Nixon, Agnew & Cabinet officers on Domestic Policy Council and Budget Planning

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Thank you very much.

So I want you to all know that these are either undersecretaries or assistants of the U.S. or White House people that have specific responsibilities under the U.S. Senate.

And I'm going to discuss Donner and his idea, and then we'll take a presentation, and then we'll go on ahead.

And this versus meeting, as you know, is to discuss long-range policy planning directed really at three basic objectives, three projects more or less already in parallel.

One is for the 19th fiscal year of 1973 budget decisions.

Another is the content of the fiscal, or the calendar 72 trading union and legislative package.

And South Silento, the Republican marketing platform.

And really what we're looking at here is next year in June.

And if I could have a slide, I'd like to suggest that we think about things that we're discussing this morning on these four levels.

Those objectives.

policies and programs.

And we put on the slide an example of the difference in the interrelationship between these four kinds of subjects.

A goal for America would be a decent home for every American.

The administration objective would be long range to build homes at a rate that we would accomplish 26 million units by 1978.

Our policy would be to encourage private sector buildings for financial incentives, and the programs would be, as examples, Operation Breakthrough, which was essentially a federal incentive to private involvement, and such 235 and 236 federal subsidy programs.

We will be talking about different kinds of policy proposals, program proposals, goals and objectives tomorrow.

I think it's very helpful to us, in our work, if we think critically about what it is we're talking about at each step of the way.

Obviously programs are directly associated with budgetary decisions,

Policies tell us to define the kinds of legislative proposals that we ought to be advancing, and we have to have the goals and objectives in mind, and we have to be very clear about the differences between goals and objectives.

So we'll be working with these kinds of concepts through this morning's presentation.

In our analytical approach as a staff to the domestic council, we have asked the departments of agencies to bring to the staff their estimates of what next year's issues are going to be.

And we've asked him to tell the department, to you, to tell us the events that you foresee that are going to be forced by events.

The decisions that the president is going to have to make, regardless of what else happens.

The kinds of issues that the country is going to be thinking about, regardless of what else happens.

In the written materials you will find an outline of major action forcing events that you'll see on the slide.

This is a summary of the principal major action forcing events in the foreseeable, in the next year so to speak.

These are brought about by either requirements of statute as in the National Urban Growth Policy Report,

or the expiration of the Highway Act or the Economic Opportunity Act in June 1972 and the expiration of FHA housing legislation in October 1972 and so forth.

Interestingly enough, November 1972, the election, was not universally noticed as an action-enforcing event by all of the returns we got from the departments.

But I think you'll all agree that it is one of those landmark dates that we do have to keep in mind.

So, with that as a sort of inevitable and inevitable set of circumstances,

We can also then turn to the question of what actions are needed, either by the problems in the patient or by issues that are widely noticed and widely discussed, and also by the politics of the situation.

One of the ways that we find out what needed actions are, needed policies, one way we find out what the issues in the country are, from a post-hoc standpoint, is to look at the polls.

And I've asked Dr. Ida Parker, a domestic counsel staff, to prepare a review of the historical and current poll situation, which will tell us something about what people in the country perceive

This is not an advance for the purpose of foreclosing the proposal of other issues, but simply to start us off with a common base of understanding as to what people perceive the issues in the country to be.

Ed, do you want to take it from here, please?

Yes, Ray Walton will first tell you a little bit about the historical development of what the Gallup poll has identified as the most important issue since 1968.

I'll talk a little bit about some other issues as well.

We'd like to begin by examining public issue polls.

You are, of course, aware of shortcomings in polls.

They usually give small samples of 1500 or so.

That means that 15 people have issued an issue up or down by 1%.

Over time, of course, they also have an inconsistent classification, which still gives us a problem.

But the trends in issues can be revealed.

Especially when the same question is asked at different times, that's what we have here.

We've followed Gallup issue polls for the last four years, from July 68 through February 71.

The question asked is, what do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?

So these are national problems, not necessarily business problems.

The percentages on the graph on the left are the percentages of respondents who cite that column as the most important of 68-71.

We did not start it out at 42% off the scale, and it's now down to 28%.

Other international problems, which includes the Middle East and the spread of world communism, has come up in the last year, and is now at 12%.

All the other issues that appear in polls are domestic problems, those are the only two international ones.

First we look at those domestic problems which have declined in importance over the last few years.

And the most important of those is, of course, race relation, which is now down to 7%.

At the beginning of the period, 1968, that was at 25%.

At the beginning of 1968, that was 25%.

That's correct.

And in July, it is now, as of February, we've got 40%.

Lack of religion is also an issue, but that is defiant and not done.

Over the last couple of years.

And these three are crime, now at 7% in 1970s.

Poverty at 5% now in 1970s.

And education at 2% now in 1970s.

This, as I understand, the key question is what you consider to be the most pressing national problem.

That's correct.

The most important problem facing the country.

Now we get to the problems which have increased in the last two years.

And two of these are more or less consistent.

That is, the drug problem has increased to 5-6% perception, and the general unrest youth protest

The question is now up to 6%, after a very marked increase in 69%.

Then we get to the last pair, and these are issues which have increased perception in the last couple of years.

Pollution, now up 7%.

Economic issues, cost of living, now up to 24% of the populace.

This, in fact, is the second ranked issue in this range.

This includes job security, unemployment, and questions across the day.

The definitions are changing sometimes.

So those were the eleven top issues as of this spring, and the history behind them.

Now this was not one of the separate issues.

It will show, I think, in current Gallup polls, historic Gallup polls over the past several years, there was a Gallup question as what is considered the most important question facing the country, so this is not one where you need it.

It's one where the individual thinks of what it is.

In fact, he may be responding to what he thinks he should say.

Now, the Gallup organization has

It gives us a base because they've been asking this question over a period of years.

So we've gone on that sort of rolling historic pole to give us some trance.

We have a pole that we've had access to.

It gives us some current field.

Is that what you have next, Ed?

Yes.

We're going to be asking a slightly different question.

The question in the Gallup poll is what's the most important problem facing the nation?

The question asked in this poll is what is the most important domestic issue, aside from Vietnam, aside from politics?

This is the result of this poll, and I assume the poll was taken in 1969, and then this one in May of 1970.

1971, yes.

And you see, by far and away, the overriding issue is inflation, cost of living, and taxes.

This does not include unemployment.

This is a separate item.

Here again, this is an open poll, since the people respond in their own terms.

To the question, rather than to be given a category to mark, isn't that right?

It's an unstructured question.

They volunteer what they think to be the most important problem, not being led by a listing of possibilities.

The number one issue, up to 44%, is an increase of 10% over the entire year.

Others that have experienced very major increases since 1969 are pollution and ecology, which is up from nothing to 25% across.

Unemployment is concerned about that as well, up 17%, as is concern about drugs and alcohol.

Another major increase is unrest among young people, which has gone up from 6 to 12%.

But it's interesting to note that rioting, violence, and demonstrations, the concern about this as a major problem, has decreased from 13%.

to 5%.

Other major decreases that should be noted are the racial problem.

Here the differences in percentage, of course, are a result of the difference in what the base is in Gallup poll.

These are strictly domestic issues.

Here, race in 1971 is at 22%, down 17% from 1969.

Another major downtrend is student unrest out from 34% to just 4%.

So these are some of the major changes in opinions about the details of major domestic issues.

Now, so far we've talked exclusively about a national perspective.

