Page 4 EDITORIAL Lyndon Johnson Lyndon Johnson, the most powerful political figure in the history of the country is to be buried today on the banks of his beloved Perdanoles in the hill country of Texas. As the 36th President of the United States, the 64- year-old Johnson was a phenomenon during his time. Entering political life at the of 22 when he went to Washington as a member of a Congressman’s staff, later as a Congressman himself, then Senate Majority Leader, Vice President, and President, Lyndon Johnson managed to grasp and hold more political might during his 30 years of public life than any man How he handled that power will be the subject of historians for many years to come. Thrust into the Presidency by the path of a bullet, Mr. Johnson was immediately hailed in most circles as the monarch he wanted to be because of the great power he had clinched for years in his political party and the Congress. But even in his second year in office, after his blistering defeat of Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential race, Lyndon Baines Johnson began to feel the wrath of an unstable constituency, a nation of people who refused to accept such a sharp drop in sophistication, education and taste as revered in John Kennedy. The public, if not the press, realized that in their President they had a man largely unread, who preferred to get his information by word of mouth, though he rarely listened. Mr. Johnson later became feared by a great host of his public because he was a man with a small stock of basic ideas who capitalized on the Kennedy brain trust. In his younger years Lyndon learned from men like Sen. Richard Russell, Rep. Sam Rayburn and other members of his party in the Southern block that the life of the successful politician dictated that he stay out of corners, away from crisis, and in a position where change is as ordinary as the dawning of a new day. But the Mr. Johnson soon found his corner; to try to militarily win a war in Vietnam was as fruitless as trying to batter down an open door. And while Mr. Johnson will obviously receive praise from his peers for his domestic policies handed to him broadly from his predecessor, he will also be marked for his resounding opinion that ‘Communists, using force and intrigue, seek to bring about communist-dominated world.” As president, Mr. Johnson maintained forcefully that “Our convictions, our interests, our life as a nation demand that we resolutely oppose, with all of our might, that effort to dominate the world.” On a personal level Lyndon was perhaps loved, and then hated the most. The renowned and cautious ‘‘Scotty’’ Reston of the New York Times was one of the first journalists to see through the Johnson facade. He wrote in November, 1963 that Mr. Johnson was ‘“‘tyrannical with his personal staff, disorderly about ad- ministration, more thin-skinned about press criticism than any President since the last President Johnson. . .a man who tended to regard dissent as perversity, as if criticism was not a duty in a free society but a crime.” And for a man, for whom access to the White House is a necessity, that took courage. As the years wore on and the war was expanded at the hands of the President, Mr. Johnson’s Great Society fell on its face; the world began to distrust; creative federalism fell apart; challenges of justice promulgated; the War on Poverty lost most bat- tles; and the quest for peace died. But still Lyndon trekked forward, disbelieving that he could have made a mistake. Lyndon Johnson was not a civil rights activist down deep for any reason except that he thought it politically smart. In this and other endeavors he was right. In right; not because of basic ideals and ethics, but because he was the political animal that wielded the power and respect that he chose to dictate. To that end historians will endeavor to sort through the maze of paper to lay bare the true Johnson motives that could not have been possible during his life-time, because as long as the political wind was blowing the boy from the banks of the Per- danales had the audacity to stick his finger up and de ide hich way to go. Oe, SA Thissa 'n Thatta by H. H. Null, 111 The Shapp Chap has returned safely from a visit to Israel to find that things, if possible, are even more mixed-up than when he went away. Unfortunately, the state has turned up nothing so readable as the Watergate Caper, but the King of Prussia incident has a flair to it that is not humdrum. It seems that, spurred by Mayor Rizzo, the Philadelphia police have been trying to hold down the crime statistics there and have been at least theoretically, hot on the trail of Quaker City criminals. Shadowing the Phila- don’t get too clubby with the criminals, have been a parcel of state cops loaned to Philadel- phia D. A. Arlen Spector, a Republican; shadowing the