‘Where Would You Cut?’

February 4, 1952

For the last eighteen years, whenever a congressman or a mere taxpayer has ventured to express concern about the ever-mounting total of Federal spending, he has been promptly squelched by some Administration spokesman with the rhetorical question: “Where would you cut?”

The question is seldom asked as a sincere quest for information. It is a taunt, uttered in the assurance that there are certain politically sacrosanct causes, and that none will dare question the amount of any expenditure made in the name of such causes. The sacred word in Washington today is “defense.” In our cities it is “education.” In England it is “full employment.” Any private business that tried to run its budget on this incantation basis would soon be on the rocks. And so, eventually, will a government.

The basic fallacy involved in the question “Where would you cut?” is that it assumes the burden of proof to be on those who wish to make economies. But the real burden of proof obviously belongs on the executive who proposes the spending. It is his job to make a positive case for every dollar of that proposed spending. And in the whole fantastic new budget of $85,400,000,000 there are very few places where this positive case has been seriously made. Mr. Truman’s defenders seem to think it is enough to say of any questioned item: “Secretary Brannan has asked for it,” or: “The Army has asked for it.” But no private firm could afford to assume that a mere unsupported request was a sufficient reason for increasing the spending budget of one of its departments.

Mr. Truman asks, for example, the tremendous sum of $10,500,000,000 for “military, economic, and technical assistance” to foreign governments in the next fiscal year. He demands this huge sum on familiar rhetorical grounds: “We cannot . . . isolate ourselves from threats to other free men,” etc. But he never tells us why the amount should be $10,500,000,000, nor why the NATO governments of Europe cannot pay more than $8,600,000,000 this year for their own armament, though they manage to find $21,400,000,000 for nondefense expenditures, largely socialistic. (See this column Dec. 10, 1951, and Jan. 14.)

Those who assert it is the responsibility of Congress rather than the President to bring spending down to a bearable level by cutting the budget item by item have simply never stopped to consider what this would mean. The $85,400,000,000 for which Mr. Truman asks is the aggregate amount to be spent by 1,252 different organizational units. How can Congress determine to exactly how much, if anything, each of these 1,252 spending or getting units is entitled? Particularly when the individual budget of each one of these agencies or categories is in turn usually made up of hundreds of items?

What we do know is that wherever Congress has pried into the details of the present Administration’s spending it has almost invariably found gross waste. On Dec. 11, for example, House investigators found that the Army had ordered enough front-axle housing gaskets for jeeps to last more than 104 years, enough engine valve tappets to last for 79.4 years, enough engine clutch washers to last for 84.7 years. And so on. This is a tiny sample of the waste. It is simply impossible for Congress to go into an infinity of such grisly details.

The individual taxpayer, in brief, is seldom in a position to say precisely where the budget should be cut, but he can say how it should be cut. We will not have an orderly and responsible budget until we reform our entire budgetary procedure. (See this column Dec. 24, 1951.)

But the first and indispensable step is for Congress to adopt the Coudert resolution. It should send Mr. Truman’s unbalanced and irresponsible budget back to him with the request that he submit a revised budget cutting his proposed $85,400,000,000, of spending down at least to the $71,000,000,000 of revenues expected under present tax laws. If the President declines this opportunity to use his own scalpel, he can hardly complain if Congress applies a meat ax.