But if you think about the issues, the polls, or the administration, you may want to consider other perspectives as well.

We've been able to find a couple of other polls which give you other perspectives.

The next thing we've talked about, we've also got a poll in 1970 that talks about what is your community's most important problem.

There you'll find pollution being number one, 34% crime second, drugs, schools, housing, transportation, employment, taxes, and youth being the other teachers at about the same level of magnitude.

Your family, however, there's a distinct difference.

What's the most important problem facing your family?

It's financial.

And here the respondents cited the cost of living increases.

They cited taxes and education.

It's interesting to trace the themes to all three of these different perspectives.

Education at 2% of the national level, schools at 12% of the community level, and then the individual family is worrying about the cost of education, surely in terms of how I possibly may be able to afford to send my child to college.

You'll notice the absence, in the family perspective, of a couple of items.

For example, this was in 1967, and still there was no mention of crime since then.

In fact, here, no mention of housing.

Apparently they talk about housing as a community problem.

They're talking about housing for people, rather than for themselves.

One other interesting item about this poll was taken in October of 67, and you'll notice that race comes in at 4%.

The prime actions under the race topic were integrated housing and riots.

Of course, this came just a few months after the major race riots in the United States, and still, that problem was not personalized, as it means that there was a family problem.

Few people were personally...

We thought it would be useful in launching your discussion today to bring to your attention the things that have been identified from unstructured questions by people as being the most important problems with respect to the nation, the community, and their individual families.

I think one thing this points out is that we need more information, more current information, about attitudes other than the headache or panic.

And we hope that we can develop some additional materials so that we can update this particular comparison, because as you see, there's a very striking difference from the differences in the list of those three headaches.

And that's something that will be worth looking at.

Thank you.

The final source of, or the point of duty that's being made here, I think, is that you can gallop actually.

facing the individual may well select a problem that may not influence him as much as what is the most important problem facing you, the man.

He puts himself in a mountaintop and he's going, both of you are facing a monster here.

What are those balls doing?

Lows or something.

But, what he puts about you is that he's going, how am I going to send the kids to college

What's my name going somewhere?

Or the individual?

Got issued.

It may be the family recommendation.

But that is 67 for the family, so that's... We don't have it.

We don't have it.

We've got to update that.

I think that's good.

That's what they do sometimes.

Yes, sir.

The tracks under that name will be very significant also.

We can begin to establish some track lines.

for these vertices.

I want to stress that we don't propose

Structuring the administration's national policies and programs strictly on a retrospective basis from polls, but at the same time it's extremely useful to all of us to understand what it is that people identify as their most pressing problems.

And also to know what people will support, and what they will pay for.

That's why the poll is enormously important.

Otherwise they aren't going to support it, they aren't going to pay for it.

Congress is going to hold it.

The difference between...

popular perception of problems to be solved, and the actual catalogs of problems to be solved might be developed from a contrast between this information and the material that has been advanced by the various departments.

We've had a very good response from the respective departments and agencies, and their catalog of what they've accomplished thus far in the administration, the work that they have underway, and the initiatives which they would propose for the future

And in the written material, which I think each of you had in preparation with me, you will find these arranged in summary form.

And I would propose that for so much of the structured portion of the meeting as remains, and I wouldn't extend this beyond an additional five minutes before we throw this over for discussion,

It might be useful if any of you have particular initiatives that you would like to call the council's attention, including the material here, that we'd be pleased to hear from those of you who have advanced it.

I think, for instance, under education,

Senator Richardson has moved along some very interesting initiatives arranged by constituencies.

Minorities, women, youths, disadvantaged, offenders, the unemployed, consumers, and so forth.

And that's about the fifth or so, ten pages in, I guess, of the initiatives, education and manpower.

And you'll see they're arranged from a constituency standpoint

15 or 16 proposed initiatives from ACW.

Blue-collar workers, for instance, pension reform, child care initiatives, work compensation review, unemployment insurance revision, quality work promotion, education upgrading, employment service redirect,

The blue-collar paper and the initiatives that they proposed last year.

What it suggests is that there is available as one option to the president the possibility of advancing some very specific programs going to the problems of a very large sector of the population represented in this poll.

We generally identify as blue-collar workers, and these are people in older, established neighborhoods

whose income is probably no greater than 12.5 something of that kind at the maximum, who are largely unemployed, who are paying their taxes, employed, supporting schools, in many cases paying tuition for private school education for their youngsters,

who are in more or less dead-end employment situations and have very significant group problems that are identifiable, and as to whom there are almost no governmental programs, no responses to their problems as a class.

So this is the kind of constituency-oriented analysis that we're going to be doing in the process of developing this work, in addition to problem-oriented analysis.

Now, Mr. Secretary, would you like to expand on that in any way?

I think you've really covered the ground very well, John.

I think you can say yes.

very useful moment at which to review these things, and I think the breakdown you started out with, distinguishing between goal, objectives, policy, and program, is a very useful tool.

There's often a tendency to blur these things.

The problem, it seems to me, with this structure is to

is to start out with some sense of what we can afford to do, and the opportunities are almost indented.

And then to try to develop a strategy which gives us some criteria by which to select among these things.

It seems to me that there is need for a considerable amount of fairly clean and deliberative discussion of such questions as relative emphasis, for example, in programs that are named in one sense or another at the schools you just described.

and the blue collar rain, and so on, versus further emphasis on the problem of the disadvantage of the inner city, and so on.

In the, I suppose we are affected to some extent by the question of what has been done in terms of legislation that has been enacted.

In any case,

Looking at it from where we sit in HW, we probably entirely agree that we know we're going to have to choose in terms of budgetary limitations.

We're also going to have to choose in terms of the shared staff investments involved in the government's education legislation.

And we have to choose in terms of the ability to achieve attention and specific consideration by the Congress and the public of what it is we put forward.

And these choices essentially have to be made within the context of a carefully thought total strategy that establishes

I was struck by the lack of visibility of the health issues in the school.

Yes, although I noted with some interest that it was very high among the parents identified by the calendar.

The right-hand column left last.

The question is, speaking with people on these pipelines, I don't want to get hit by the economic considerations.

I think economic problems, just like right-of-house support, is the number one domestic problem.

Mr. Secretary, did you know you wanted to add a blue-collar initiative?

I think what that means more than anything else is focus.

We all know there's something there somewhere we ought to be able to get our arms around and be able to dramatize in a useful, meaningful way.

But we really haven't been able to do that yet, and that's the thing that I've been working on.

I've been trying to get that aspect.

There's a good, solid load to be mined, but we haven't quite got the way to do it yet.

Secretary Morton...

We have quite a few initiatives from the Department of Interior that came in.

Would you like to read any of those?

Two of them.

Particularly, one is our energy problem.

I know that the best thing that's happened is a long time in the presence of energy message, because that has given us the chance to focus a little bit and focus on team energy.

I believe from a sheer political, raw politics that when you run out of energy, you're going to run out of votes.

I believe we're going to have to address ourselves to this, and we are across the board.

The trouble is you go into conflict then with the policing problem.

Some middle ground will have to be struck, but I think all of the areas that we are now in, from a political point of view, energy probably is the most important.

The other thing I think we have to address ourselves to is the total philosophy of conservation as we are able to bring this administration's efforts to the people.

What is important in New England states is not important in California.

What's important in California is not important in Virginia.

So those two areas, the general conservation and recreation area, I think we've got an excellent balance in the department on the latter, but I think we're going to have to look to the energy problem and get some more help of

a better coordination of the total administration effort in the energy sector.

Somebody called our problem the other day the credit gap, rather than the credibility gap.

We're not getting credit for a lot of the things that we've undertaken.

This administration has had an extremely comprehensive environment pollution program for the last two years, this year and last year in particular.

And the polling that we called in order to come up with these numbers indicates a very, very low awareness and perception on the part of the public of any involvement of this administration in any pollution activities at all.

I wonder if you have any thoughts on that.

Well, we have.

I think...

The fact that pollution is caused by so many different sources, and the pollution that really bothers people is air pollution.

That's the one that makes your eyes water.

That's the one that people see when they're at work in the city and the field, and they're on their way home.

And we don't have it.

A single focal point on which we can grab air pollution.

We are getting an awful lot of work done in the water pollution field, but there's a lead time there between the time something is done and the time to get any credit for it.

We are sort of in a multi-agency situation as far as air pollution is concerned.

The mobile sources account for about 80% of it, so you're dealing with something that you can't grab hold of, the automobiles, the trucks, the buses, the tractors, and so forth.

We are trying to dramatize areas where we do grab hold of it in a stationary way.

We've got a lot of stack programs going, and some of them are very effective.

And if we can solve this problem down at Four Corners, I think we can.

I think we can.

I think we'll get a little credit for that.

But we are just not getting any credit for any efforts that we're making in municipal air policing areas.

And I really think this is an area where we've got to do some real work just to figure out how to get some credit, because we've done a lot of work there.

Secretary Conley?

John, my own ideas have not at all crystallized.

I have several comments, particularly on Ross's comments here, I just suggest for consideration.

Assuming that what you said is true, that you have a credit gap, which I'm just going to question the truth, that's the principal problem that you have.

You might think in terms of taking one city, or one area.

and one river, or one bay, and just concentrate on it.

Put whatever money is required, and just say, we'll take Pittsburgh.

We're going to use it as a pilot plant from here.

We're going to clean up Pittsburgh.

We're going to take Gallatin Bay, or Santa Barbara Bay, or whatever it is, and we're going to clean up this bay.

We're going to devote whatever it is, local states, and

Cold water on what you've done here, because I believe you're extremely interested in a very important journey.

But obviously we're doing too many things in too many areas.

You're not going to get credit for it.

You can't get credit for it.

And people are not that interested in that many things.

Just not.

They're going to have to choose five or six different...

programs that are vital interests and concentrate on them and do it in such a way that you get credit for.

And the interest that you study these polls, I agree that you can't rely on polls, but there are certain very fundamental things that people are concerned with.

And the tragedy of it is that you can do things for people.

In small groups,

They still look at what somebody else is getting or what you're doing for somebody else and resent that.

more than they appreciate what you did for them.

They think they're not getting the fair share.

So, and this particularly, I think the welfare, I think very frankly that our approach has been over the last several years, and I'm not sure it's true of us even now, that we're trying to do too many things to too many people.

We're trying to spend too much money and give away too much money.

To try to solve two of these people's problems all at the same time.

And we're basically not solving them.

And we're not convincing anybody we're solving them.

And I think we just have to try to, out of all of this, get down to the very basic fundamental things that people are concerned with.

If they're cost-related, no question about that.

We all wrote these things, just cost-related decisions.

One, let's take the farmers.

You've got a lot of programs here for farmers.

I personally think that if you could use this illustration, I personally think that in some way we could start an initiative to break down the barriers that the European community have against the importation of American farm products and do more for you as a farmer than anything else you can do and everything else you can do.

That's just one thing.

The business community generally, you do things for them all day long and they're not grateful to you.

They think they've had it all.

I don't care what you talk about tax remissions, tax rebates, just a human animal to be selfish.

And it's not just true of the business community.

But if they really thought that we were committed to stopping inflation, if they really thought we were committed to...

to help them, the government to help them in their international relations, and in their international trades, if they really thought we were committed to help them compete with the Japanese, the Germans around the world, I think you'd have a whole new transformation of psychology in the country.

in the business community.

So this whole field of international trade has tremendous vocation in areas where you're going to have to have help.

And this is particularly in the foreign belt and the business community.

So I think you can achieve a number of things.

are always a course of thought.

This is not the original of me, but it's time again to listen to others.

Where people really deal with pension taxes is on their property, on their homes.

And we've got to find, we're working on ways where we can hopefully

hold out some promises that with the rate of taxes that there seems to stick with those local governments without increasing taxes on homes, I think you can take yourself and face problems that the American people are concerned with, and we'll concentrate on those and really hammer them home.

You can't begin to get the closest credit yet.

I think that's going to be a problem for us.

I just frankly think that if you do, if you just work your heart out, and beg and just reach the Congress to pass a lot of these programs, and nobody's ever going to know about it, a lot of people don't care about this.

They just don't have any great national impact.

And we just spend all our time working on it.

John, the President asked about consumerism.

And I'm not quite sure why it doesn't appear on any of those charts.

But there may be some reasons.

It was an opinion of a certain poll later, but not very significant.

It is not a big item.

Business-oriented polls show that consumerism rates very high.

Polls show a decline in public respect for business.

Well, they attribute it to two things.

They blame business for all of the ills of the environment, and they blame business for failure to serve the consumer adequately.

Now, it may well be that in polls of that type, consumerism is a sort of a direct addition that appears on a form as one of the items that might be checked, yet people tend to check it because they remember something they're unhappy about.

It may also be that it isn't nearly as big an issue in the minds of people as Nader and some of the others would have us believe.

I would conclude that it probably isn't a very important political issue unless it centers in on one or two matters.

In the course of the campaign, I would see that consumerism would be very important in November 1972.

It gives us plenty of concern in the way we have to resist some of the things that are going on.

Attitudes are awfully important, I think, in what you say about the declines, probably attitude toward business, and of course, the debtors' credibility and the credibility of...

That movement is extremely high, and there's a proposal from the National Committee poll that just came out, that came by just yesterday, that includes a poll on here, and his incentives and credibility I think is under 70%.

Yeah, but isn't the cost of living really an important aspect of consumerism?

It goes right down to the expression being made to respect the economy.

After all, that's what the consumer feels in the pocketbook.

Yes, exactly.

That's registering very strongly.

Yes, except we don't classify that in the consumer issues of safety and price and inventory.

Well, that's a very narrow definition, really.

And Nader is beginning to reach out to this whole broad area of the basic impact on the pocketbook.

He played around and said, you know, he needs to build a reputation.

But now he's beginning to move into the real issues to him.

I took up another point raised by John Connolly.

It's true this is a very long list, but it really ought to be broken down into major and minor, because a very large part of this is relatively routine.

There are even authorization, annual authorization bills and things like that listed.

I think if you listed it in the major and minor, you'd find a lot more than six or eight.

Major issues that are involved here and all the rest is relatively normal and routine.

Except for one thing, I think, Marty, when you get into this environment, you're all things to all people, and I believe any major environmental program is a composite, it's a montage of many, many things, and I think it's the way we sell that.

You can't take this very long list of stuff from the interior.

You don't say, well, this is major, this is minor.

You won't.

You'll just say it's a composite.

And what we're trying to do is to develop a way to bring the administration through in the whole composite.

Well, look at it this way.

Let's think back to what Ms. Johnson did.

And she got identified with unification.

What did she call it?

What was involved?

What can you think of in terms of what was accomplished?

They spruced up Washington, they planted trees on the highways, many of which our Texas Highway Department has been doing for 25 years.

Nobody picked him, but she brought him to the fore.

This is terrible.

She attracted the national attention to him, so he gets identified forever more when the national gives the ticket.

And this is part of the whole environment thing that you're talking about.

So he's identified.

We identified the president, she was the same in New York, and I think we've gotten more nail, Mr. President, on that one thing.

Gateway East and all the rest of the whole...

I think Secretary Connolly struck a very, very important point in what was inherent in what he said, which was basically, what's dramatic is really tomorrow's cold.

I don't think we should be unduly concerned with polls for this reason.

What those polls show is what seemed to be important to those people the morning they were asked those questions.

And what seemed to be important to them that morning was, to a great extent, what the headlines of their newspaper were about, or what their television commentators had to say the night before, or what their opinion leaders in their community, maybe their pastors or somebody of that sort, talked about a few days ago.

Now, basically, there's one gut issue, and that's the economy.

We all know that, and of course...

I haven't found anybody yet who would contest the fact, as the president pointed out, that that's a family issue.

It relates to the ability to provide education, the ability to provide a better life for the people that he, the head of the family, is really concerned with, and that they're all concerned.

Now, coming back to these other issues, I think we have been...

I'm going to use the word legalistic in our approach to domestic programming because we've tried to become expert in the, what you might call, the inter-functioning of governmental delivery systems, which mean absolutely nothing to the people in the community.

I recall I had a meeting about two and a quarter years ago when

We were discussing mass transit.

Now, mass transit hasn't appeared very prominently anywhere, but principally because nobody's done anything about it, people have just given up on it.

They don't even think about it anymore.

They think it's an impossibility in this country to have a good mass transit system, so they don't talk about it.

But if you use John Connolly's suggestion, and you went in with the kind of funding that John Volpe would need to do a pilot program...

Put a good subway system in a principal city.

You'd find that that would be first in a lot of polls because people who went and saw that thing functioning would want it for their city and it'd be on their mind.

The same way the secretary said cleaning up...

A river, or a bay, or a basin, or taking a highly industrialized city like Birmingham, which might be more practical than Pittsburgh, because they've done lots of good over there already, and cleaning that up from an air pollution standpoint, would have the kind of dramatic impact that would affect the toll you might take next year.

And I just think it's terribly important that we don't program, that we don't respond to what the people think is important at the moment, because that can change overnight as a nigger starts to cronkite in a new direction.

And he starts to talk about a particular subject over and over.

Now, we've got a lot on the plate now.

Tremendous amount of stuff on the plate.

We dropped health reform.

On the Congress, I thought rather precipitately.

And we just dropped it there, and it's been laying in the air like a cold egg ever since.

Nobody's done anything with it.

Nobody's saying much about it.

We've really worked hard with the environmental programs.

We've worked hard with revenue sharing.

We've worked hard with welfare reform.

But we haven't begun to fight...

The gut issues that we have on the plate, to the extent that we can drop them here, it just seems to me that we ought to stick with what we have.

Now, revenue sharing, I know, from my travels around the country, can succeed if we just don't leave it in disgust at this critical moment.

I think Ed Harper, who's been around with me as much as anybody here, and some of the others, and I know John's been all over the place and others talking about it,

Realize that there is tremendous support for this all over the country.

We're just trying to crack the protective band around the Congress, and that's where we are right now.

So I don't believe it's smart for us to launch out in new directions for 72.

It shows that, to me, it makes us vulnerable on the basis that, well, the next administration puts out a whole lot of garbage every year, but they never do anything about it.

We've got good programs on the plate, and I think we ought to stick with it.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I'd like to support what the Vice President said, because as we took a look at what we had in process, it seemed to us that if we could follow through and get what we already proposed, that this would be a tremendous accomplishment.

It seems to me that a few things that John Connolly's talking about could come largely out of what's been proposed.

Now, there may be one or two that ought to be added.

Let me go on to the economic issues and just say this.

It seems to me we're at a very critical point right now, Mr. President, with respect to this economic situation.

And one aspect of it is this interest rate problem that we were dealing with yesterday.

Now, I think the statement that you made yesterday, we thought, well, you might have been here, but in any event, there's a critical point where either these interest rates are going to begin to move up here in a very substantial way and cool off this whole economy, or we're going to take the steps necessary to prevent that.

And consequently, it would seem to me that

It may be desirable to begin to do with respect to this pocketbook issue what you did a year ago with respect to revenue sharing and so on, begin to concentrate on and see all the ways in which we can improve the economy between 1972.

Let me just submit it with respect to housing.

About a year ago I pointed out the building up here in housing with these subsidy tokens, and that's a level of cost that's going to be tremendous.

And yet, even when you get that level of cost, the seven and a half billion dollars a year in subsidies,

You're only going to be subsidizing about one-fourth of the families who are eligible for subsidy.

Now that means that the sort of thing we do here early on is building up.

They see the fellow next door getting a subsidy, but by gosh, they aren't getting a subsidy, and they say, what the hell can he get, and I don't get it, and you're building up as many people against you as there are for you.

I'm not prepared in this connection with housing.

to take a look at the question of whether this basic concept with respect to housing is really what it ought to be, namely that we're going to build new housing for the poorest families, and let other families try to get their housing needs anywhere they want to, or whether we have to take a completely fundamentally different approach.

and provide some across-the-board assistance to people who want to build housing, whether they're middle-income or whether they're low-income, and let these families who are being bypassed from this specter housing get some of that housing benefit and stimulate to that very kind of hope.

But I simply...

I simply cite this as a sort of thing that we might well be taking a look at now, from an economic standpoint, if we can't deal with some of the things that we're going to be confronted with here, and we need to do it now, in my opinion, if we're going to have an answer program by 72.

But, George, I ask you this one question, if you've got any evidence,

We know that does in other countries.

Well, George, you know it doesn't.

No, sir.

You're really saying do the same thing with welfare reform and housing?

Yes.

Essentially.

Well, before you, could you get, I'd like John for this to be a hyper-representation.

I should be traded for you.

I just want to know what we could do in this field.

Let me, but I simply...

It's a terrible example of the sort of things to be done here if we began to zero in with the task force to really take a look at this economic situation.

I think you're going to have, forgive me for saying it, but I think you're going to have to face this labor situation before the 72 election, and you're going to cope with this cost of living problem, and that seems to me it's time to begin to shape up some recommendations in that area in order to convince people that you're really going to deal with the inflationary problem.

On this subsidized housing point, Peter, did you have something you wanted to say?

Mr. President, we do have a group working with Treasury and HUD on the financing of our housing start levels, and they have a program included in the various programs for subsidized middle-income housing, both as in New York State, both in the rental and in purchase levels.

The current projections as to what kind of money is needed there is well within the scope of the budget for 1972 to keep the housing starts at the levels that we have projected as necessary.

Let me talk about something that's different.

It's on the housing thing.

We can talk about all these other issues.

We can get people excited about the environment.

We can see all of them.

And we, with or without the help of people, we can make it much more important.

That's what the environment is.

How did it become an issue?

Not because it was really an issue.

The media made it an issue.

Over the last two years, it was 1% in every poll two years ago.

Now it's up to three or four.

I remember you came to me before the election.

You're an outdoor guy.

You like those dampers.