shadowers were three more of the constabulary, sent there presumably by ex-police commissioner Urella. I suppose the criminals had an eye on these gum shoes through some sort of espionage at the King of Prussia Motel where all of these shenanigans took place, so it just went around and around. Anyhow, so far as I know, nobody caught any Philadelphia criminals or Philadelphia cops, but Urella’s three officers were caught wiretapping the other state officers and it stirred up quite a stench. S0000000; back at Harrisburg, for reasons not completely clear to your reporter, Urella gets into a hassle with Atty. Gen. Creamer. Atty. Gen. Creamer, if I am any judge of horseflesh, has less under his hat than any attorney-general or even district attorney that I ever heard of, so he proceeds to give out statements every now and then to the effect that if Urella isn’t fired, he will quit and leave the Commonwealth of Pennsyl- vania flat on its backside. Whereupon, the Chap, refreshed by his Mediterranean visit, returns and fires both of them: Not a bad idea, says I, but it would have been even better if the governor had followed it up by conceding that he has got the state into quite a mess and then handed down his own resignation. Because he hired both of these worthies and if they didn’t turn out so well, it shows that his own judgement of people is very poor. Next move in this scenario was for three of four members of the State Crime Commis- sion to resign in sympathy with Creamer. As TRB from Washington We're getting a little tired telling how in- drawn and removed the President is, and this is an opportunity to write about something else. This is the start of a brand new presidential term, Inaugural and all. The “magic time’’ for; changing policies is’in the first few months of. an administration; Mr: Nixon told Daniel P. Moynihan four years ago. His first executive act in January, 1969 was to set up the Urban Affairs Council with Moynihan as executive secretary. “We don’t want the record written that we were too cautious,” he told the council at its first meeting. Those were ‘splendid hours,” with “a touch of glory to theny,”’ recalls Pat Moynihan in his current book, The Politics of A Guaranteed Income (Random House), which is serialized in three parts in The New Yorker. America had sent three men to the moon and then, in August, on television, Mr. Nixon electrified the nation by proposing his astonishing Family Assistance Program, surely one of the most revolutionary pieces of social legislation in American history. I remember the shock. Anything could happen. Surely liberals had misjudged the new president! He began the most devastating denunciation of the US welfare ‘‘mess’’ ever delivered; a year later he called it a ‘consuming, monstrous; inhuman outrage against the community, against the individual--and most of all against the very children whom it was meant to help.” A family of four under FAP would get a basic $1600, plus $800 in food stamps. The plan passed the House twice but was wrecked in the reactionary Senate Finance Committee under chairman Russell Long, where the Republicans voted solidly against their own president. Footnotes by J. R. Freeman Tax deadline time is just around the corner, and the average citizen will soon be faced with paying his fair share in order to keep government healthy another year. It’s also time when Mr. John Q. Public faces the greatest slap in the face that his government is going to hand him. In fact, this pro- pagandized ‘fair share’’ bit has gone too far, because the government, even with its huge propaganda machine, is having a harder and harder time enticing Mr. John Q. Public to pay his taxes, And rightly so. It just isn’t right, for example, when a homeowner has to pay a higher rate of pro- perty taxes than the business or commercial entity. More importantly, however, is that business interests get away with even more tax breaks. Take for instance, a not-so-typical busi- ness establishment in Luzerne County. The establishment, which has a number of profes- sional and blue-collar employes, has neglect- ed to pay the taxes levied for its share of school taxes during the last several years. The school district, needing funds desperate- ly, took the due process approach, and filed a lien against the firm. But nothing happened; the business firm still refused to pay its fair share. The next year when tax time rolled around again, the same thing happened; only gL LR Te Sale. it turns out, they were Republicans, whose they were just trying to add a little partisan seasoning to the cookery. The Chap then appointed three or four Democrats to bring the Crime Commission up to full war strength and presumably, prove a little more pliable in the governor's war against crime, which, so far, hasn't been much of a war. Now cometh the new state crime