The Reagan Presidency

Gale Warner and David Kreger

American voters will soon decide whether to re-elect President Ronald Reagan for a second term in office. President Reagan’s major statements, proposals, policies and actions on a wide spectrum of issues are the subject of heated debate. The following is a summary, drawn from publicly available sources, of the Reagan Administration and how it has affected Americans and the world.

The Economy
In the past 15 years, the U.S. economy has taken a roller-coaster course through a series of recessions and recoveries. Though presidents’ policies have had an important influence on the economy, they have by no means dictated it. The president writes the federal budget and sets levels of government spending and taxation. The Federal Reserve Board, which is not under the president’s immediate direction, controls the amount of money in circulation and thus can directly influence the interest rate and inflation.

The cycle of inflation, recession, and recovery tends to run by itself. The era of high inflation began largely with the sudden oil price hikes in the early 1970s, which sent shock waves through the economy. This created higher prices, causing workers with built-in cost-of-living wage increases to receive salary hikes. Since labor costs significantly affect production costs, the price of goods increased and sustained inflation was underway.

The Federal Reserve, in order to reduce inflation, can decrease the amount of money in circulation. This makes each dollar “more valuable”, and helps keep prices down.   But with less money available, there is more competition between potential borrowers, so Interest rates for loans Increase, reflecting the increased competition. Whenever loans are more expensive to obtain, business slows, workers are laid off, and there is less investment. In a depressed economy, people purchase fewer things—demand decreases—and therefore prices come down. That is, a recession causes a reduction in inflation.   The Federal Reserve cuts Inflation, but only by increasing the number of jobless.

Lower inflation allows interest rates to come down since it is the difference between interest rates and inflation—the “real interest rate”—that reflects the true cost of borrowing money. As interest rates lower, production, consumer spending, and Income—indicators of economic growth—begin to rise. This is called a “cyclical recovery.” With the recovery comes more job opportunities, though after each recession unemployment has remained higher than before the recession.

The forces causing the recession from which we are now recovering had been building for several years. Inflation was spiraling upward, and it was widely agreed that something had to be done. President Carter faced a choice between two evils—high inflation or high interest rates. To show he was a serious inflation fighter, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker, a highly respected economist, has earned a solid reputation for acting Independently, and Carter got even higher interest rates than he bargained for. Volcker changed the Reserve’s policy in October 1979, tightening the money supply, and soon the Interest rate soared above 21 percent, causing a recession that lasted from late 1980 through 1983.* As inflation fell from its peak of 11.3 percent in late 1980 to 3.8 percent in late 1982, unemployment rose from 7.5 percent to 10.7 percent, breaking the post-war record. Some criticize Volcker for being too drastic and causing more unemployment than necessary.

The 1980 election occurred just after the Federal Reserve tightened the money supply.   The 1984 election will occur in the middle of the cyclical recovery. Because of this sort of timing, Carter was one of the unluckiest presidents seeking re-election—and Reagan is one of the luckiest.

The Reagan Budget
Reagan’s dramatic cuts in social programs have not been enough to offset his even more dramatic increases in spending and the loss in federal revenues due to the 1981 tax cut.   This imbalance between the inflow and outflow of money from the Treasury has created a record-breaking annual deficit that is causing fundamental economic problems.

Taxes
The 1981 tax cut, the largest in U.S. history, abolished a fourth of personal income tax and slashed corporate taxation deeply. It was estimated the U.S. Treasury would lose $750 billion over the next five years. Most of the money was returned to those in upper-income tax brackets. According to the Treasury, 4.4 percent of all taxpayers—those with Incomes of $50,000 a year or more—are receiving one-third of the benefits from the tax cut. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office analyzed the cumulative effect of budget changes between January 1981 and April 1984 and found that low-income families had lost the most and high-income families had gained the most.   Households with incomes less than $10,000 a year lost $390 a year, on average. hose with incomes between $40,000 and $80,000 gained $2,900 a year, on average; those with incomes of $80,000 or over gained an average of $8,270 per year. Middle-income families gained only slightly: households with incomes from $10,000 to $20,000 per year gained an average of $30; those between $20,000 and $40,000 gained $1,010 per year.

These results are not surprising considering Reagan’s long-held belief that taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor is unconstitutional and comes “direct from Karl Marx.” Reagan also believes “there really isn’t a justification” for the corporate tax, saying “only people pay taxes.”

Supporters of the tax cut argued that the money returned to the wealthy and to corporations would spawn investment in new business ventures that would create new jobs and “trickle down” to those hardest hit by the recession. However, there is a great deal of evidence that increased investment following the tax cut did not occur; instead, consumption rose. The wealthy simply bought more, and the money never reached those who needed it most.

Spending
Reagan is responsible for the largest peacetime military build-up in U.S. history. While Carter’s fiscal year 1981 budget called for $182.4 billion, Reagan’s fiscal 1985 budget calls for $313.4 billion, with further increases each year to $436 billion in fiscal 1989. From I985 to 1989, he plans to spend $2 trillion on the military. This compares to a total of $1.8 trillion spent between 1960 and 1981.

Human services—food aid, health programs, job training, veterans’ benefits, housing aid, Social Security, education, and so on—have been cut $110 billion between fiscal 1982 to fiscal 1985. Had all Reagan cuts been adopted as proposed, the figure would be closer to $140  to $150 billion. These cuts have inflicted heavy costs on millions of working and needy Americans; the “savings” have been transferred to the military.

In spite of these cuts, Reagan has continued to increase overall federal spending. In fact, according to Republican figures adjusted for inflation, he has not even decreased the rate of increase in spending. Carter’s fiscal 1981 budget was a 14% increase over 1980, but inflation was 11.3% In the last quarter of 1980 when the budget was finalized. Thus, the growth in real dollars was 2.7%. Reagan’s fiscal 1984 budget was a 7.2% increase over 1983. But inflation was 3.9 percent in the last quarter of 1983 when it was finalized. The growth in real dollars was 3.3%, larger than Carter’s 2.7%.

The Deficit
The federal deficit was $57.9 billion in Carter’s last year. In fiscal 1993, it was $194 billion, and it is predicted to be $280 billion in fiscal 1989. Our national debt at the end of fiscal 1985 will stand at $1,852 billion, $853 billion of it a legacy of the Reagan Administration.

The massive cuts in social programs have not made up for the military Increases and the loss of tax revenues. Even if all non-military discretionary spending were eliminated, the fiscal 1988 deficit still would be $70 billion. There simply are not enough social programs in existence to make room for Reagan’s military increases and tax cuts.

Yet while lobbying for the tax cuts, Reagan promised a balanced budget in fiscal year 1984. He told Americans: “Now there are those who are Insisting that we settle for less (than the 25% tax cut). They demand proof in advance that what we propose will work…Our opponents want more money from your family budget so they can spend it on the federal budget and make it remain high. It’s your money, not theirs. You earned it, they didn’t…And when they insist we can’t reduce taxes and spending and balance the budget too, one six-word answer will do* ‘Yes we can and yes we will.'”

When the budget deficits became a reality, the president said on November 16, 1982: “A propaganda campaign would have you believe these deficits are caused by our so-called massive tax cut and defense buildup. Well, that’s a real dipsy doodle. …Current and projected deficits result from sharp increases in non-defense spending.”

As part of a recent “down payment” plan to reduce the deficit over the next three years taxes have been raised $50 billion and social programs cut by $13 billion. No defense cuts have yet been approved. Even this plan is only making a small dent in a huge problem.   Over the next three years, deficits are projected to total $600 billion. Reagan wants to cut $77 billion more—largely, he says, by vetoing expenditures on social programs.

