Galbraith Offers Unemployment Remedy

"The primary remedy for unemployment is better education, more job training, and an equal break in education and employment for Negroes." John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, said yesterday.

Testifying in Washington before the joint Economic Committee of the congress, Galbraith said that although last year's tax cut helped to stimulate the economy, too may tax cuts may reduce federal revenues at the expense of urgent social needs.

"There is the danger that conservatives, once introduced to the delights of tax reduction, will like it too much," he warned. Tax reduction, which gives more money to the well-to-do, does nothing for untrained and uneducated men, he added.

The tasks of education and retraining belong to city and state governments, Galbraith said. He emphasized the tremendous urgency that these local programs be financed wholly or in part by federal funds.

'End Negro Ghettos'

We want "communities with better recreation, better welfare workers, better housing, better law enforcement,less squalid surroundings, and an end to the Negro ghettos," he said.

Galbraith also opposed reduction of the amount of duty-free goods which American tourists may bring back to this country. It is more important to tax the wealthy expatriate who spends $10,000 abroad, he said, than to tax "the Kansas schoolteacher on what she spends on a trip in excess of fifty bucks."

Direct government control over bank lending would regulate capital outflow and therefore ease the balance of payments problems, Galbraith also claimed. This elementary action has been avoided by all governmental agencies, he said.

Galbraith also criticized the current proposals for control of bank lending. To place matters like this on a voluntary basis with businessmen is much the same as putting the closing of veterans' hospitals on a voluntary basis with senators," he said.