com- mission and orders 17 troopers of Pennsyl- vania’s Guardia Civile taken away from Arlen Spector and put under their own super- vision; the unannounced reason probably being that Spector is being touted as Republi- can candidate for governor and anything that can be done to make his road a little stony will be smiled upon by the Shapp Chap. Because the Shapp Chap, with Colossal effrontery, is apparently planning to run for governor again. He will be the first governor able to do so under changes wrought in the Pennsylvania Constitution and it would plain- ly give his ego quite an uplift. Not that there has been anything wrong with his ego so far in the game. It’s just that, if anything, he has a king size ego. I wouldn't give any more for his chances than I would for a building lot in the Republic of Ghana, but sometimes you can’t always tell. The race goes not always to the swift, but to the one with the most money, as I can read- ily recall from the last gubernatorial pri- mary, when the Chap outbought a perfectly good and capable Democrat candidate, who has been a credit to himself and the state ever since. The next time around, I am convinced, it is going to be different. Even the Chap’s “everybody. ; he had better start trying to ma/%€ #e voters forget about his exploits so far, indig- nities as a state income tax, for instance, or his apparently studied efforts to antagonize Just about everybody in both political parties. I presume most of these apparently thought- less acts stemmed from the Chap’s desire to establish himself as unquestioned head of the Democratic Party and to convince the voters that he is a forceful and aggressive governor. That he is, to be sure; but the force and aggression has seldom been to the benefit of the citizens of the Bucktail State. z Os Gite TEIDBNER ST Yi It is the thrust of Pat Moynihan’s lively but bewildering argument that it was the liberals as much as the conservatives who did FAP in. Since he specifically makes an exception of TRB (‘a convinced advocate of FAP”) we can claim some objectivity. It is true that a lot of liberals felt $1600 was too low, and a lot of “intellectuals” opposed anything Mr. Nixon offered; just on suspicion. But the tragic death of FAP goes a lot deeper than that. Mr. Nixon was trying to broaden his political base and thought for a while he could win the liberals over. But he had to sell the idea to the conservatives, too, so he threw in the idea of a compulsory work requirement (which he originally omitted). The plan was for a guaranteed income, based on Milton Friedman’s negative income tax, and the title of Moynihan’s book and all the White House discussion were based on it. But Mr. Nixon wouldn’t use the words in selling the product. In his August 8, 1969 speech he specifically and categorically declares, “This national floor under incomes for working or dependent families is not a ‘guaranteed income’ ”’ (my italics). This devious approach was con- sidered good politics. We come away from the book with a new respect for Moynihan, now ambassador- designate to India, who has always been one of our favorites. He almost put over an astounding reform by a conservative president, whom he still defends and admires. But it wasn’t a Truman; it was a president frankly in which case, we think, he might have won. He put more and more emphasis on the compulsory work requirement making the thing sound like a punitive system. As he strengthened himself with the white Southern suspicious liberals and ungrateful blacks. “Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans have just as much dignity as there is in any work to be done in this country, including my own,’ he told them. Alas, what he said about the vicious welfare ‘‘mess’’ remains ‘true; and it is still there, but he has turned to other matters. Other matters, of course, like Vietnam. We have no doubt the outcome will be presented skillfully, just like FAP. Four years of war have cost us around $75 billion and 20,000 lives. No doubt we shall have victory, but it will be the only war we ever heard of where “victory’’ consists of getting our own POWs back. The Inaugural stands and bunting are coming down now on Pennsylvania Avenue, and Mr. Nixon is cancelling Federal programs in order to balance the budget. He has canceled programs for soil conservation and rural electrification. He is canceling or freezing Federal commitments to subsidize construction of new low and middle-income housing which has aided many to find decent places to live. When his new budget comes out next week we shall really know how deep the cuts go. America needs things, but we can’t afford them. We need more police: the Gallup poll says that the average American still regards crime as his most serious problem. But more police would mean higher taxes, so in wealthy communities