Hard Rain Falling

AMERICA HAS GOTTEN tough. The nation took a long, hard at its problems and set off on a bold, new course to solve them, casting away the dogma of the recent past to summon a genuinely different future. That is the way the recent arrivals in Washington see themselves and we cannot argue with their motivation. The United States is in deep trouble. But the ideas that have emerged from our transformed capital--from the seductive illusion of the Laffer curve to the cruel inhumanity of the Human Life Amendment --seem destined only to distort and corrupt what is left of our national dream.

The origin of the power shift in Washington, Massachusetts and around the nation lies in the perception that government had stopped working as it is supposed to, that it had become a force for stagnation. The solution, the new-comers promised, was to truncate the government and return many of its powers to the private sector, where a benevolent invisible hand would massage the nation back to spiritual and economic health. We, too, believe those symptoms exist but place our faith in entirely different remedies from those President Reagan has proposed. For all that the President and his supporters speak of realism and accepting the world as it is, they have embarked on as risky and speculative a course of action as has been attempted in more than a generation.

The product of this change is a federal budget exquisitely tailored to the current agenda of the American right. The government is to be forced off the backs of the people, through reductions in social services, safety regulations and income assistance, leaving private enterprise free to invest and expand in ways that will take up the slack for the abandoned government functions. The Defense Department is exempt from these cutbacks because it must increase preparedness against the world-wide Soviet threat. Furthermore, the government will cut taxes in an effort to encourage investment in the once-again-robust private sector.

Though the President has been understandably reluctant to invoke precedents, one or two might be enlightening. One president in the 1960s tried to raise defense spending without increasing taxes at the same time, and the result--as Republicans have joyously pointed out for at least a decade--was a knot of inflation that paralysed the nation. The order of magnitude of the Lyndon B. Johnson precedent seems almost trivial by comparison. And Reagan might well remember the inflationary jolt of the early 1970s that came when the Arab states increased their oil prices. Under Reagan, energy has magically disappeared as a cause of inflation, but, in fact, our national reliance on a costly and uncertain flow of oil from the middle east still remains one of our most dangerous predicaments.

But--history be damned--the Reagan administration has decided to take a walk on the supply side and no one knows for sure what the effect on the economy will be. We have a guess, though. The cutbacks will force those people least able to cope to make the sacrifices. It won't be Harvard students for the most part who feel the reductions, (some may, however, become ex-Harvard students because of the reductions in student grants and loans) but rather those like the gluttonous children on the public dole who (horrors!) get both food stamps and school lunches and the workers who will now have to depend on the "free" labor market to see their job safety rules enforced. And as for the predicted rejuvenation of the free enterprise system, we have our doubts there, too. Reagan's tax plan (if, as expected, it passes) will offer low and middle-income tax-payers little relief to their already-too-high tax rates, and instead offer the rich a bonanza that David Stockman and company hope will be invested in the reindustrialization of America, Anger against unfairly distributed taxes is justified, but unfortunately it has often been channeled toward measures that do not address the true injustices and make the continuation of essential government services nearly impossible. Our own state, Massachusetts, once known as the most liberal in the nation, made such a mistake in the passage last November of the understandable, if completely unsound, Proposition 2 1/2.

PERHAPS, ALSO, THE Reagan plan will also set off a round of consumer spending that will do nothing but increase inflationary pressures--a sort of hyperthyroid version of the Reagan inaugural bash. One group guaranteed better times ahead under the Reagan years are the defense contractors, who will, as they did in the 1960s, absorb absurdly wasteful amounts of money. In return for this windfall, the nation will receive little: no great number of jobs because defense spending is a notoriously ineffecient way to create employment; no economic benefit because defense spending is non-productive and inflationary; and no peace of mind because the American military (and its political leadership) have yet to learn that our army is an underpaid, overly eleborate failure of a fighting unit.

The defense increases, however, bespeak an even more dangerous evil in our society. President Reagan arrived in Washington advocating a policy of international confrontation and the boost in the defense budget is but one example of the militarism that dominates Washington today. Reagan's refusal to keep his promise to end draft registration is another. An agreement in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) was one of the few achievements of the Carter administration (ultimately undone in the Senate), and the Reagan administration's reluctance to discuss disarmament or even arms limits shows paranoia getting the best of common sense.

The arrival of the New Right as the dominant political force in the nation gives progressives (or liberals or whatever they are called now) not only a challenge but also the opportunity to regroup and assess what has and has not worked in the past. We favored Barry Commoner of the Citizens Party for the presidency in November, not because we thought he would win, but because we thought he was the only candidate who had addressed the issues with a consistent concern for equality and justice, universally distributed. Perhaps, as the November results would indicate, the future is not with the Citizens Party; certainly it does not lie with "throwing money" at problems, or, conversely, with abandoning them to the "invisible hand." A future with equitably distributed taxes and without dangerous or uncertain energy sources; with civil rights and without handguns; and with more evenly distributed economic benefits and without a political system that inspires only meagre participation--this is a future still worth fighting for, and not, we believe, one that the Reagan presidency will provide. The current leaders in the struggle for the issues we believe in are temporarily or perhaps even permanently out of public favor. But the cause remains as valid as ever; and when the public learns the true nature of the new gospel in Washington, the voices of protest against it will be impossible to ignore. We raise ours now.