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A Chill Wind
This mild autumn weather we’ve been having is
delightful, even at its dreariest, rainiest moments,
but it is at the same time strangely discomfitting.
We are indeed aware of the energy problem, yet
few of us realize just how it will affect our daily
lives. And we wonder how we will weather—for-
giving the pun—those cold, dark days that loom
ahead.
They are bound to come. Northeastern Pennsyl-
vania has never been noted for its mild winters.
The best we can hope for is a minimum of wind and
sunny afternoons which will help to heat our 68-de-
gree interiors. (Some seers of doom say 68 degrees
itself is too much to hope for.)
No doubt some of us are worrying about our
health and catching the la grippe and double pneu-
monia. Physicians, however, according to a nation-
al news magazine, discount the dangers of a chilly
household and maintain, in fact, that American
homes are too hot anyway. Europeans, many of
whom don’t have central heating, are healthier be-
cause they are accustomed to cooler living quar-
ters, the medical authorities claim. Wear a swea-
ter, they advise unsympathetically, and if your
hands are cold, buy a pair of gloves and cut the fin-
gers out, After all, it won’t be the first time in his-
tory that people had to sacrifice elegance for com-
fort.
A few years ago, a book entitled “Nation of
Sheep’’ told us what deep down inside we probably
already knew: that we are something less than a
hardy lot. The long, hard winter of 1973 may prove
that that author is still correct. Time will tell, so put
another log on the fire and knit yourself a big,
heavy sweater. Ba }
It’s Working!
We had occasion over the weekend to travel by
‘auto to Washington, D.C., and en route observed a
surprising and somehow reassuring phenomenon—
the great majority of motorists were, in fact, keep-
ing their speed to 50 mph or under! Traveling along
the great highways designed for twice that speed
was a little like riding in the pace lap at the In-
dianapolis 500—mighty gas-guzzlers idling along as
if bridled by an unseen governor.
Why the almost uniform observance of the 50
mph speed limit? It wasn’t fear of the law, for there
were few police cars in evidence. It wasn’t a short-
age of gasoline, since the Sunday ban on gas sales
had yet to go into effect, although there were short-
ages in some areas.
Rather, it seemed as though a vast cross-section
of Americans, from Volkswagened longhair to El
Dorado mahout had decided, as a group, that there
was, indeed, a fuel crisis, that it was in the best in-
terest of all to observe the 50 mph speed limit and,
by gosh, all these varied species of Americans were
going to do what was right and what was expected
of them! .
In these times when the confidence of ordinary
Americans in top leadership has been shaken to the
foundations, it is profoundly reassuring and
strangely touching to again have evidence of the
common sense, reasonableness and sense of public
duty of the great majority of Americans as evi-
denced by the common observance of the 50 mph
speed limit.
Can we hope that those who put themselves for-
ward as the nation’s leaders will aspire to the same
high standards of citizenship as those they govern?
WASHINGTON—Twenty years after the
nation should have launched a crash program
of energy development, we seem to be
rushing pell mell into one. I strongly suspect
we are rushing the wrong way.
Two major pieces of legislation now are
~ working their way toward enactment. The
first is the National Energy Emergency Act
of 1973; it may be too much. The second is the
National Energy Research and Development
Policy Act of 1973; it is almost certainly too
little.
As to the first bill: So far as its general
provisions are concerned, dealing with fuel
conservation, the legislation plainly is needed
to cope with the situation that confronts us at
present. This much also should be under-
stood: The bill is fraught with the most dang-
erous implications for the future. What is in-
volved here is a massive delegation of power
to the President. What is further involved, or
simultaneously involved, is a weakening of
certain economic and political concepts that
have been weakeried too much already.
Patrick Henry laid down the sound ad-
vice, nearly 200 years ago, that in political
matters power should be delegated
sparingly: ‘If you give too little power today,
you may give more tomorrow. But the re-
verse of the proposition will not hold. If you
give too much power today, you cannot retake
it tomorrow, for tomorrow will never come
for that purpose.”
The Energy Emergency Act pays small
heed to Mr. Henry’s warning. The bill calls
for ‘prompt action by the executive branch’’
to deal with “severe economic dislocations
and hardships, including loss of jobs, closing
of factories and businesses, reduction of crop
plantings and harvesting, and curtailment of
vital public services, including the transpor-
tation of food and other essential goods.” The
presidential responsibility would appear to be
comprehensive.
Under this legislation, the President is
directed to promulgate ‘‘a nationwide emer-
gency energy rationing and conservation pro-
gram.” He is directed to fix priorities on fuel
consumption. His authority is to extend to
“transportation control.” He is to impose re-
strictions against the use of:fuel for certain
uses he deems ‘non essential.” No such awe-
some powers ever before have been dele-
gated, in peace time, to a president.