people are hiring private patrol cars and guards. We need better health care: the US ranks only 22nd in male life ex- penctancy among the big nations, and 13th in infant mortality. But a national health program (like that abroad) would cost money; we can’t afford it. Ending pollution costs money, too: Mr. Nixon has impounded half the money Congress voted over his veto for cleaning streams. ‘They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream,” observed John and go'on to spend the night at a park which is a ‘menace to public health and, morals.” It is funny how some natiof§ can afford these things. David Lawrence's US News & World Report last week compared US taxes with other nations’. Americal surden, it reports, ‘is smaller in relatio "to national output than in most other developed coun- tries.” Our total tax burden (city, state, seven countries of those enumerated. England, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Canada and the Scandinavian countries all carry a heavier tax burden than the US. We wouldn’t have any Treasury deficit now if we hadn’t slashed taxes in 1964, 1969 and 1971; these three enormous tax cuts cost us a $45 billion annual revenue loss. Many of these cuts aided the affluent more than the poor; there has been emphasis on regressive (“soak the poor”) taxes. Middle-income people, for example, don’t evade payroll taxes; the money is subtracted before they see it; the percentage of revnughom payroll collections has jumped from 18 10 28 percent since 1963. The percentage from corporate and personal income (progressive) taxes, on the other hand, has fallen from 66 to 60 per-. cent. Just to plug the notorious tax loopholes (which mainly benefit the affluent) would end the current inflationary deficit. But it’s all a matter of choice, isn’t it? Some nations put health, cities, public services first; some nations stick to tax loopholes. paper among a long list of other such tax derelicts. After years of continual frustration, the school district decided to make a settlement for half of the back taxes. Should the board pursue the matter through the courts, it might not come out any better. Meanwhile, the busi- ness firm would fight the case perhaps with a battery of expensive lawyers, whose fees in- turn would be deducted from their federal essary’ business expense. Industry, for that matter, and particular- ly the super giants, get advance-of-the-fact rulings from the Internal Revenue Service before getting involved in a big money deal. This makes executives privy to IRS informa- tion that the ordinary taxpayer does not re- ceive, and provides them with the best advan- tages tax-wise, often saving them from pay- ing taxes on perhaps a deal involving millions of dollars. In this way the government gets into the business of coddling criminals. Take the giants like General Electric and Westing- house. When caught price fixing in 1960, these super giants were faced with paying treble damages. But through a letter opinion from the IRS, they were granted the advantage to consider it tax deductible, or ‘“‘ordinary and necessary’ business expense. And as of 1971 $400 million. There are many other such examples. Two weeks ago an IRS ruling permitted the Anaconda and Kennecott Copper Companies a tax break on the losses they sustained when the Chilean government expropriated their assets, saving the companies between $75 million and $175 million. Back a few years, just two days before New Year's, an IRS ruling saved the mam- moth U.S. Steel Corp. $60 million in ‘“‘excess foreign tax credits.” As if the $60 million . wasn’t enough of a saving, the IRS then gen- erously granted the company the same deal years ahead. Tax reform in Congress is an obvious joke, particularly as long as the Administra: tion permits the Internal Revenue to issue such secret rulings. And in light of this fact, noted tax expert Phillip Stern recently sug- gested that the only way to help the situation would be the citizenry insisting that the IRS be required to make their rulings public; pro- vide opportunity for public coggment before major rulings formally take #&ect: and to broaden the right of citizens to challenge par- ticular rulings in court. Mr. Stern’s suggestions seem well found- ed. But all three would take the power of Con- gress prodded by an upset constituency. And’ what better time than now to complain to law- makers. April 15 is just around the corner. per year. Call 675-5211 for subscriptions. Editor Emeritus: Mrs. T. M. B. Hicks Editor: Doris R. Mallin Advertising Manager: Dan Koze ER A To ENE No at D ar AR To at ta Nall pm 2 PNT JAN Et was Sima rt CD LCT TAN TAR AN PIN ha Wk DN I rt Tat pps pt LEAN at Ph NCL NT Rp 1 pein’ i LEANN TE fa EA IN rn rp Cn a rh SE ae aa ap Pe Lo aRp BOL El (SE i ak ah CL al pent
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers