17:11 | |
that this is what they will get. | 17:13 | |
Well, I haven't seen any position papers | 17:14 | |
written by Martin Feldstein for Candidate Carter | 17:16 | |
on this subject, but I can be sure that, | 17:21 | |
if he's asked for one, | 17:24 | |
that he will have the gravest reservations. | 17:25 | |
Now I think we ought to go into | 17:29 | |
the advice which is given by the candidates. | 17:33 | |
We also ought to go into the nature | 17:35 | |
of the candidate himself. | 17:37 | |
In order to understand LBJ, that is Lyndon Baines Johnson, | 17:39 | |
you had to understand his Texas background. | 17:44 | |
Part of a poor state, and although he made a lot of money, | 17:46 | |
he and his wife in TV stations and so forth, | 17:52 | |
and although he was a wheeler and dealer, | 17:55 | |
he liked to look himself in the mirror | 17:57 | |
and think of himself as a Roosevelt New Dealer | 17:59 | |
who was doing something for the poor man. | 18:02 | |
Well, Jimmy Carter comes from very humble background. | 18:06 | |
Plains, Georgia, is small, | 18:09 | |
but he doesn't even come from Plains, Georgia. | 18:13 | |
He comes from the countryside outside. | 18:15 | |
Jimmy Carter has been brought up all his life among blacks, | 18:18 | |
except for his Navy experience. | 18:21 | |
He | 18:25 | |
understands blacks in the sense of a liberal southerner. | 18:30 | |
There was a Harper's article, that some of us will remember, | 18:34 | |
in which it was suggested that Carter was a closet racist. | 18:37 | |
Seems to me that, | 18:41 | |
on the record as I've gone into it in Georgia, | 18:42 | |
the story is quite otherwise. | 18:45 | |
This is why Herman Talmadge and Maddox | 18:49 | |
are very angry with Carter. | 18:53 | |
Carter knows how to get elected. | 18:54 | |
I think we'll grant him | 18:56 | |
(David laughs) | 18:58 | |
that, and he talked in terms | 18:59 | |
which | 19:02 | |
were regarded by the blacks as not unfriendly, | 19:05 | |
and were regarded by the white races, | 19:09 | |
if I could count Maddox as a self-proclaimed | 19:12 | |
man against integration, | 19:17 | |
they thought that Carter was their man. | 19:19 | |
But the moment he got in to be governor, | 19:21 | |
it turned out that he wasn't their man. | 19:23 | |
He was his own man, and for Georgia politics, | 19:25 | |
he was very liberal on the race issue. | 19:28 | |
This must explain why the father of Martin Luther King | 19:31 | |
went with him, why he's had a black vote | 19:35 | |
despite a infelicitously worded, | 19:38 | |
I think I felicitously worded (laughs) that description, | 19:43 | |
remark that he made in Pittsburgh | 19:48 | |
about ethnic purity of neighborhoods. | 19:49 | |
So that, with exception of a few black Georgia politicians, | 19:51 | |
the blacks have been for him. | 19:56 | |
Now what's amazing is that the sort of person | 19:58 | |
for whom Reagan has an appeal, | 20:02 | |
and the hard hats in the north, | 20:04 | |
and who, as whites are sensitized | 20:07 | |
against the competition of blacks, | 20:10 | |
they also have a weakness for | 20:12 | |
for Carter. | 20:16 | |
Well, Carter, I think, can be held down | 20:17 | |
by the advice of somebody like Feldstein, | 20:21 | |
but I think he still will have a inclination | 20:23 | |
towards transfer expenditure | 20:28 | |
of the health type. | 20:31 | |
- | Well, his health program | 20:34 |
is almost approaches Kennedy's program, does it not? | 20:35 | |
It does leave some question open | 20:38 | |
as to whether it's gonna be government or private insurance. | 20:40 | |
- | Right, and what you must add to this | 20:45 |
is the fact that his formative years, 10 years in the Navy, | 20:46 | |
is belonging to a | 20:52 | |
a socialist way of life. | 20:55 | |
Eisenhower, you know, | 20:57 | |
never had the instinctive businessman's reaction | 20:58 | |
about the welfare state, because he had, | 21:01 | |
living on Army reservations, having his wife's health, | 21:04 | |
and his health, his family's health cared for, | 21:08 | |
subsidized housing, never having to pay taxes in those days. | 21:11 | |
If you remember, a officer didn't have to pay taxes | 21:14 | |
on a officer's salary. | 21:18 | |
He was not unsympathetic to the use of strong government, | 21:20 | |
and so I think you will find this strain in Jimmy Carter. | 21:23 | |
I've not found in the record whether, as a peanut farmer, | 21:28 | |
Jimmy Carter has been eligible for agricultural subsidy, | 21:32 | |
but I know from the macro data that much of the income | 21:36 | |
of peanut farmers in this country has come from the AAA. | 21:41 | |
And I daresay that his business enterprise | 21:44 | |
was also nurtured by the welfare state. | 21:48 | |
The conclusion that I come to from this | 21:55 | |
is that Carter will have a very healthy respect | 21:58 | |
for that which will be judged | 22:04 | |
unacceptable by the broad middle range of politics. | 22:07 | |
How or why he ever made that statement | 22:12 | |
that house mortgage interest perhaps should be deductible, | 22:15 | |
not be deductible, | 22:20 | |
I cannot imagine because that's the opposite | 22:22 | |
of what I'm now talking about. | 22:24 | |
I think that somebody who was interested | 22:26 | |
in closing loopholes gave him a complete package and, | 22:28 | |
instead of saying this is political dynamite, | 22:32 | |
political murder, and you've got to go along with it. | 22:35 | |
Same thing, remember in the McGovern campaign, | 22:39 | |
that the amount you give to church, | 22:42 | |
suppose you just go to church once a week | 22:45 | |
and you give a modest couple dollars. | 22:49 | |
What's that, people say you shouldn't | 22:51 | |
get any extra credit for that. | 22:53 | |
It's just for extraordinary philanthropic contributions. | 22:54 | |
Well, you've got every denomination | 22:57 | |
in the land against you on that one. | 22:58 | |
And I think that Jimmy Carter is a fast learner, | 23:01 | |
and that he would drop that sort of talk. | 23:04 | |
But on the other hand, I think there is a threat | 23:08 | |
to the business interests of a strong Democratic president | 23:11 | |
if he has any coattails and brings in, again, | 23:16 | |
a strong, strong majorities in the congress, | 23:18 | |
that tax reform is like the sword of Damocles | 23:22 | |
hanging over the American system | 23:27 | |
because we have unconscionable loopholes | 23:28 | |
from the standpoint of economic logic. | 23:31 | |
And certainly unpopular loopholes | 23:35 | |
still in the tax law from the standpoint of equity. | 23:37 | |
You want to give credit. | 23:42 | |
We oughta say a word. | 23:45 | |
The Wilbur Millses and the Warren Hayses | 23:46 | |
are having their troubles these days | 23:49 | |
as they age ungracefully | 23:52 | |
(laughter) | 23:53 | |
in the public view, | 23:55 | |
but those fellas, being elected and re-elected | 23:58 | |
time after time and being essentially conservative | 24:02 | |
small-time Democrats, | 24:05 | |
have again and again | 24:08 | |
held up | 24:11 | |
the path | 24:13 | |
of logical tax reform. | 24:15 | |
And those days may be getting numbered. | 24:18 | |
- | Yeah, certainly Carter's program calls | 24:21 |
for a complete reform | 24:23 | |
with a genuinely progressive tax system | 24:25 | |
which would mean increase in taxes for the well-to-do. | 24:29 | |
- | Oh, yes, and the most damning thing, you know, | 24:32 |
from the standpoint of the well-to-do, | 24:36 | |
are these rather few individuals, | 24:38 | |
maybe only in the tens of thousands who pay no tax at all | 24:42 | |
because they use every loophole in the book to the limit. | 24:46 | |
And so I think that | 24:51 | |
the stock market, | 24:55 | |
to the degree that it thinks of itself | 24:58 | |
as reflecting the interests of, | 25:00 | |
let's say, the typical person | 25:03 | |
who has over 30 thousand dollars of income per year, | 25:06 | |
would have some reason to increase the odds | 25:10 | |
that one or another of the tax loopholes | 25:13 | |
will be closed in a Carter administration. | 25:18 | |
This would not be true of a Nixon administration | 25:23 | |
or a Ford administration to the degree | 25:26 | |
that the chief executive and his advisors have their way. | 25:29 | |
Of course, they don't have their way | 25:33 | |
when the congress has a majority in the other party. | 25:34 | |
- | Yeah, Mr. Carter talks much | 25:37 |
about reducing the 19 hundred overlapping, | 25:39 | |
uncoordinated, and wasteful federal agencies | 25:41 | |
to some 200 streamlined, efficient units. | 25:44 | |
Can he do it? | 25:48 | |
- | I don't think so. | 25:49 |
You know, everybody, when he writes a textbook, | 25:51 | |
say in economics where there are a lot of textbooks, | 25:54 | |
has to have some new theme, | 25:56 | |
and I always ask a new writer what's your gimmick. | 25:59 | |
(laughs) | 26:01 | |
I think Carter's gimmick in getting into politics, | 26:02 | |
aside from the fact that he wanted the job, | 26:04 | |
was that he would greatly simplify the administrative, | 26:06 | |
bureaucratic structure in Washington in the way | 26:10 | |
that he did in Georgia. | 26:13 | |
Well, I don't know whether he did in Georgia a lot | 26:16 | |
or a little, but I do know from the record | 26:19 | |
that he used patronage in Georgia, | 26:23 | |
that he was a strong executive who could work compromises | 26:25 | |
in the congress, and I don't think that he's gonna be able | 26:30 | |
to take a new broom into Washington. | 26:33 | |
This anti-Washington talk is very popular, | 26:36 | |
but those bureaucracies are quite entrenched | 26:41 | |
and it will be a long, slow process of reform | 26:44 | |
rather than revolution in my judgment. | 26:48 | |
- | He's also talks about endorsing the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, | 26:52 |
but he seems to have some reservations on this-- | 26:57 | |
- | Yes, now there's, I think the absolute key tip-off | 27:00 |
of what Carter is like. | 27:04 | |
No Democrat can go against the Humphrey-Hawkins bill | 27:06 | |
at this time. | 27:09 | |
It's like being against motherhood. | 27:10 | |
But he did say that 3% is too low a number. | 27:13 | |
The 4.6%, which I would say is the lowest defensible number | 27:17 | |
that wouldn't cause inflation to accelerate, was his number. | 27:21 | |
So you can see that not only does he have | 27:24 | |
some economic advisors, but unlike the others, | 27:26 | |
he seems to have listened a little bit to them. | 27:29 | |
He has some notion of what the traffic will bear. | 27:32 | |
- | Thanks very much. | 27:35 |
If you subscribers would like to ask questions | 27:36 | |
of Professor Paul Samuelson, | 27:39 | |
or suggest subjects for him to discuss, | 27:41 | |
please write to Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, | 27:44 | |
450 East Ohio Street, | 27:48 | |
Chicago, Illinois, | 27:51 | |
60611. | 27:53 |
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