TRB
from Washington
Marion Curtis, widow, 72, of Doylestown,
Pa., enclosed a clipping from, the Doylestown
Intelligencer. Her sole income is $169.a month
in social security and her rent $120. Under the
rent subsidy program she is theoretically
eligible to get half her rent in federal funds.
But the Administration, she writes, has frozen
the funds. She voted for Mr. Nixon. The
clipping says that there are many other in-
digent victims of the freeze in Bucks County
8: A New York City nutrition group asks a
judge to hold the Agriculture Department in
contempt for not starting a $40 million
program to feed improverished pregnant
women and young children. Congress voted
the funds, but the Administration has im-
pounded them.
Next, consider an AP item from Indiana-
polis: Father Hesburgh says President Nixon
is letting the US Civil Rights Commission ‘‘die
on the vine” by failing to appoint a new
chairman, nearly one year after forcing him
out. Father Hesburgh is president of the
University of Notre Dame. Mr. Nixon, after a
brief fling at the so-called Minority Corpora-
tion program in 1969, has gone back to the
racial policy of benign neglect.
These are individual examples. They fit
into a pattern described by neutral
Congressional Quarterly as efforts of ‘‘the
economy-minded Nixon Administration to
halt or cut back on social programs.” Few
deny this goal. Pat Buchanan, White House
aide, wrote in February that if the President
“can begin dismantling the unwise and un-
successful social programs” of the past, and
Capitol Notes
by William Ecenbarger *
There is a popular tendency to view the
Pennsylvania General Assembly as a unit,
composed of two very similar chambers dis-
tinguishable only by the fact that one has
more members than the other.
But the fact is that right now there are
enormous differences between the Pennsyl-
vania House and the Pennsylvania Senate.
While the House is not yet ready to take a
place among the great parliamentary bodies
of the western world, it has made significant
steps in recent years in the direction of self-
improvement.
While all this was going on, the Senate re-
mained where it was, which is somewhere
near the middle of the 19th Century.
Through a series of procedural changes
begun about four years ago, the House has be-
come the more efficient chamber, and to
compound the distinction the average repre-
sentative works considerably harder at his
job than the average senator.
While debate is marked by brittle preten-
tiousness in the Senate, it can have genuine
meaning in the House. On a number of occa-
sions this year, oratorical reason has actually
changed the outcome of House roll calls—an
unheard of event in the Senate.
Given the gravity of the present situation,
perhaps some such powers have to be dele-
gated, but they ought to be subject to re-
straints and checks and balances. The bill
provides very few.
There is this to consider too: The bill
opens the door to new and still more per-
vasive federal regulation of the market
place; it imposes new federal authority upon
the traditional responsibilities of state and
local government. The bill appears to require,
for one thing, federal subsidies for reduced
fares on local transit systems, and we may be
grimly certain, following Patrick Henry, that
if such subsidies are provided today, tomor-
rs
row will never come for their removal.
The second of the two major bills prompts
equal concern. If our nation truly is to achieve
“energy independence,’ the major thrust of a
research and development program must be
directed less toward fossil fuels and atomic
fuels and more toward what the experts call
“the exotics”’—the energy of the sun, the
energy of the wind.
One hears pathetically little talk on the
hill of harnessing the sun and the wind. The
talk is chiefly of coal degasification, oil
shales, offshore drilling, and expediting de-
velopment of atomic energy plants. The talk,
that is to say, is of further exploitation of re-
A Greenstreet News Co. Publication
sources that are either finite or hazardous.
The sun and the wind, by contrast, are clean,
sate and inexhaustible. If these resources
could be mastered—and they. can be
mastered—much of the problem wosild be sol-
ved not merely for the here and nofl-but also
for the world and the future. oF
Our concerns this winter have to deal
with power in two meanings—with political
power, and with kinetic power also. The pro-
‘blem is to control the one and to expand the
other. If we fail, we can look to the day when
two lights grow dim—the lights of freedom, :
and the light of industry as well.
Z
NNIOOAR
SANNA
NESE AA
decentralize government, ‘‘he will reverse a
tide that has been running for 40 years.”
Exactly! Mr. Nixon put ardent young
Howard Phillips in charge of the Office of
Economic Opportunity, which is supposed to
fight poverty. The new head said OEO ‘‘un-
dermined authority, challenged the family,
promoted the welfare ethic and eroded
democratic safeguards.’” He set out,
systematically, to discredit it. Even he,
however, couldn't get a Republican
congressman to sponsor his idea of making
the elderly pay more for Medicare.
The deepest, most fundamental cleavage in
American politics, I believe is the clash
between the rival claims of the public sector
and the private sector. Variations of the
struggle stem back a century, to States
Rights for example, and anti-federalism, now
sublimated into ‘‘revenue sharing’’--a Nixon
formula to let Washington collect the money
and pass it out to the states often at the ex-
pense of cities, counties and the poor.
Watergate has obscured this fundamental
issue. Mr. Nixon, unlike Ike, came deter-
mined to set the clock back. He was out to
prove that 30 or 40 years of New Deal
welfarism are aberrant, and that his New
Federalism is the norm. He is sincere in this.
I know and respect men around him like
Treasury Secretary George Shultz and HEW
Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who are in-
telligent, attractive and dedicated. I may be
wrong but I also think they are conservative
doctrinaires, whose views are dangerous. It is
only fair to note that they were supported by a
majority in 1972, or at least by a ‘majority of
those who voted. Mrs. Curtis of Doylestown;
cited above, voted for Mr. Nixon.
It begins to look as though Watergate has
ruined the best chance of conservative
revival in 40 years. Look at California: it just
defeated Gov. Reagan’s amendment to limit
tax spending; like Pickett’s Charge this may
have been the highwater mark of the con-
servative counter-revolution. The Reagan
dream package would have saved taxes for
the affluent by putting a limit on aid to
schools, the sick, the elderly, the slums and
the poor. Mr. Nixon wants to do that for the
nation.
He almost got away with it too, except for
Watergate. He had powerful support. Of the
newspapers that took an editorial position in
1972, an amazing 93 percent backed him. The
corporate establishment backed him. All last
week shamefaced executives paraded before
the Ervin committee and told how they made
illegal corporate campaign contributions.’
The going rate was $100,000, and it sounded
. like protection money. The funds were stuffed
in satchels in $100 bills and the stockholders
were bilked by amusing bookkeeping devices.
The courts fine the corporations only $5,000
for this. Little attention is paid. How does it
feel, folks, to live in a country where this kind
of thing is taken for granted?
Sinews of war came from the corporate
establishment and ultimately support the
status quo. The status has little to quo about.
About one family in 10 is below or on the
meanest and most despicable tax systems in
\
example, earning $150 a week, un:
she pays around $1060 in federal Income
taxes. Here is the President of the country,
Mr. Nixon, who has theoretical tax le in-
come of $250,000 and paid only $878.0%#n 1971.
At least he is charged with that and does not
deny it. All perfectly legal; done through tax
his donation of vice presidential papers for
which he got $500,000 charitable deduction
was under the deadline, but that is a
technicality.) There are tax loopholes for
everybody from President down if you have
enough money, and hire a good lawyer.
The whole burden of taxes is distorted
against the wage-earner. The tax rate on
property is only 65 percent of that of wages.
The tax rate on capital gains (profits from
selling stocks and bonds, say) is only 50
percent of that on wages. Preferential
treatment of capital gains costs the Treasury
$14 billion. The rest of us pay for it. Philip
Stern figures that almost all of theggenefits
goes to the richest one percent of th try;
the one percent which, according to
calculation, owned 40 percent of the nation’s
wealth in 1969. (Up from 30 percent in 1959.)
Congress could act. But who pays the
campaign costs of Congress? They are
dependent for a significant part of their
campaign contributions on the rich. The tax
reform bill is stalled in Congress. hL
Andrew Mellon in 1924 said: I'he
prosperity of the middle classes depends on
the good fortune and light taxes of the rich.
It’s still the theory. i i
This year the House took the historical
step of opening all of its standing committee
meetings to the press and public, and it is
seeking some major advances in the virgin
territory of legislative ethics.
But the Senate continues to operate a sec-
ret committee system, opening the meetings
only when it wants to. And ethics is still a
dirty word in the Senate vocabulary.
The House has imposed stiff controls over
the use of the new $5,000 a year legislative ex-
pense accounts. The Senate has a papier-
mache set of rules that leaves room for a
number of questionable uses of taxpayers’
money. Indeed, the Senate doesn’t even
bother to keep daily attendance records.
Although Republicans currently control
the House and Democrats dominate the
Senate, this Jekyll-Hyde situation is not a
party affair.
The House GOP leadership has been the
catalyst for reform this year, but improve-
ments also were made when Democrats had
the upper hand. Conversely, the minority Re-
publican bloc in the Senate is as culpable as
Be Democrats for the sad level of that cham.-
P;
The chasm appears to stem partly from
the institutions themselves. Political control
election, while Democrats have ruled the
Senate only twice in this century. One party
rule never makes for good government.
Representatives must seek re-election
every two years, senators are elected for four
year terms. And the smaller House districts
make it more feasible for maverick candi-
dates, free from party regimentation, to seek
and win seats. In short, the House as an insti-
tution is constructed so its members are more
responsive to the electorate.
These factors help maintain the Sg@ate’s
lacklustre performance compared “¥ the
House in recent years, but they do not excuse
it.
Itis within easy grasp of the Senate today to
understand why it doesn’t begin. But as Mark
Twain once pointed out, there ain’t no way to
tell why a snorer can’t hear himself snoring.
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