Impact of the Deficit
Real Interest Rates Remain High. The amount of money banks can lend out is limited by the amount deposited in their savings accounts. When the government “deficit spends,” it borrows from banks (and pays interest on the loans). The nearly $200 billion deficit is more than three-fourths of all the money saved by Americans each year, compared to the 1980 deficit, which was about one-third. This leaves little for private borrowing. Since interest rates reflect the increased competition for the remaining money, this is a main reason the real interest rate (interest rate minus inflation) is now above 9%, still very high.

The interest rate would probably be higher if foreign capital were not pouring into U.S.   banks, increasing the amount available for lending in the United States. The capital is coming in because the United States is further along in its recovery than most other countries. When they catch up, the influx will slow down.

Reagan has created a confidence problem.   Because people in the financial world expect the interest rate to rise because of the deficit, demand for loans right now is increasing, boosting the interest rate still further (13% in July 1984).   Many predict the massive Reagan deficit will ultimately lead to the same dilemma Volcker faced in 1979.

Trade Imbalance Soars to All-Time High. High-interest rates induce foreign investors to buy dollars and deposit them in U.S. banks to earn high interest. This increased demand for dollars increases the value of the dollar on the foreign exchange, meaning that U.S. products become expensive for foreign consumers, while foreign goods become cheap for U.S. consumers. The results are increased imports and decreased exports. In fiscal 1981, the balance of trade was negative $28 billion. In 1983, it reached negative $70 billion, an all-time high. In 1984, it is expected to top a negative $100 billion.

One out of five jobs depend on the export trade; since 1980 the exchange rate imbalance has cost 1.5 million jobs. Multinational corporations tend to invest outside the country where labor and materials can be purchased easily with bloated dollars, and U.S. firms suffer permanent damage as foreign firms push them out of markets.

Small Business Suffers. With large federal deficits, small business is crowded out of the credit market by the high-interest rates and intensified competition with big business for a share of the diminished funds available for borrowing. In this credit struggle with big corporations, small business usually loses. Small businesses are often charged rates above the prime rate because banks deem them less creditworthy and a greater risk than their big business customers.

World Economy Suffers. High-interest rates in the U.S. encourage companies and individuals to draw capital out of other countries for deposit in the U.S., thus inhibiting other countries from recovering from the worldwide recession. To stop this capital drain, other countries are forced to raise their interest rates, fueling further recession.

High interest rates also increase the danger of default on the United States’ $150 billion loans to the third world, threatening the stability of the world financial system.

WHAT IS REAGAN GIVEN CREDIT FOR?
Curbing Inflation. Inflation, which reached a peak of 11.3% at the end of 1980, is expected to average 3.9 percent from November 1983 to November 1984.

The drop in inflation is largely due to the recession itself. The recession meant economic hardship, and therefore, less demand and lower prices. Also, falling oil prices resulting from the temporary world oil glut, as well as bumper crops leading to lower food prices, have brought down inflation.

Decreasing Interest Rate. In January 1981—when Reagan entered office—the prime lending rate was 21.5%. In mid-1984, it was 10.5%.

In 1980, the Federal Reserve caused the interest rate to soar from 11% to 21.5% in an effort to curb inflation, spawning the worst recession since World War II. The decline in the interest rate to the pre-recession level represents a cyclical recovery from the recession. The rate is climbing, however, to 13 percent in July 1984, and is projected to reach 14% by late 1984.

An important measure of the cost of borrowing money is the “real interest rate”—the difference between the interest rate and inflation. For example, if the interest rate and Inflation are equal, then in effect it costs nothing to borrow money: the extra value you get from having the lump sum early is equal to the Interest you have to pay, so the real interest rate is zero. Because inflation has fallen along with the Interest rate, the real interest rate has remained nearly constant. At its highest, it was 11%, and it remains a hefty 9.1% hampering business investments in plant and equipment that are critical for a lasting recovery. The Reagan-caused deficit threatens to keep the real Interest rate high.

Economic Growth. According to the Republican National Committee, the economy grew 6% during 1983, and unemployment has fallen from 10.7% in November and December 1982, to 7.5%t in May 1984.

In recovery from the worst recession in over 40 years, economic growth is no surprise.   Unemployment remains higher than pre-recession levels under Carter, which averaged about 6.6%. The economic recovery has occurred not because of Reagan’s policies, but in spite of them. Reagan’s deficit may thwart any long-term recovery.

Bias in Favor of Big Business
Big Vs. Small Business. Comprising 97% of all U.S. corporations, small business employs one half of the American workforce, creates virtually all new private sector employment, and provides greater opportunities for laid-off workers, women, minorities, and first-time job seekers. Small businesses, however, have been failing at record levels. In 1983, 30,794 small businesses failed, a number comparable only to the 31,822 failures of 1931.

Despite this crisis, Reagan’s corporate tax cuts favored big, not small, business: 80% of the money went to big business, with only 20% going to small business.

Gutting Antitrust. For assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Reagan appointed William Baxter, a self-described “harsh critic” of antitrust laws. “The antitrust laws,” he said, “interfere with a lot of efficient business practices.” Baxter told the judge who was presiding over the ten-year-long IBM trial to dismiss the case because it was without merit. The judge then publicized that Baxter had been a paid employee of IBM on several occasions. Baxter has moved to strip the Federal Trade Commission of “all its antitrust jurisdiction.” The three largest mergers in U.S. history, all involving oil companies, occurred in the first two years of the Reagan Administration. During Reagan’s term, three of the government’s four major pending antitrust suits have been dropped and the fourth one settled under controversial terms.

The National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB was established in the New Deal era to guarantee workers the right to choose whether they wish to be represented by a union, and, if so, which union. It was meant to guarantee that collective bargaining is conducted in a civil, orderly manner. The members of the NLRB have traditionally been reasonably impartial figures. For chairman of the NLRB, however, Reagan appointed Donald L.   Dotson, who believes “collective bargaining frequently means labor monopoly, the destruction of individual freedom, and the destruction of the marketplace…unionized labor relations, shortsighted demands, greed, and debilitating work rules have been the major contributions to the decline of once healthy Industries. …The way has been paved by the NLRB.”

Dotson transferred considerable enforcement authority from an independent general counsel to Hugh Reilly, who had spent the previous eight years at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a right-wing organization that supports employers, never workers, in management-labor disputes.

Dotson and Reilly have partly dismantled the NLRB. Since 1980, the backlog of undecided unfair labor practice cases has grown to unprecedented levels. From September 1983 to February 1984, the total number of decisions in unfair labor practice cases was 259, compared to 625 and 638 in equivalent periods of time under Ford and Carter. In the cases that were decided, disproportionately few were ruled against employers, while disproportionately many were ruled against unions. The NLRB ruled against employers in only 68 cases, compared to 280 and 374 under Ford and Carter. However, it ruled against unions in 35 cases, compared to 47 and 36 under Ford and Carter.

Unemployment and Job Training
Although unemployment has dropped from 10.7%—the highest since 1940—to the present 7.5%, this still represents a higher level than during the Carter Administration. The reduction occurred as a result of the cyclical economic recovery.   Reagan has shown little sympathy for the unemployed. At a time when there were more jobless Americans than at any other time In over 40 years, Reagan cut the budget for unemployment Insurance by 7 percent, about $7.7 billion. He also cut overall job training and employment programs by 60 percent during his first three years in office, transferring $25 billion away from these programs between 1982 and 1985. He cut:

• General Employment and Training by 35%.
• Public Service Employment by 99%.
• Work Incentive Program by 33%.
• Jobs for Economically Disadvantaged Youth by 14%.

He dismantled the Young Adult Conservation Corps and the Youth Conservation Corps, two highly successful programs dealing with conservation projects on public lands. He attempted to abolish the separate youth programs in CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) and to abolish the Summer Youth Employment Program.

If Reagan’s 1985 budget prevails, the major programs of CETA and its successor, the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) will have had their funding cut by 56% between 1980 and 1985.

Minorities endure higher levels of unemployment. In 1983, unemployment for Hispanics averaged 15%, one-and-a-half times the national average. For Hispanic teenagers, the rate is triple the national average. The gap between unemployment levels of blacks and whites Is increasing. In 1981 there was an 8.6% difference; at the end of 1983, it was 11 percent. The unemployment level for black teenagers in some urban centers is 80 percent. Half the participants in the gutted CETA and JTPA programs, however, are non-white.

Human Services
Women, children, the elderly, minorities, and the working poor are the groups hardest hit by Reagan’s shifts in spending priorities. Today about 34 million people live below the poverty line, defined as an average annual income of $9,860 for a family of four. This represents 15% of the American population, the highest level of poverty in 17 years. In a single year, from 1981 to 1982, 2.6 million people fell below the poverty line. The poverty rate for Hispanic Americans is 30%, double the national average and up 15% since Reagan was elected. More than one-third of all female-headed households live in poverty. Over three million more children today live in poverty than in 1979, and they continue to fall into the poverty zone at a rate of 3,000 per day. Almost half of all black children and one out of six white children live in poverty.

Said President Reagan in June 1984: “Our tax policies have been more beneficial to (poor people) than to anyone else.” This is simply not true: the federal tax burden for low-wage earners has ballooned under this administration. A family of four at the poverty line paid 5.5% of its income in federal income and payroll taxes when Carter left the White House; today, that tax bite has virtually doubled. Moreover, families earning far less than a poverty-level income generally paid no federal income tax prior to 1981; now, a family of six pays taxes, even if its income is $4,000 below the poverty line.

Reagan’s cuts in domestic discretionary spending have been disproportionately aimed at low-income programs. This combined with the recession has dealt a double blow to the poor. Yet Reagan said in June 1984: “We are helping more people and paying more money than ever In the history of this country on social programs.” The facts say otherwise: funding for many programs aimed at poor people, including compensatory education, subsidized housing, and employment and job training programs, has dropped substantially in absolute dollar terms since 1981. When inflation and unemployment are taken into account, total spending on all programs for the poor has been cut by nearly one-sixth, with community support services and child nutrition among the biggest losers.

According to a study by the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan research agency, spending for human services for the poor in fiscal years 1982-85 will be $110 billion less than it would have been without the Reagan cuts, and the figure would be close to $140-$150 billion had not Congress resisted many of the cuts. These cuts are summarized by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as follows:

• Retirement and disability programs (Social Security, civil service retirement, veterans’ pensions, and compensation and supplemental security programs) CUT $26.8 BILLION.
• Other income security programs (unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps, child and maternal nutrition, housing aid and home heating assistance) CUT $27.1 BILLION.
• Health programs (Medicare, Medicaid and other health care services) CUT $18.5 BILLION.
• Employment and training programs (Job Corps, public service employment, work incentives, general employment and training) CUT $25 BILLION.
• Social Service programs (social service block grants, community service block grants, and veterans’ readjusted benefits) CUT $4.6 BILLION.
• Education programs (compensatory and vocational education, Head Start, guaranteed student loans and other student aid) CUT $9.1 BILLION.

Although some effort was made to paint these cuts as reforms, in general, they were made simply to save money.  The CBO study says that about 40% of the “savings” will come out of benefits to households with annual incomes of $10,000 or less and 70% from families with Incomes of $20,000 or less. Reagan’s first budget proposed to take benefits of some kind from between 20 million and 25 million people who live just above the poverty line.   In dollars adjusted for inflation, in his first two years, Reagan tried to cut federal aid to the needy almost in half, by 45 percent and did cut it by 28%.

According to the Children’s Defense Fund, Reagan’s cuts through fiscal year 1984 mean that the poorest and most vulnerable children in America will have lost $1 in every $6 spent on them before Reagan took office. Because military spending has been so drastically increased, overall federal spending continues to grow and the deficit to enlarge. Carter’s last budget was $664 billion; Reagan’s fiscal year 1985 budget is $925 billion. In fact, when figures published by the Republican National Committee are adjusted for inflation, they show that Reagan has not even reduced the rate of increase in federal spending.

How did Reagan do this? For years he has told tales of welfare queens and unemployment bums to arouse public indignation and said private charities ought to pick up the slack, despite protests from the leaders of these charities that they could never keep up. Reagan has targeted the most helpless: poor people make poor lobbyists.

Social Security
More than 30 million older or disabled Americans receive benefits from the Social Security system, and another 100 million workers are expecting benefits when they retire. Though he now denies it, Reagan has for years advocated that Social Security become voluntary and need-based, which would effectively abolish the program. It would put the present retirement insurance system into the same vulnerable political position as welfare. As it is now, people who would balk at receiving charity depend on Social Security with equanimity, because they legitimately paid into it all of their working lives.

Before and after his 1980 campaign Reagan created a dragon and promised to slay it, claiming that the Social Security system was going bankrupt and that he would “save and strengthen it.” Scare stories filled newspapers and David Stockman solemnly stated in May 1981 that unless Congress took direct action to preserve the system, “the most devastating bankruptcy in history will occur on or about November 3, 1982.”

There was Indeed a “shortfall” in Social Security trust funds, but “bankruptcy,” which connotes going out of business so that no benefits can be paid out, was never a possibility. The shortfall was a temporary result of wages not keeping up with prices and population changes. For every $9.50 being put into Social Security trust funds via payroll taxes, $10 was being paid out in benefits. By about 1990 this problem would have corrected itself and more would have been paid in than out. Even if the Social Security trust fund, which exists to buffer fluctuations in income and outflow, were to run completely dry, the worst that could have happened would have been a delay in sending out benefits amounting to a 5% cut—not a 100% cut connoted by the word “bankruptcy.”

Many leading financial figures disagreed with Reagan’s gloomy forecasts: Robert A.   Beck, chairman of the Prudential Insurance Company, said in June 1982: “I don’t know of any reasonable study that didn’t conclude that the system is basically sound.” A half-dozen changes to fix the short-term problem were advocated by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, including putting in some funds from general revenues, taxing benefits Issued to those over a certain Income level and dedicating those revenues to the system, and making scheduled increases in the payroll tax come sooner.

Instead, Reagan insisted on cutting benefits and proposed on May 12, 1981, to cut benefits by 22% over the long-term, including a one-third cut in benefits for the disabled. In a television appearance two months later he assured listeners that “I will not stand by and see those of you who are dependent on Social Security deprived of your benefits,” without mentioning that those who would become dependent on Social Security the following year would not receive their full benefits under his proposals. With relative ease, he convinced Congress to eliminate minimum benefits and college student benefits. His May 12 proposals combined with other budget changes in Social Security came to total cuts of $280 billion by 1990—so much that surpluses in the trust funds would have soon allowed a cut in the payroll taxes that fund the system. Some claim this is his ultimate goal.

Meanwhile, the Reagan Administration cracked down on enforcement of eligibility requirements for disability benefits and threw 42% of the cases investigated—485,000 recipients—off the rolls. The mentally ill were particularly targeted: after studying 40 cases in which mentally ill persons had been cut off, the General Accounting Office concluded that 27 of them could not work in a competitive environment and more information was needed about the other thirteen before a good judgment could be made. Administrative law judges have restored benefits to nearly two-thirds of those who appealed. On April 13, 1984, fearing mounting political hot water and accusations of cruelty, the administration announced it would suspend its efforts to cut off disability benefits.

The scare tactics worked. In the fall of 1981, a Harris poll revealed that 66% of people under 45 no longer believed that the Social Security system would exist to pay them benefits in their retirement. The damage to the public’s confidence in the system so worried Democrats that they went along with the recommendations of a “bipartisan” commission (10 Republicans, five Democrats) and agreed to a $40 billion cut in benefits by 1990 in the form of a recurring six-month delay in cost-of-living adjustments. This compromise also cut early retirement benefits from 80% to 70% of full benefits, and gradually raised the age of full-time eligibility to 66 by 2009 and 67 by 2027. Payroll and self-employment taxes were increased slightly, and benefits will be taxed over a certain income threshold. Despite the compromise’s better points, Reagan’s attempts to discredit Social Security have resulted in millions receiving reduced benefits and millions more losing faith in the system.

Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC)
The Republican National Committee says that aid has been “retargeted to the truly needy.” This means that millions of Americans who hold jobs and live just below or just above the poverty line have been cut from AFDC rolls or are receiving reduced benefits.   AFDC was enacted in 1962 as an outgrowth of the Aid to Dependent Children provision of Social Security. In order for a family to qualify for AFDC, there must be children who are deprived of the financial support of one of their parents due to death, disability, absence from the home, or unemployment, and they must fall below a minimum needs standard. AFDC recipients are customarily eligible for Medicaid and usually eligible for food stamps. The average AFDC family size is a parent and two children. About 98% of the AFDC national caseload are women and children; about 45% are black.

Reagan has cut AFDC funding by about 13% in fiscal years 1982 to 1985, approximately $4.8 billion, affecting 725,000 families out of a caseload of 3 to 6 million. According to a 1984 General Accounting Office study, 1981 eligibility changes took 493,000 families off the AFDC rolls, saving $93 million a month out of a total AFDC budget of $1 billion a month, and others had their benefits reduced. These cuts have been made through restricted eligibility requirements—such as lowering the income ceiling—that have hit the “working poor” the hardest. An example of one of the new mandatory restrictions is counting the income of a stepparent as available to a child whether or not it is. States also have the option of counting the value of food stamps, housing subsidies, and energy assistance as income. Although Reagan says that this has helped these families reduce their dependency on welfare, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission released a study in the spring of 1983 that said that if Reagan’s “reforms” for 1984 went into effect, in 13 states welfare recipients would lose money if they went to work.

Hunger in America
After highly-publicized remarks by Ed Meese on Dec. 8, 1983, (“I don’t know of any authoritative figures that there are hungry children”) served to call attention to White House attitudes toward hunger, Reagan said he was “perplexed” by the issue and appointed a Task Force on Hunger. Their recommendations are now under review.   Meanwhile, Reagan has systematically cut federal food aid and child nutrition programs again and again.

Food Stamps.  The Family Nutrition Program, now widely known as the Food Stamp Program, was initiated in 1961 in the Department of Agriculture and is now in effect in all 50 states and territories. It is a wholly federal aid program, usually administered by state departments of welfare or social services, and its purpose is to battle chronic malnutrition with its accompanying physical and mental retardation. About 22 million Americans currently receive food stamps. Eligibility is tagged to the poverty level; limited assets are also required. The average gross income of food stamp households is $325 per month. About 87% of the recipients are poor and most of the others are just above the poverty line. The average food stamp benefit is now 47 cents per meal.

The food stamp program has been reduced by nearly 20% below the levels it would have attained without Reagan’s cuts. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that food stamps have been cut by about $2.4 billion since 1962. In 1983 alone it was cut by $1.3 billion, “terminating” one million people from the program, reducing aid to four million more, and making it unavailable to many of the newly poor. These cuts were made by tightening eligibility Income criteria, reducing food stamp office hours and outreach, and making the semi-annual adjustments for Inflation annual. At least 80% of the cuts were made by reducing benefits to people below the poverty line.

Even these cuts pale beside what Reagan was asking for: in 1983, his proposal would have affected 83$ of all food stamp recipients, reducing aid for 14 million people and dropping three million from the rolls entirely. Working families on food stamps would have lost $2 of every $5 in benefits, an average yearly loss of $684.

The administration boasts that more people received food stamps each month in 1983 (21.6 million) than when Reagan was elected in 1980 (20.7 million). This is due, however, to the overwhelming increase in the number of poor people, so that large numbers continued to be eligible despite tightened restrictions. In 1981, under Carter’s last budget, 22.5 million people received food stamps.

Child Nutrition Program. The School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program are administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and run by local school boards.   The School Lunch Program serves 23 million children in over 90,000 schools; the Breakfast program, 3.4 million children in 34,000 schools. Although all school meals receive some subsidization under the program, about 80% of the federal funds in the School Lunch Program support free and reduced-price meals served to low-income children. About 90% of the children in the breakfast program are from families below the poverty line.

The Reagan Administration has cut child nutrition programs by about 28%, or $1.5, billion, between fiscal years 1982 to 1985. In fiscal 1982 alone, school lunch programs were cut by $1 billion (about 35%) and the breakfast program lost about $78 million (20%) of federal funding. Cuts were made by lowering federal subsidies per meal (increasing the price for all meals), changing income criteria for free and reduced-price meals, and changing the application procedure. As an immediate result, two million fewer children purchased school lunches, and 1.1 million fewer children received free or reduced-price lunches. The new requirements forced 2700 schools to drop out of the lunch program entirely. About 800 schools and over 400,000 children dropped out of the breakfast program. In addition, new regulations were proposed which were so nutritionally lax that ketchup and relish would have been accepted as school lunch vegetables. (Public outcry forced the administration to drop this provision.)

The Summer Food Service Program reached 1.9 million children in 1981, but only 861,000 in 1982 after a 25% cut. The Child Care program, which provides meals in numerous day care centers, was cut by 30 percent, or nearly $130 million a year.

Under the Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) program, set up in 1972 and made permanent in 1974, needy pregnant and lactating mothers and their Infants and small children up to age five who are deemed to be vulnerable to poor nutrition are given vouchers to buy foods rich in protein and other nutrients. Initially, Reagan tried to cut $224 million from the program, about 25%; Congress rejected this proposal. But about 200,000 women, infants, and children were removed from the program in 1981 and $60 million went unspent because the federal ceiling for eligibility was changed; later Congress ordered the administration to restore these benefits. In fiscal 1984, Reagan proposed dropping 600,000 people from the program, with Congress offering some resistance. 100,000 more poor pregnant women and their children lost their WIC dietary supplement.

Health
The poor’s access to health care has been greatly reduced under Reagan. When one is cut from AFDC, one is also cut from Medicaid; and nearly half a million families have been taken off the AFDC rolls since Reagan’s election. In addition, since 1981 10.7 million people have lost some or all health coverage as a result of unemployment. Health care costs are spiraling at a rate three times that of inflation. Over 10 million of the poorest children in America depend on Medicaid for checkups, medical treatments, dental care, hospital care, and drugs. Reagan wanted to cut $12 billion from Medicaid over four years; Congress approved $4 billion, a 5% cut. In the 18 months after mid-1981 almost 700,00 children lost medical coverage and the cuts in community health centers cost 725,000 people medical services.

In the spring of 1984, the General Accounting Office released a study surveying former AFDC recipients in Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, Memphis, and Syracuse, and found that 43% to 75% had no other health insurance coverage. Between 14% to 24% reported that they had neglected a medical problem because they couldn’t afford treatment; between 27% to 48% had neglected dental health care. In Boston and Memphis, 13.3% of former AFDC recipients had been refused medical and dental treatment because they couldn’t pay.

Reagan is continuing to seek major cuts (about one-third) in the childhood vaccination programs that keep rubella, polio, and diphtheria at bay, although at present fewer than half of black preschoolers are immunized against diphtheria and only 39% against polio. In 44 states prenatal and delivery services and preventive health services for women, infants, and children were reduced.

The effects of these cuts (added to the effects of the child nutrition cuts) will be long-term and difficult to quantify, but there is already one startling indicator of their magnitude.   Although the average national infant mortality rate continues to drop slightly, Infant mortality is rising in poor rural areas of Appalachia and the deep south and inner-city slums—the areas hardest hit by the cutbacks. In Detroit, the rate has climbed to 33 per 1000 live births—the same as it is in Honduras, the poorest country in Latin America.   On May 24, 1984, a Harvard researcher released results of a study revealing a 46% rise in mortality for the first year of life in areas Served by five Boston neighborhood health centers in 1981 to 1982, compared to a steadily declining rate in the 1970s.   Mortality in the first month of life, which had fallen 15% in those areas in 1980, increased by 58% in 1982. The study pointed a finger directly at reduced access to health care and cutbacks in Medicaid eligibility.

Other Low-Income Programs
In addition to cuts for specific programs, much less money is being made available to states in block grants for discretionary spending on social programs.   In fiscal years 1982-85, the Community Service Block Grant has been cut 39% and the Social Services Block Grant by 22%.

Reagan has repeatedly attempted to eliminate the $271 million Work Incentive Program that helps mothers escape welfare.

The Legal Services Corporation, established by Nixon in 1974, provides 85 percent of the money for local legal-aid clinics for the poor. Reagan first attempted to abolish it. Then he managed to get Congress to cut its budget from $321 to $241 million a year, forcing the departure of one-fourth of the program’s lawyers and the closing of 300 field offices.   He then attempted to take it over with appointees who were opposed to its existence, but Congress refused to go along.

In fiscal year 1984, low-income energy assistance was reduced 34 percent, from $2 billion to $1.3 billion, in a time of rising gas prices.

Housing
The Low Income Housing Information Service estimates that there are 3.5 million more households with incomes under $5000 a year than there are affordable places to live. A Reagan-appointed commission stated that 7.5 million low-income families need housing assistance. Yet Reagan has advocated decimating the budget for low-income housing, including halting new construction, lowering rent subsidies, and raising rents in government housing.

Budget figures in the housing sector are tricky to evaluate; overall housing spending has risen slightly, because most of this goes to middle-income lending and mortgage insurance payment and tax expenditures, especially on homeowner mortgage interest and property tax deduction.   Actual outlays for lower-income programs have risen: $4.5 billion in fiscal 1980, $7.7 billion in 1983, and $10.8 billion in 1984. However, this merely represents the fulfillment of obligations created by Ford and Carter; Reagan has tried to limit future obligations to near zero.

In the fiscal year 1981, Carter’s last budget, the federal government obligated $26 billion for future spending on low-income housing.   Reagan proposed the obligation of $14 billion in fiscal 1982, $8.7 billion in fiscal 1983, and a remarkable $0,515 billion in 1984—only 1.3%, allowing for inflation, of the amount obligated in President Ford’s final budget. Congress has refused to go along, giving $8.7 billion in new funding in 1982, $10.9 billion in 1983, and $10 billion in 1984—the latter a twentyfold increase over Reagan’s proposal.

Nevertheless, funds for subsidized housing for the poor have been cut 60% since 1981.   Rent subsidies for the elderly, on which about one million people rely, have declined somewhat and would have been nearly halved by Reagan’s 1983 proposal. The rural poor have also been hit by budget cuts in the Farmers Home Administration from $3.7 billion to $1.1 billion.

About 2.4 million people with; incomes averaging less than $6,000 a year live and pay rent in government-subsidized housing. Reagan succeeded in raising rents from 25% to 30% of tenants’ income but failed to convince Congress to let 30% of food stamp benefits count as overall income. Reagan opposed future construction of new housing units, but under severe pressure from Congress, he acceded to a new $15.6 billion housing authorization involving more than 20,000 new units.

Reagan has often publicly sympathized with young middle-class couples who can no longer hope to own their own home because of high-interest rates, but he cut Government National Mortgage Association support for home loans by $16 billion (25%), and vetoed a Congressional bill to subsidize home mortgages with $3 billion in a five-year plan to reduce interest rates on such mortgages by up to four percentage points.   The bill was championed by a Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, who claimed it would build 400,000 new homes and put 700,000 people back to work per billion dollars spent.

Education
Reagan initially attempted to cut federal aid to education by one-third, with larger cuts in programs like Title I, which provides compensatory education in the basic skills to disadvantaged children. His Commission on Excellence in Education recommended substantial and costly improvements in public education and a continued federal role, but Reagan’s main education initiatives have been advocating school prayer and $245 in tuition tax credits for parents with children in private schools.

Reagan originally planned to abolish the Department of Education, and he wanted federal aid to education halved by 1986. Thanks to public outrage and congressional action, the 1984 budget of $15 billion is about the same as Carter’s last one, not adjusting for inflation. In real dollars, however, federal outlays for education have dropped 14% from 1980 to 1983. The Department of Education staff has been cut by 25%, removing 2000 employees.

Several small programs have been consolidated into a block grant to the states and given a 35% cut in overall appropriation.   Facing shrinking state and local revenues, most states chose to spend these funds a mile wide and an inch deep, and small, specific, and at times unpopular programs, such as desegregation aid, lost out.   There has been an overall transfer of money to the West from the East and Midwest, and from urban and rural districts to suburbs.

Compensatory Education and Desegregation. Reagan believes that federal intervention has caused school deterioration. Many educators, however, credit federal programs such as Head Start, Title I, and desegregation aid with narrowing the gap in reading skills between young black and white pupils. Half of all black students in the South now attend fully Integrated schools. In 1960, only 41% of American students finished high school, but 66% had by 1980. 20% of black students graduated from high school in 1960, compared to 51% in 1980. Minorities have been closing the gap in SAT scores since 1976. Twice as many black students—nearly one million—were enrolled in college in 1981 than in 1970.

Reagan has dismantled the Emergency School Assistance Act, a modest program to aid voluntary integration, and his Justice Department has declared that it will no longer pursue cases involving busing to achieve desegregation goals.   Because of Reagan’s cuts, 1.5 million children were denied the help that Title I should have given them in the 1982 and 1983 school years.

Handicapped. Hundreds of thousands of handicapped children once isolated in institutions are now in public schools because of the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act. When Reagan tried to loosen regulations requiring the nation’s estimated four million handicapped children to receive a mainstream education where that is feasible, the Senate passed a resolution saying it would not go along by 93 to 4.

Bilingual Education. Although Reagan claims he is committed to bilingual education, he first proposed to abolish the Bilingual Education Program, then he reduced its funding from $161 million in the fiscal year 1981 to $138 million in the fiscal year 1982 and $95 million in 1983 and 1984. The number of students helped fell from 324,000 in 1980 to 125,000 in 1983.

Higher Education. There has been a 27% overall cut to higher education in fiscal years 1982 to 1985, affecting nearly 700,000 young people. Reagan terminated the Social Security Student Benefits program and tried every year to gut the Pell Grants system, which was started under Nixon for disadvantaged college students. Pell grants have actually been cut 13% since 1981 and would have been cut further had not Congress intervened. For 1985, he is trying a new tactic: instead of the current maximum award of $3900, low-income students could receive $3000 provided they contribute a minimum of $500 themselves—an impossibility for many students.

Reagan has also tried to decimate the Guarantee Student Loan; fee changes have in fact reduced them by about one-third. The fiscal year 1985 budget also recommends that national direct student loans, state student incentive loans, and supplemental opportunity grants receive no further federal funding.

Weslyan and other colleges have publicly announced that they are having to reject qualified applicants who cannot pay full tuition. There are signs at many colleges that fewer students from poor families are applying for admission; as state and federal support dry up, many universities and college students are experiencing dramatic hikes in tuition by as much as 15% a year. The small steps taken to Increase access to higher education for us all are being retraced.

Civil Rights
President Reagan is on record as opposing every major civil rights law, Including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Law.   Reagan’s civil rights stand earned him the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan during his 1980 campaign (which he publicly rejected), Reagan made numerous attempts to weaken the 1965 Voting Rights Act when it came up for extension in 1982, shifting his position a number of times when outraged public and Congressional reaction made it clear that he would not be able to gut it as he wished. The effects of this law have been clear: between 1965 and 1980 the percentage of blacks who were registered to vote in the South increased from 29% to 57% and many more blacks held office.

Enforcement of existing civil rights legislation has dropped dramatically under Reagan.   There has been a 15% cut in actual spending power for civil rights enforcement budgets and staffs in five key federal agencies. Advocating “color-blindness and neutrality,” Reagan’s Justice Department has stated that it will no longer use affirmative action principles in the hiring of federal employees, rejecting the principle of transitional favoritism to offset historic patterns of discrimination. The number of equal employment opportunity suits has declined more than 70% compared with the Carter Administration.

Carter proposed regulations to enforce the 1968 Fair Housing Law; Reagan promptly withdrew them. In 30 months the Department of Justice has filed only six new lawsuits under the Fair Housing Act. Before 1981 it had brought 20 to 32 actions a year.

In the past, Reagan supported a constitutional amendment to eliminate forced busing.   The Justice Department said in 1981 that it would not require defendants in school desegregation cases to prove that their segregation was unintentional, thus making it harder to prosecute. When in 1983 a federal court ordered the Justice Department to begin proceedings against Alabama officials on a charge of racial segregation in Alabama higher education, it was the first new education case in two-and-a-half years.

On June 13, 1983, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said it was “disappointed and concerned” by the President’s failure to put more women, blacks, and Hispanics in high-level government jobs. As of October 1980, 16.1% of Carter’s judicial appointments were blacks; only 2.5% of the 121 federal judges named by Reagan were black. Carter appointed 110 Hispanics to full-time positions in government; Reagan, 35. No Hispanic has been appointed to a position requiring Senate confirmation.

The U.S. Senate rebuffed Reagan’s attempt to put the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, an independent watchdog created by Eisenhower, out of business by replacing the Commission with his own appointees. Then, in the fall of 1983, Reagan suddenly fired the three Democrats on it who had been appointed by previous administrations and replaced them with three thoughtful critics of affirmative action. He also arranged that two outspoken civil rights activists—both women and both Republicans—would be denied reappointment.

On January 8, 1982, the administration suddenly announced the reversal of an 11-year-old IRS policy denying federal tax exemptions to schools that discriminate on the basis of race. This meant that more than 100 such schools, including Bob Jones University, which expels students for inter-racial marriage, and Goldsboro Christian School, which bars blacks because God separated the races, would be exempt from paying unemployment, Social Security, and federal income taxes, and their benefactors could deduct their contributions. Such an exemption is in effect a matching grant from the Treasury. In May 1983, in an 8-to-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the IRS’s policy of denying their exemptions was entirely legal, Congress refused to overturn the policy, and the administration appeared to back off the issue.

Although minority groups have stopped short of calling Reagan a bigot, several have suggested Reagan’s spending cuts are an attack not on the programs per se but on the people they serve. Says the National Urban League: “The bald truth is that not only has movement toward narrowing the socio-economic gap that separates black and white Americans come to a dead halt, retrenchment has set in and Blacks are actually regressing.” The black unemployment rate in 1982 was 18.9%, more than twice the white rate, and between January 1981 and August 1983 the black unemployment rate went from 13% to 21% (for black teenagers, 37% to 50.6%). In 1982, median black family Income was 55% of median white family Income, $13.598 compared to $24,593—an income gap larger than any in the 1970s or early 1980s.

Women
Reagan actively worked to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and his party’s refusal to support the ERA in its 1980 platform broke a long tradition of bipartisan support.

Reagan also is working toward a constitutional amendment that would make abortion illegal. The next president may have the opportunity to appoint between three and six justices to the Supreme Court and thus Influence rulings on reproductive rights for several decades. Commenting on how women have been hit by Reagan’s social program cuts, the National Organization for Women (NOW) says: “It is perfectly clear that Ronald Reagan’s great concern for fetuses does not extend to already born children—and certainly not to their families.” Nearly 60% of children in female-headed households live in poverty. 72% of the elderly poor are women; Social Security, which Reagan tried to cut by 22%, is the only significant source of support for 90% of these women.

Women currently make 62¢ for every dollar men make. Women with college degrees and full-time jobs bring home less money, on average than men who never finished high school. In 1982 women were the sole support of more than 9.4 million households. In 1960, 23.3 million women were workers; in June 1982, 47.7 million were workers, comprising 43% of the labor force. But jobs were held at the lowest end of the pay scale: in 1981, 8 of 10 clerical workers, 6 of 10 salespeople, and 7 of 10 teachers were women, while only 14% of lawyers, 14% of doctors, and 4% of engineers were women.

Reagan has refused to effectively enforce federal employment discrimination regulations; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sharply reduced litigation of discrimination cases. Reagan’s Justice Department recently argued in a Supreme Court case for drastically limiting the use of Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education; many schools can once again arbitrarily limit the number of women they admit.

Reagan has appointed one-third fewer women than his predecessor to full-time positions in government—very few of whom were minority women. Despite the appointments of Elizabeth Dole, Margaret Heckler, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Sandra Day O’Connor, Reagan has overall appointed 19% fewer women to top-level jobs than did Carter.

Civil Liberties
According to Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Reagan Administration “seems to regard the restriction of information as a central strategy of government.”

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guarantees a citizen the right to have access to non-classified government Information. In Britain, where there is no FOIA, Individuals and organizations spend tremendous amounts of time and effort simply obtaining leaked copies of documents the government does not wish to disclose; as a result of FOIA, Americans have immediate access, and rarely need to press their case in court. In October 1981, the administration attempted to gut the FOIA through a “reform” bill that would have placed numerous new restrictions on information requests, including increasing request fees, allowing agencies “stall time,” requiring agencies to deny access to any “business information” if its disclosure “could” Impair the “legitimate business interests” of any person, and many other weakening clauses. The bill has not succeeded.   On Jan. 7, 1983, the administration unsuccessfully attempted to override the 1974 fee waiver provision, which said that documents were to be furnished without charge or at a reduced rate when the release of the information was in the public interest.

In 1982 Reagan Issued an Executive Order on Classification that makes it far easier to classify information. There have also been major efforts to restrict and censor the communication of unclassified scientific information to scientists in other countries.

The administration has also proposed a “gag rule” that would require all federal employees that at any time had access to “sensitive compartmental information” to submit all future writings, even after leaving government service, for pre-publication review. This would mean, for example, that a president could sensor his predecessors’ memoirs.

In January 1983, the U.S. Department of Justice labeled three Canadian films—the Academy-award-winning film “If You Love This Planet,” featuring anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, and two films on acid rain—as “political propaganda” under a provision of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. This meant the National Film Board of Canada was required to label the films with a statement that it is a “foreign agent” and submit the names of theaters and organizations showing the films and the number of people in attendance. Widespread defiance of these rules and .public ridicule ensued. While the films enjoyed notoriety in some areas, distribution in other areas suffered.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, the State Department has begun denying entrance visas on the basis of political affiliation in order to keep out points of view that they do not want Americans to hear. Here are two examples of many: approximately 320 delegates from Japan, Australia, Africa, Canada, and Europe seeking to attend the U.N. Special Session on Disarmament in June 1982 were denied visas. On March 3, 1983, the State Department refused to grant a visa to Hortensia Busse de Allende, widow of the slain Chilean president, under the authority of the Infamous Walter-McCarran Act (a vestige of the McCarthy era) because “her entry into the U.S.   to make various public appearances and speeches has been determined to be prejudicial to U.S.   Interests because she is a highly placed official in the World Peace Council, which is affiliated with the Soviet Union, both ideologically and financially.” Mrs. Allende had been invited to visit California for two weeks by the Northern California Ecumenical Council, the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, and Stanford University. It would not have been her first visit to the United States.

Crime
Although Reagan often speaks of “getting tough on crime,” he sought budget cuts in the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Customs Service of between 6% and 12%.   Each year, the administration has “zero-funded” the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, although 17.2% of all serious crimes are committed by juveniles, who then “graduate” to criminal careers as adults. By 1984, the administration had cut drug and alcohol prevention and treatment programs by 25% over what was spent in 1980.

The administration has cracked down on drug traffic in southern Florida, and the government has seized nearly 12,500 pounds of cocaine in 1982—more than three times the amount captured in 1981. There is some evidence, however, that this has merely shifted drug traffic to other corridors, such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Northeast.

Reagan has formally proposed doing away with the exclusionary rule, a law which says that evidence found during an illegal search cannot be used in a criminal trial. The administration also wants to empower judges to jail accused people without bail and without trial unless the accused can prove he or she would not commit a crime if released on bail—thus changing the presumption of innocence until proven guilty into guilty until proven innocent.

Attorney General William Smith asked Congress to eliminate the insanity defense.   Reagan suggested the law could be changed from “not guilty by reason of insanity, to guilty but insane.”

Although John Hinckley bought his cheap pistol in a Dallas pawn-shop (Texas lacks gun registration requirements), Reagan is still firmly opposed to the registration of firearms.   In 1983, 21,000 people were victims of murder; 43% were killed by handguns. Reagan has also fought against a Congressional bill to outlaw man-maiming and armor-piercing “Cop-killer” ammunition.

Regulations and Safety
Under the rubric of “regulatory relief,” Reagan has pressed a policy of “getting government off our backs.” Rules and regulations, in general, restrict what business can do, and therefore, are “costly and unnecessary” in Reagan’s view; the administration points with pride to the reduction in the size of the Federal Register, which prints federal rules and regulations. But while the elimination of “rules and regulations” sounds vaguely appealing, the specific rules and regulations being repealed are those designed to protect the environment, increase auto safety, enable the elderly to travel by bus, regulate worker exposure to toxic chemicals, and many others.

Reagan has proposed a “regulatory reform” bill that would require agencies to prove that the economic benefits of a major regulation will outweigh its costs, even though costs are simple to calculate while benefits, such as better health, are less easily quantified. For example, the federal standard for cribs has reduced by half the number of infant deaths from strangulation; studies show that between 1973 and 1979, child-resistant bottle caps saved the lives of 200 to 300 children under the age of five. The regulatory reform bill is being opposed by the entire public interest community.

OSHA.  The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was once termed by Reagan as “the most pernicious of the watchdog agencies.” In 1981 OSHA inspections dropped 21% and follow-up inspections dropped 72%. Between the end of 1980 and mid-1983, the number of workers covered by OSHA inspections dropped 45% (1.5 million workers).   Serious health and safety violations uncovered by OSHA fell 47%, willful violations were down 92%, and repeat violations dropped 64%. What inspections remained tended to be “paper” inspections—lookings’ at business records without inspecting actual working conditions. According to the Department of Labor, 100,000 workers die each year as a result of on-the-job exposure to toxic substances. OSHA has failed to tighten the standard for benzene, even though the current standard is estimated to result in risks of 1400 to 1700 leukemia deaths for every 100,000 exposed workers.

The administration held up efforts to tighten the asbestos standard for almost three years despite evidence that thousands of workers exposed at current standards would die of asbestos-related cancer.  The new standard set in November 1983 is still five times higher than that recommended by OSHA in 1980.

Procedures for setting workplace standards for other toxic or carcinogenic chemicals—cadmium, beryllium, nickel, chromium, formaldehyde, ethylene dibromide, and ethylene oxide—have been delayed or halted. However, much time has been found to “review* existing standards, such as that for cotton dust, lead, and radiation, in order to try to weaken them.

A number of states have passed “right to know” laws guaranteeing a worker’s right to be informed of his or her workplace exposure to hazardous substances. OSHA passed a much weaker set of rules and is trying to have them override the state rules; three Northeastern states are currently suing to keep OSHA from substituting its rules for the tougher and more specified laws they have on the books.

Mine Safety. About 216,000 miners work in about 2,100 deep mines and 2,800 surface mines in the U.S. Before 1952, between 500 and 2000 U.S.   miners died in mine accidents every year. Federal Inspections and sanctions began that year and annual deaths dropped to about 100 per year. Reagan reduced the number of Inspectors by 10%, there were 5000 fewer inspections in 1981 than the year before, minimum fines for safety violations by mine operators were decreased, and deaths increased to 155. The administration then restored the Mine Safety and Health Administration budget.

Auto Safety. Each year 50,000 Americans die in automobile accidents. Federal rules had required automatic passive restraints (in effect, either airbags or automatically locking seat belts) in new full-size cars in 1981, mid-size cars in 1982, and compacts in 1983. In spring 1981 Reagan announced a one-year delay in these and other auto-safety regulations despite government and Independent estimates that passive restraints would prevent 9,000 deaths and 65,000 serious injuries per year. Later, the director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rescinded the rules altogether.  A federal court threw out his action as arbitrary and capricious and ordered that all cars sold after September 1983 be equipped with airbags or automatic seat belts.

Environment and Energy
Reagan’s lack of sensitivity to environmental concerns has become almost legendary, and his appointments in this area have been vociferously criticized. All three of his Cabinet-level appointees—James Watt at Interior Department, Anne Gorsuch-Burford at the Environmental Protection Agency, and James Edwards at the Department of Energy—have been replaced with less controversial figures, but the effects of severe budget cuts and internal reorganizations will linger for years. Faced with an array of new environmental legislation passed in the 1970s, Reagan chose to strip enforcement of those laws and weaken administrative rules that put them into effect. Although public protest, Congress, and numerous lawsuits brought by environmental groups have ameliorated these changes, the damage may be lasting.