So we looked at all this stuff.

We decided to pick up the waters and so forth.

We used all the issues that the media was seeing at the same time.

That's why it's so funny about your answer.

The same is true of so-called consumerism and its

More blatant aspects.

That will be an issue.

It's not because the average guy is so concerned about this.

Everybody gets irritated that he can't get his television set fixed or his car fixed.

You know, like that.

You can take your $300, put it in your bumper.

That's the source of everything.

We all know most of that.

Let's come down to the real issues of matter.

See what's going to happen from it.

First internationally, third world.

On that, we will look very good next year.

However, once you move that out, I think it's all a blessing.

Once you move that out, then they're going to zero in on the others.

It will be a blessing for us.

We'll be glad to have it on the way.

Internationally, we're likely to have, unless we get some bad breaks, some quite good news in terms of the war situation, and also good news in terms of our relations with the superpowers.

So people will say, well, these guys know how to run the Internationale.

Then they'll zero in on the economy.

Now, on the economy, what matters are two things.

One's jobs, the other's inflation.

And this poll you referred to just recently had a very interesting byproduct.

A question was asked that's never been asked before in a poll.

It said, which of these two matters do you think your government should give the highest priority to?

Reducing unemployment or stopping inflation?

You know what came out?

Buddy, 30% for one, 30% for the other, and 30% said both.

So you have a useful interest in the two problems.

Some people are more worried about unemployment, some people are more worried about their cost of living, some are worried about both.

But looking to the economic issue...

You can move the economy.

You gotta do one or the other.

Let's face it, to be so lucky as to have both unemployment and inflation out of the way would be very, very lucky.

Certainly the unemployment issue is one that we have to have moving in our direction.

Now, if it's moving in our direction, even though unemployment is at 4.5%, 4.3%, 4.4%, whatever it is, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference.

Because 96.5% of employees, it's a question of whether the numbers that come out each month say things are getting better or things are getting worse.

At the present time, we're in that period when they're either getting worse or saying about where they are, how much worse they're getting.

But if you get the number coming down, everybody's happy.

And we come back, of course, to the 10-year unemployment, which is 57%.

Nobody paid much attention because the media didn't give them a bang about it, as they do us.

It's alright.

It's 5 and 9 tenths the next year, for the average.

But it was moving down.

Then 5 and 7 the next year, moving down a bit.

Still, very high level, but moving down.

So, let me tell you, on that issue, we're likely to look, unless all of our projections are right, we're likely to look more hopeful on the inflation side.

The inflation side is extremely difficult.

CDI's rate of increase has happened.

The first quarter has happened what it was a year ago.

Whether it be in the second quarter, and in fact with the close sale price index moving up, it remains to be seen.

But at least we continue to battle.

The main point is, get one or the other looking back.

Not have both look back.

Now we come to your issue, the content.

In terms of doing something about unemployment, there is nothing that does more about it more quickly and more visibly than housing.

Now, therefore, in terms of cost, instead of talking about a huge WPA, a lot of damn make-work jobs around, and this may be, I know that Arthur and probably all the bankers over at Treasury and all the rest of the goddamn bankers in the country will say, oh no, we can't do anything about interest rates.

to keep it down and so forth.

But if the key to getting housing a first is this kind of activity, it ought certainly to be considered not because of housing, which is important, but because of its effect on employment, which is enormously important.

You see, George, therefore I think this has to be considered, John, a bold aspect.

What, has anybody got a better thing to do?

Well, we're doing one thing that could happen in your field,

In this whole transit field, in terms of what we can do, what can be done quickly to affect jobs, and we're only talking about affecting it by one-tenth of one percent.

In other words, if the number goes from 6.2 to 6.1 to 6.6, that's quite a bit, and that's 100,000 jobs.

All right.

So what can you do in a transportation deal?

Well, I don't know.

We've got a lot of things going on.

But when you build, I mean, that's jobs, right?

Now, of course, we all know there's lots of problems.

You've got living costs.

You've got a lot of other things.

But in this deal, if we're going to have money, if something is going to be done, as it will be done by the Congress to work on unemployment,

Isn't it far better to have it be done for something that really builds, that is constructed, like housing, like transportation, and to have it tossed away in these nutty things that there are a lot of things going on, parts of the idea, I mean, that's fine, but we'll have that forever.

The other deal that I would mention just briefly is that

Where are your other subsidiary issues that appear to be coming into the focus, you see?

All right.

Suppose the war is out of the way.

International.

All right.

Let's talk about that.

Let us suppose that unemployment is starting to move down.

There's nothing that politics or the borders more than the back.

Then they move to something else.

Then they move to the next meeting, and the question will be the issue.

So you fight it out on that floor, and here we come to health.

If the media can make the environment an issue, they sure as hell will make health.

Because the health of Teddy can't be considered.

That's why health, regardless of where it is in the present poll, we vow to go up.

Not to go up because it will go up in health costs, or out from the doctors, or, you know, getting people bad medicine, or not giving them an offer, it's costing them too much, whatever the case might be, and so forth and so on.

So, we're complaining, and the health team is very indifensive over here, inundating, of course, to try to deal with the real problem, dealing with the fact that this, as opposed to, I'll just say this, I couldn't agree more with John Collins, because we're scattering too much.

Scattering too much.

People can understand at most three issues, usually two, and...

And many times, most students, many can only understand one, just one.

And we get in 30, and none get across.

The one thing that I noticed in this national committee poll referred to,

is that despite more speeches made by cabinet officers more and more effectively on telephone programs and arrests and so forth, that a clear identification with various issues has not come true on these tweets.

And the reason is that there hasn't been a zeroing in on one, two, or three.

It couldn't be more right that Mrs. Johnson handled the beautification they first was equipped him to do,

But second, it was done with great public relations skill.

We kept walking around, running around, until finally she was fully identified with it.

And in that case,

Who would care less about beautification?

The average guy doesn't look to the right or to the left when he goes down the highway using blind rock anyway.

So what's the trouble is that the other hand, beautification, it affects folks.

Mr. President, on the Secretary's point about taking a pilot project or a demonstration project, I think that...

Introducing the entire trial, we all know that the subject of crime, we've done that.

And with some degrees, the Department of Justice has zeroed in on this district where we have jurisdiction.

And perhaps we expect in one or two other major cities, this has been the only major medical narrative where we have had good results in terms of crime.

Before you go to that, could I, Mel, Mel has some comments for me.

Go ahead, Mr. President.

I'll make it very brief, I get very interested in this question of issues, and I think our problem is that we have gone for too many issues and haven't zeroed in on a few important issues as we prepare for the campaign.

I don't think we should take a holier-than-thou attitude either about make work.

If we have to make work, we should be willing to make work as we get into 1972.

I listened to the debate up on the floor of the house the other day.

I went in there and sat for an hour and a half.

And as they debated, we were not communicating our position.

We got into a lot of technical arguments.

over an application of what we call revenue sharing, which doesn't come true to anybody, because it doesn't tie in with the property taxes he's paying on his home.

And the way to sell that is to tie it into that property tax issue that is a big issue in every state in this union.

Now, we got into the thing about how we as a party were going to do all this training, and we were going to make the best use of the money.

And certainly that was the right approach.

We are right on the issue.

But we couldn't get so tied up with being right on the issue.

We're unwilling to face the political problem that we're going to have in 1972, and it's going to be the issue of jobs.

It's going to be that issue.

Is that something we can do something about?

We're not going to be able to control this inflation issue.

We're going to have a hell of a time with that issue.

Nobody can do something with jobs.

And so the problem, as I see it, is one of...

Maybe we'll have to go along a little bit with this thing.

And I don't think we should get ourselves tied up to a philosophy here that every damn dollar has to be just absolutely effectively and efficiently used in 1972.

Wouldn't you accept the proposition, though, that it's amazing work and it made more sense?

to make it through housing and transportation and things like that.

And now the tax has been cut back.

That's why Bob and Pete said a moment ago that, well, we can do, we can do, we can have, we can have one million nine within the existing budget.

That's all well and nice, and let's do that.

My point is, maybe we have to think bigger, if there's a market, if there's a market.

Because in a housing figure, it's, we can argue the burns, you know, because you refer to housing as being open factories.

I agree with you up to a point, but one thing that bothers me is when you say make work.

Now, we have a make work program.

In our men's cars training and the special revenue training, the big distinction about our program and their program is that they make permanent jobs where people are going to be on the federal payroll or some state payroll forever.

And we have a two-year limitation in which they must be converted to the private sectors.

I can't employ people forever.

Let's not lose in our efforts to create the distinctions that make us different from their party, because it's this...

The total move toward government subsidization on a permanent basis of everybody has gotten us into darn much trouble nationally.

And this is something that a lot more people understand.

Really, the fundamental difference between our parties lies in this issue.

We can't, in our efforts to move quickly and politically to meet the job crisis,

Allow ourselves to be sucked into more of that same point of view.

We've got programs that can make work on an intelligent basis, the way Jim's plan has survived.

Also, remember this on the revenue sharing.

I think this is something that really isn't seen as much as it should be, Mr. President.

This is an issue.

that may not mean a whole lot to a man in his home, but it is cutting the very fundamental support out from under the grassroots of the Democratic Party.

It's cutting the county judges loose from the national party.

It's cutting the county commissioners loose, the legislators.

These people seek for the first time a chance to get some assistance in the labor of every form of resources.

That won't help them.

And they are, if this issue is tearing the Democratic Party apart, we must let go of it on the basis that a man in his living room goes and understands it.

Because those legislators understand it, and those governors understand it, and the mayors understand it.

And the more chaos that we can create by pushing this revenue sharing issue,

The better off we're going to be politically now.

We mustn't forget that it has a great political value that doesn't necessarily relate to the crisis identification in private citizens.

Well, I agree with you on that.

There's no question.

But I think it does have to be related to those local problems that take place in Russia.

That's the other hammer on the basic assumption that the Congress has no confidence in any level of government.

That's the whole one point that I can make on the legislature, and that's to put it a little closer to home, to that home and that family.

If you read very carefully, I agree that the political company causes chaos among various political people, by some of their people opposing the national government, and some before it.

That may or may not be the case on our side, which is rather interesting.

But, in terms of revenue sharing, as it affects the innovation,

Get the individual in terms of salt.

He gets the idea that this purpose is simply to rescue states and cities from actual chaos.

He couldn't care less.

If it's put in those terms, if it's simply in the case of making government work better, he doesn't care less in those terms.

If he sees it in terms of, for example, of a revenue sharing, he's going to be able to accomplish something that's insane for him.

He won't care.

Let me put it another way.

I think he may have gone too far in revenue sharing.

It's simply in the sense that we're going to add more money and give more money to states and municipalities so that they can spend more money doing things for people.

As a matter of fact, there's one loud, clear signal that came through, I suppose, it was the people.

They were asked generally about...

They want to cut revenue rates.

So if you present revenue sharing in terms of the federal government giving a hell of a lot more money to cities and states so they can spend more, that is a spell.

That is who you are.

Oh, it's true if you ask if you want for your government to spend more for education, yes.

You want for this, that's right.

but not state citizens.

On the other hand, if revenue sharing is presented in a way, tied in such a way, that the individual knows that he is going to get relief from increases in property taxes, or relief by reductions in personal goods, it will be a real shock.

I mean, for the individual.

There's no reason why it shouldn't be.

What I'm really getting at is this.

I think that if we

I think Reverend Strang is right as a constant.

I think he's right for a number of reasons we all know.

But I think in terms of relating it individually in a way that he's going to support it, we have to bear in mind the fact that an individual has to see in terms of how it's going to help him, not how it's going to help the mayor, not how it's going to help the county commission, not how it's going to help the county judge or the governor balance his budget.

He's starting to be concerned about how it's going to help him, and to him there's taxes.

And that's why John was you, John, you and I talked about, we've got to get this thing put in terms of taxes one way or another.

Property taxes.

Property taxes, if there's one thing that has impact, it's the income taxes.

The property tax, they get a bill every six months.

They all look at it.

They know how much it is.

They haven't got the money.

Then they say, ah, my taxes are out.

And I don't disagree at all with what you said, regarding the validity issues, regarding the fact that it's one that divides our...

Our potential opponents.

But I think in terms of long-term issues, we have to get Morton's gutsy political sex appeal to the issue for the average guy.

And he's got to see it in terms, well, at long last, maybe his taxing's going to stop.

He mustn't see it in terms, well, these guys in Washington are just going to have to.

All the money that's being wasted.

At the local, at the state, at the present time.

Mr. President, so I think we can do a tremendous amount of make work without appearing make work.

To take up the slack of ordinance procurement, to take up the slack of reduction in the space program, for example.

The big employers are people like shipbuilders.

Air pollution control devices can put up $2 billion in the economy short term if we can use a tax credit device or some way to stimulate industry to do this.

These would be the type of people who are highly skilled, who aren't necessarily the same people that would be involved in much of the housing construction.

And these are short term things, though.

Thank you.

Determine where a dollar spent has the best job effect, what the cost-benefit ratio is really of dollar spent in this area versus dollar spent in terms of employment, in terms of jobs, and in terms of areas that are now depressed, in terms of the west coast cities, for example.

and other cities.

I think we can all, all of us, I certainly, in our department, we can swing the priorities toward employment if we have the right economic criteria and data to do it.

And if we can get back to the tax credit, I know that got unpopular, and George Bush and I

through either tax credit or special loans in some way, we in the machine shops and in the job shops and in the fabrication shops and in the steel mills, we'll up production across the board because we're looking at having a pipe that's probably four to five billion dollars worth of goods over a decade.

I think you have to look.

Roger, what problems does tax credit have?

Everybody knows.

Well, I know I have an appointment, but what I meant is, it's certainly something we can advocate in January of next year.

I'm going to be wasting my time, so I'm going to ask for a prayer to give them the pass on the tax legislation.

It already does, right?

But the thing about it, Mr. President, is that jobs are the result of capital employed.

And if we put our money in short lead time programs, it's going to have an effect on the number of people employed in 1972.

Now, in the case of mass transit, the lead times are such that

If we dedicated ourselves to four or five billion dollars, now, in that case, you couldn't get it spent over less than four or five years.

Secretary, if I might, I just want to hammer home what you just said, and what I think President John Connolly did on it.

Unless you turn any issue into a gut issue, the American people don't remember.

And this business of property tax and jobs is the way we sold after 14 months our sales tax master.

We just kept repeating it, repeating it, repeating it.

Not 14 issues, not 19 issues.

but only two or three.

And the way it sold is that it was going to reduce their property taxes, and also property taxes was industry which provided jobs, and industry was leading Massachusetts, therefore we had to have a limited sales document taxed in order to keep those jobs.

