Budget cuts continue

The most effective and courageous and certainly the most comically engaging mayor that New York City has had in this century, and some people would say the most typical New Yorker, was the son of an Italian bandmaster, a boy brought up in Arizona, who moved with his mother back to Budapest in his teens and didn't return to this country till he was in his mid twenties.

His eight years in Europe admirably qualified him as an interpreter for the immigration services and it was down on the New York docks and shuttling from there across to Ellis Island and trying to bring some order to the chaos of invading immigrants that he picked up a sense of city government a good deal more realistic than anything he might have learned from a college course in political science.

He's all but forgotten now and remembered, if at all, by the young because he gave his name, or rather we gave it for him, to an airport – LaGuardia. Fiorello LaGuardia was a politician who never hedged his language, never called a strike 'industrial action' and never called the Democratic leaders of New York City 'the opposition'. He called them tin-horns and punks. Such spontaneous talk obviously got him into trouble from which, or for which, he rarely apologised, but he did say once, 'I don't often make a mistake, but when I do, it's a beaut!'.

It would be wonderful if some of our more elevated leaders would remember LaGuardia. For that matter, they might recall the line that an old Baltimore newspaperman, another forgotten character, used when he was asked how he would feel, as a lifelong atheist, if he found himself in heaven. He said, 'If I do wind up with the twelve apostles, I shall say, Gentlemen, I was wrong.'

The faces of the cocky LaGuardia and the sassy Mencken floated in front of my television screen last Wednesday evening as I watched the President of the United States trying to slide and wriggle out of the most absolute, the most uncompromising, promise he gave during the presidential campaign. He would never, never, he'd said, touch the sacred trust fund known as social security, which is dedicated to the livelihood, to the living expenses of American citizens over 65.

Mr Mondale, another forgotten warrior, warned everybody in one of those presidential debates that once Mr Reagan got elected he would start shaving social security. The president was wounded to the quick and many times afterwards on the road, he kept wondering, in that attractive, baffled way of his, why people kept on bringing up this bugaboo. Never meant never, didn't it? And as for increasing taxes – another outrageous accusation – he said that would happen 'over my dead body'.

So, on Wednesday evening, a reporter got up and said, 'Mr President, haven't you painted yourself into a corner with your campaign promises to raise taxes only over your dead body, not to cut social security and to keep up defence spending?' 'No!' the President replied. 'In the first few days of February, we'll be submitting our budget to the Congress and I don't mind if they want to do what they're doing and have some plans of their own or are suggesting some. Maybe they've got some plans we haven't thought of.'

Now, this being translated means, 'I did my damnedest during the campaign to say that I'd like not to touch social security payments and I dearly would like not to raise taxes, but, after all, fellas, when you're running for president, you have to pretend that you run the government. It's only after election you remind the people that the best any president can do is to propose. Congress disposes.

'The president – any president – is nothing like as almighty powerful as he claims to be when he's out on the hustings. I wish you guys would stop headlining things like, "President Will Not Touch Social Security" and "Reagan Promises No Tax Increase". In our system, it's not up to me. The Congress, in the end, the House of Representatives, writes the budget, and, by the way, men, I hear from my own budget director that my precious budget will be strangled at birth the moment after I deliver it.'

It would all have been much simpler, not to say heartwarming, if the president on Wednesday evening had replied to that reminder of his campaign promises, 'Well, as LaGuardia used to say, I don't often make a mistake, but when I do, it's a beaut!'.

The truth, the truth of things to come, is that the week before the president's press conference, his budget director went up to Capitol Hill where Congress lives and works and has its supreme being and Mr Stockman had with him more than an armful, in fact, 53 notebooks. Why 53? That's the number of Republicans in the Senate.

The notebooks, a conglomerate feat of proposals from every Republican senator, were the raw material from which the president and Mr Stockman had manufactured the president's budget, but this final, or rather provisional, document lumped all the ideas – Republican ideas at that – politely listed as alternatives to the president's ideas, but many of these alternatives were rank rejections of what the president had in mind.

Mr Stockman, himself, revealed that that plaguey deficit will be $25 billion more than the White House calculated only a month ago. What Mr Stockman was doing in presenting this gloomy document was not so much slapping down a single-minded budget, he was saying, 'It won't work'. Or, as one Republican put it, 'He was ringing alarm bells'.

Now, probably, the key man, the man the president most depends on for getting across his ideas and getting through the most of his budget, is always the Senate majority leader, that's the leader of the president's own party in the Senate. If there's one man on the legislative side of American government you'd expect to be the president's field commander, it is that man. He is Senator Robert Dole. So what had he to say to the fruit of those 53 black notebooks?

He said that the cost of living allowances paid for by the government – and that would entail welfare costs, food stamps, school lunches, disabled pay, unemployment cheques, the lot – the American people have to know that cost of living allowances are going to have to be dealt with in a tough, gut-hard way. And talking, in particular, about the president's sacred trust fund of social security, Mr Dole said, with extraordinary blandness, 'I don't believe social security is off limits'.

So the phrase that rose from Capitol Hill, after the budget director gave the congressmen this preview of the president's budget, was a word appropriate to the winter weather which has now descended all across this continent, the new Ice Age – 'freeze' is the single word – to 'freeze' the present budget, which could mean not only a freeze on the defence budget and on social security payments, but increased taxes by whatever name to pay for the increased costs which the current budget always allows for – inevitable increases due to, even seven per cent inflation, to cost overruns for weapons, and so on.

This drastic move is already under way. Senator Dole, the president's man – remember? theoretically –together with the Senate chairman of the budget committee have already introduced a freezing bill which calls for $250 billion worth of spending cuts over the next three years and that would take care of the groaning deficit.

I don't suppose either of them expects it to happen, but it does remind Americans and ought to acquaint foreign correspondents in this country with the facts of American political life, especially in the second term of any president. He will not be running again. Four years is the limit of any patronage he can offer anybody. No personal ambition of any senator or congressman is put at risk by defying the president now.

In other words, the second and last term of any president is a time when Congress can exercise most confidently its superior power to dispose, in its own way, of anything the president proposes, in nothing so much as composing and stamping and sealing the national budget. So, if you think that these commentaries, anyway, will register fewer alarms than usual about what the president wants and urges in domestic matters, you'll be right.

Foreign affairs, foreign policy, is something else. For though the constitution gives to the Congress the power to declare war at the president's bidding, to raise and support armies and maintain a navy, the president is the one who conducts foreign relations. He makes treaties, admittedly only with the advice and consent of the Senate, and we have seen – to go no later than Woodrow Wilson, who failed to get the United States to join the League of Nations – we've seen how the Senate can cripple even the president's initiative in foreign policy.

But such a crippling blow is rare. The present Senate may jib a little at more money for El Salvador and the House may tighten the purse strings, but the president has considerable independent executive power to promote relations with other countries, to send Americans abroad if he decides that by so doing, they'd protect the security of the United States.

Which leads to the thought, the correct thought, that Secretary Shultz and Secretary Weinberger, being servants of the executive branch, are nobody's but the president's envoys and that in such things as the arms control talks, American policy stands or falls by the president's power and his convictions, his wishes.

And that brings us to Geneva. We've all been bitten so often before previous Russian-American sessions that this time everybody muzzled high hopes, warned us gravely that nothing was to be expected, the old Carter and Ford Cabinet men were brought in to say that these would probably be the talks to end future talks.

So, once again, we were all wrong. For once, for the first time, the American press and the White House were at one in seeing new hope after the talks, a new dialogue and it's surely the first time that Moscow echoed these sweet thoughts, even Izvestia, allowing itself a delirious headline – 'The Talks Are On!' – this is no time to quibble or mutter.

Not when Tass begins its editorial, 'There is, there can be, no sensible alternative to the policy of peaceful coexistence.' Amen.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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