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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.