I did come back from overseas, and one thing that I noticed particularly is that unless we as a nation start to really come up and trade with this R&D and technology,

France, particularly, is going to pass this out.

You and I know exactly what Western Germany and Japan are doing, but I certainly feel that this is an area in which, as Barry Goldwater said in Paris after we bought the Concorde, I just can't believe that my country is backing out of this race even before it got to the starting line.

The opinion makers, yes, are going to do the job for us, whether we do it or not.

But I think that we have a tremendous opportunity here.

They talked about beautification.

They did a great job.

But not a single billboard has been torn down.

The Congress has never appropriated but two million dollars.

For beautification, until we fought our heads off for it last year, and we've done it.

We haven't had any particular credit for it.

We are trying to dramatize it around the main, toward down the first billboard.

We're going to be tearing down a great many more of them, which hasn't been done before in the sea and highways.

But I think it's a case of where we have to dramatize these things, and I guess it's a better way to have done some tasks, i.e.

I think that the international trade thing is something that our American worker is getting so productive through the mechanical means of technology that unless we can sell more overseas, we're not going to have enough jobs to keep our men busy.

And therefore I think it's essential that we...

A look at this international trade situation with a few toys really being able to sell to some of these countries like Yugoslavia that right now is starving for technology, is very anxious to get upgraded both in mass transit and a lot of other things.

And I think there are potentially good customers for us, and I think we ought to cultivate those areas where they...

It's a sign of western methods rather than communist fields.

I would hope that through the means of the GACD, the improved railroad systems, we're going to divide the mass transit, which we're working at, and you'll start to see some real developments, I think, before the election of next year, even though it won't be the long term.

We will have the very rapid transit systems in California and San Francisco that will open about February of next year, to which the federal government has contributed not a large share, but about $175 million.

This will be open, so it will really tell a story, as well as merit not the American public.

We're using public transportation, and this is what we have to push.

I would like to make one observation on that issue.

Looking at some of those changes in the polls, particularly with respect to race relations and civil rights, I think we have to reexamine how some of the programs that we have on the books are administered.

I think that the reason the race relations question of civil rights has gone down is because the government has had a little hot rhetoric in leading the marches in some Alabama.

Yes, I was getting that, Mr. President.

We have had more accomplishments than the previous administration in any field that you want to look at, and yet that has ceased to be an issue because we have not exacerbated the situation, but we have recognized in all cases there is two sides to the problem, and we have carried out our statutory and constitutional responsibilities without...

churning up the communities by leading the strike.

And I think that probably also is true with respect to the campus situation where leadership is provided.

And I see this same situation rising in the environmental field and other fields, where we have to be very careful as to how these programs are administered.

Carry out your responsibilities and do your job.

But be sure that you recognize that there are two sides to these issues, and both interests have to be protected.

I think that's something that we all ought to look at all of our programs.

program our activities, and particularly the PR with respect to it, recognizing that there are these deals in which there are multiple interests.

I don't think that I'm a citizen here.

I might go through the whole criminal justice system for you, but sometimes I'd be glad to do it.

Besides, I've got to go out and testify.

I'd like to just follow on that point for you.

There's no question about the conflict in strife and making issues.

And Labour, Johnson, I don't think was quite as clever as we're given our credit for, I think, if I recall the history right there.

One of the things that made that history was that the Republicans in the House fought on a late night session, and it got dramatized.

It wasn't the spending of the money, it was the fact that there was a big battle over beautification.

We were pro-junkyard.

And when there's a fight, and it's wrestling, as John Mitchell said,

Well, John Clegg is a dirty dude.

But to reverse what John Mitchell said, he said that you might want to reduce the strife and conflict in some instances.

I think the other is true.

You might want to escalate the strife.

And if we know the economy is going to be an issue, no matter what we do in 1972, then we darn well, I think, better be involved in

working and fighting visibly in conflict and in strife with those things that are inhibiting the economy from functioning.

And I think that takes aggressive public posture on the economy.

Visible.

Then we ought to coordinate it to make sure that we're all tracking together.

Well, that's right.

If you're going to take a position, as we've done, I guess, to make work kind of jobs, then that's also the kind of thing we're talking about in housing, and the kind of thing we're talking about in the environment.

To create real jobs, to go after those things.

As a matter of fact, we need to separate out the job provision and the revenue sharing.

That might be a way to do it.

We're looking to separate it out.

Kelly, you wrote down something a moment ago.

It was very dissimilar.

Yeah.

We thought of the point that you made with John Volpe while we were in court.

He and I worked together on the promotion of this.

He was my man.

It would add one small thing that was very effective.

It's to keep hammering on the point that this is the real estate sector.

Tax on the whole is the most progressive tax, and we found it made a lot of use of tax.

It boils more heavily...

I'm the lowest rent payer than anybody else.

And as you go down the income scale, the real estate tax bears more and more heavy.

And if you walk out with a point there, which everybody will understand, the fact that the person was up on his income...

The cost of shelter is a higher portion on income, but another factor is that as you go down income scale, a relatively lower portion of total overhead for the land board goes into the maintenance and care of the shelter itself.

So the very lowest, poorest portion

Slums, of course, what you see is the situation in which the only overhead paid by the landlord is his taxes.

At any rate, the proposition that general revenue sharing is a program for the taxpayer, I think is very strong.

proposition and a very valid proposition, because what you're doing in the long run is shifting part of the cost of government to a broader and fairer tax base from the most unfair, most progressive, most subject to the

pure accident of where its taxable property has to be.

I used to contrast, for example, in my speeches for John Bowling's program, the gaunt skeletons of the vacant textile mills in Fall River, across the river from the town of Somerset, where there happened to be located two large power plants.

As a result, in the town of Somerset, they had more taxable real estate and more revenue than they knew what to do with, and they were building extra fire stations for the money, buying new equipment.

And this is, of course, just an illustration of the arbitrariness of that situation.

And what we're trying to do is to create a fair decision system, etc.

And I think there is a lot of violence in that.

There can be.

...be effectively translated into English.

We've got to be gentle.

Well, Mr. President, I think, though, that's the point.

I don't want to be misinterpreted on my remarks about jobs.

I think you're understood.

I'm rather not sure about the job thing.

There are a lot of things I think we all can do right now in decision-making that make jobs available next year.

Decisions have to be made now, whether it's in housing or any of these other areas.

The question is, you come back from, you see what the French are doing.

Well, the French are financing their sales abroad.

We've got to compete with them.

We can make some decisions now and sell a few of this equipment to make jobs in the aerospace industry.

They've out and sold a million dollars worth of equipment outside of their country within the last nine months.

They've done a hell of a job, or he knows what they've done in that area, including Latin America.

They travel 500 million dollars worth into Latin America.

Well, we've figured out a country-crush report.

There's many people that are yacking about the climate and so forth.

We must sell military equipment to Latin America.

Latin America should spend their money for cleaning up their ghettos.

On the other hand, Latin America spends the lowest percentage of its national income in any section of the country, 2% of its GDP for military equipment.

Secondly, they're going to spend it anyway.

And so the point is now the French are giving up so much rather than us.

Now, which is better, to have the French there with their influence in Latin America, or ours with our influence?

Our influence hasn't been too benevolent at times, perhaps, if you look at the Chilean experiment and a few other things, but it's certainly a hell of a lot better than having a French there who was simply there to fish for those waters.

And also make sure I brought that...

I just wanted to address myself to one point that was made here earlier.

I would agree with John Connolly that

Business programs doesn't create any gratitude in the part of businessmen.

Business doesn't vote in elections.

But there are many things that businessmen can do in elections and can be helpful.

What I'm really driving at is that I don't think we should ever address ourselves through a program that helps business so much because it helps business.

It's because of what it does for the economy and in turn what it does for people.

In fact, business is a very large part of the economy.

And all the statistics we talk about, whether it's unemployment or sales or credit or industrial production or gross national product, are the consequences of business activity.

Which leads me to the question of the environmental issue and its effect on business.

Right today, there are billions of dollars of expenditures being held up because of environmental issues.

Public plants, the Alaska pipeline, business expansion, and so forth.

They're being held up?

Well, let's get going with those damn things.

Now, that's just silly.

I don't think they are being held up, Corey.

They're just being held up because of the damn environment.

Let's get going.

Well, that's just silly.

Well, they're being held up by the processes of dealing with them.

Well, in that sense, you find out that it blocks us into the requirement that there be a 102 statement and that kind of thing.

Well, the problem is, if you go ahead with a project of that kind, you get an interruption in five minutes.

That may be true, but I'm only stating it as a fact that the Alaska pipeline might have been built a year or two ago.

A lot of power plants might have been built a year or two ago that hadn't been for the environment.

A lot of business decisions are going to be further because of their concern about the environment.

Let's see if we can get a list of these, and then we'll talk directly to Ruffles.

Let me point out, President, I will do that, but the 102 statements necessarily have to come out of the departments and agencies.

And I must say that the response of a subject operating at an agency is something less than C, in terms of any one of those things.

I can't think of anything that is more important than at least doing it fast, turning it down, turning it down.

But let's get going.

Nothing should be held up because part of this is the screwball that you end with.

If you have a statute that has to be finalized with, and sometimes the agencies are taking 6, 8, 10 months to get it finalized, they can get it done.

I'm going to work a little over time.

I don't want anything delayed, because nothing is going to be delayed.

Every goddamned department is going to have a report in a week on these things being held up.

They're going to listen to me.

Well, like that, that's pretty...

The main thing we want to do is build the elastic pipeline and we've got...

Four or five suits pending at the moment.

I think we're going to have the stipulations and the requirements and the input.

We haven't got all the industry input.

The project description from industry is not in yet.

From industry itself.

But the Coast Guard work now is about to finish.

The Corps of Engineers work is about to finish by September.

We're going to be able to determine, and I think it will be a permit, Mr. President, that we'll fly through the courts.

And if we get one that doesn't fly through the courts, we're going to be in court for three or four years.

Looking at all the points that Maury says about the power.

I know about a lot of these expenditures.

Those are the ones I'm talking about.

I think we can speed this up, and hopefully this powerful and exciting bill of ours will go through up here and help this.

I couldn't agree with you more that one of the things that's difficult, and I'll be very candid about it, is that I think that in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, these not being the rest of the agencies that are involved in the environment, we have created for ourselves as many problems as we've solved.

It's not because of any particular position of anyone else.

I think Rutgers has done a terrific job that we have created within the system here

A head-to-head consultation about it that makes it a very difficult thing to administer.

One of the things that I'm concerned about in our reorganization plan is the things that are not going into the DNR, because there, I think, again, you leave yourself wide open to long delays, difficult interagency conflicts that are going to be...

are going to be required more each time and more difficult to be solving the problem.

The point I wanted to make, which I never got a chance to express, is that of all the environmental actions, the main thing we ought to do is to measure the economic impact of the action by the reach of balance between the environmental improvement and the economy.

We have, we have throughout this government, whether it's consumers, or just for the sake of development, airbag and all those other things, whether it's in the field or the environment, we are not going to study these things in here.

In fact, not on jobs.

And it is deep down.

The thing about it, John, is that I cannot believe, I know it's bureaucracy,

Don't let them tell you it takes six months to get something through.

It takes six months to get something through.

We want it through sooner.

I really feel we can.

Do you feel that the FI creates a following interest?

I think it creates a reason.

It's supposed to get it going.

It creates some difficulties.

I think one of the things is the new agency, and we have all of us in response to it, but I believe that...

I believe that in the environmental area there are tremendous jobs and job opportunities coming forth.

And solving them, there are also a lot of jobs that are being denied because of the restrictions, because of the lead time.

It's the time factor that both ends up in.

We've got these four big power plants, for example, under construction down in the Four Corners area, and the whole thing was slowed up.

But now I think we've got it on track again and going, and if we would have...

Put environmental controls in a positive way so that we begin to stimulate industry to take these actions.

We're talking about thousands, literally thousands.

I take the same water area.

I can put 50,000 people to work within a year if we would go on saving water.

Really, no, we're not going to use it automatically.

It's right on time.

So, yes, sir.

President, we...

So I've assumed our time, and a little besides, I know there's a county committee that wants to meet in the other room, I've just been speaking, so I'll turn it back to just the fact that I've passed around one thing that you're asking us, and we're doing these polls, and now you're going to be thinking about the public perception of the county.

And it's a fear that, in terms of climate, it would indicate that some questions regarding the American public history would be consistently encountered.

That's always the case.

The one point I think we should all be clear of is this.

This shows the need to hammer in on food.

We will get no credit for that.

Except in heaven if we go there.

My point is that as far as the issues are concerned, you mentioned it, what John Mulkey did, there were two property tax jobs.

Everybody knows Jim Rhodes.

He was a very successful Ohio politician.

He only had one team of jobs.

And then he got into the Senate.

Problem is that by the time these guys are done around, we have a big video of them.

We can go around and have all these expectations by the time we get down to it.

We've covered 15 or 20, and that's why there are no starting pieces.

You get down to just a few that are very important.

And of course...

It's one that may be one for the farmer, and there may be one for the city guard, and there may be one for you, and there may be one for the others, and they may all understand.

But in terms of the telling of doing it very simply, that comes first.

The other point is, the thing that Roger's comment brought on, it seems to me that...

Not only looking at the environment, and the environment is a good example of it, we can look at it either way.

We can look at it in the number of jobs that we can create by cleaning up the environment, or we can look at it in the number of jobs that are being denied or delayed because of environmental decisions.

Now, we should go out both ways, because throughout this government, we've got to examine our situation, see whether our own government activities are responsible for the need they send in some of these employment problems, and also to see what areas of opportunity arise.

What if I don't think?

I've got to emphasize, well, I've long been a believer in tax credits, the rest of it.

And I think we should propose some new initiatives that John and Connie are working on for the next time around in January.

Let us recognize that in anything that we try to, that we come up with now, as to what we can do now to affect the employment situations,

This fall and next spring.

But remember that you aren't going to get a tax bill from the Congress this year.

There's no way that you aren't going to get one unless you may hang something on it.

And you might not get one from the spring of next year, and that's too late.

So what we've got to think of are those initiatives that do not require a new tax bill.

Do you agree with that, sir?

Nixon, Agnew & Cabinet officers on Domestic Policy Council and Budget Planning

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Also recorded on June 8, 1971

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Nixon, Agnew & Cabinet officers on Domestic Policy Council and Budget Planning

AI Summary

Audio

NARA Description

Nixon Library Finding Aid

Transcript (AI-generated)

Also recorded on June 8, 1971

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