The fate of the Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ), a modest-sized watchdog agency created by President Nixon in 1970, seems to demonstrate Reagan’s priorities. With its budget cut by two-thirds and its entire professional staff fired, the CEQ is a shadow of its former self and no longer publishes its annual reports on the nation’s environmental quality.

Pollution Control
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for administering and enforcing major pollution laws and for regulating toxic chemicals. The EPA suffered major budget cuts and purges of experienced professionals under Anne Gorsuch-Burford, who resigned in 1983 after a scandal (“Sewergate”) involving favoritism to polluters.   Reagan accepted her resignation reluctantly, praised her for the “fine job” she had done at the EPA, and blamed the media for her resignation.

The fiscal year 1984 budget calls for 22% fewer staff and 43% less money for the EPA than in Carter’s fiscal year 1981 budget, although a study by a group called SAVE EPA calculates that new laws that add to the EPA’s workload require a 43% increase in personnel and a 69% jump in funds to do the job right. The EPA’s research and development funding has been cut in half, although “lack of sufficient research” is often cited by the administration as an excuse for delaying action on such problems as acid rain. While the EPA claims it has given power back to the states for enforcing environmental laws, it has cut grants for such enforcement by 40%.

Shortly after taking office Reagan issued an Executive Order which gave the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) de facto veto power over environmental regulations. It has exercised this over several dozen rules; for example, it suspended pretreatment regulations for industrial pollution, delayed three new air pollution rules, and delayed the labeling of toxic substances in the workplace. The OMB has tended to exempt rules from review if they relax rather than increase the burden on industry.

Air Pollution. The 1970 Clean Air Act has resulted in measurable progress toward healthier air, though when Reagan took office, 140 million Americans still lived in areas where air pollution violated health standards during some part of the year. Reagan has cut the EPA’s air quality staff by 30% and its budget by 40% since the fiscal year 1981.   The EPA has been slow to issue new regulations that are required by the Clean Air Act, such as clean-up requirements for diesel cars and trucks and for heavy-duty gasoline-powered trucks. It has delayed setting emissions standards for 30 suspected toxic pollutants—12 of which have been declared carcinogens by the National Toxicology Program.

The EPA has also weakened or abolished many existing regulations.   It increased the allowable emissions of sulfur dioxides from power plants by a million-and-a-half tons per year, despite a consensus of scientific opinion that a decrease of 12 million tons per year is essential to limit acid rain. Although Reagan described acid rain as his highest priority when he appointed William Ruckelshaus to be the EPA Administrator, he allowed the Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman to shoot down Ruckelshaus’ acid rain program—which was a modest one-third the size recommended by the National Academy of Sciences.

In its first two years under Reagan, the EPA referred an average of 65% fewer cases of violations of the Clean Air Act to the Justice Department for enforcement, compared to I980.

The administration has supported congressional proposals to weaken the Clean Air Act, including:

• Allowing deadlines for attaining health standards to slip until 1993.
• Weakening auto emissions standards to allow a doubling of nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide emissions.
• Eliminating the requirements that in polluted areas new sources of pollution use state-of-the-art pollution controls.
• Allowing greatly increased pollution in relatively pristine areas such as in National Parks.

These proposals have been stalled, and the Administration is concentrating instead on stopping amendments to the Clean Air Act that strengthen it in two areas: acid rain and hazardous pollutants.

Water Pollution. The Reagan EPA has also slowed down progress toward achieving the goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act. The water quality staff has been reduced by 38% and its funding by 57% since 1981 levels. The EPA has sought to weaken or evade responsibility for protecting groundwater from hazardous wastes and identifying toxic water pollutants. Enforcement actions against wastewater dischargers have fallen off from 697 in 1980 to 410 in 1982. A December report by the General Accounting Office found that 82% of the 53 major wastewater dischargers surveyed had violated their permits, and nearly a third of the violators were in “significant non-compliance.” The study blamed it on the severe budget cuts and dropoff in the EPA’s enforcement.

Reagan has backed off from some early proposals to drastically weaken the nation’s clean water law. However, the administration continues to fight strengthening amendments to the Clean Water Act proposed in Congress, including ones that:

• Increase federal funds for municipal sewage treatment.
• Establish a program to deal with “non-point” sources of water pollution (such as agricultural run-off).
• Further protect groundwater from contamination.

Toxic Chemicals. Toxic chemicals are poisons. There are over 55,000 chemicals now in commercial use in the United States and 10 to 20 new chemical compounds are introduced into commerce every week. The 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act requires the EPA to gather information and test data and if necessary restrict the use of toxic chemicals before they are placed on the market. It also requires the EPA to review all chemicals in use to regulate those that pose unreasonable risks.

Reagan has stalled the slow progress that had been made toward these goals. Staff for this task has been cut 22% and the budget by 31% since 1981. Roughly, 2000 priority suspect chemicals await review, with 100 added to this list each year. No rules have been issued on the conducting of safety tests for new chemicals; Ruckelshaus advocates “voluntary testing” by companies. The EPA has also failed to meet deadlines for the testing of dozens of chemicals deemed by a federal interagency panel to be suspected of causing cancer, genetic damage, and birth defects. It has put off regulating DEHP and formaldehyde, two widely used chemicals, despite staff recommendations that these deserve “priority assessments.”

Hazardous Wastes. The Reagan Administration has failed, particularly in its first two years, to carry out the nation’s hazardous waste law. It dragged its feet on cleanup, used toxic dump cleanup “superfund” money to aid Republican political candidates and made “sweetheart deals” allowing the companies responsible for the wastes to escape from most of the costs of clean-up. The resulting national scandal led to the resignation of the EPA’s top leadership in 1983 and the criminal conviction of toxic wastes chief Rita Lavelle for perjury before Congress. Under Ruckelshaus, these policies are improving slowly.

Of the nation’s toxic waste dumps, 2,000 are estimated to pose a serious health hazard.   Cleanup has been completed at only six sites since Reagan took office. Litigation against violators to recover Superfund money has been hesitant and many opportunities to recover taxpayers’ money have been lost. There is still no policy regarding public input in clean-up decisions.

The cheapest way to avoid cleaning up hazardous waste dumps is to prevent inadequate dumping in the first place. The 1976 Resources Conservation and Recovery Act provides for “cradle to grave” management of wastes, but the staff for implementing these regulations at the EPA has been cut 37% and the budget by 32%. The administration has resisted Congressional efforts to close loopholes in RCRA and attempted to suspend rules designed to control the incineration and storage of wastes at pits, ponds, and lagoons.   Burford suspended the ban against the burial of liquid wastes in drums, but the ban was soon restored after public outcry.

Pesticides and Herbicides. There are now over 1,500 chemical compounds which kill insects, weeds, and other “pests.” About two billion pounds of these chemicals are applied a year. The law requires the EPA to evaluate the safety of each pesticide compound and ban it if it poses substantial risks to human health or to the environment. To conduct research and consider regulation on at least 600 generic groups of pesticides will be a complex task requiring about 15 years to complete; however, Reagan has slowed this down considerably by cutting staff in this area by 25% and funding by 48% below 1981 levels. At this rate, the review could take up to 40 years.

Reagan failed to move quickly to ban EDB despite a National Cancer Institute study showing that it causes cancer in laboratory animals and several other studies indicating that it could contaminate groundwater and that residues on bread and grain could be harmful to humans. By 1980, the Carter Administration was poised to cancel most uses of EDB. But thanks to hard lobbying by large agribusiness interests, Reagan postponed regulatory action until 1985. In 1983, traces of EDB were found in groundwater and in over 100 grocery products, prompting several states to recall products from supermarket shelves. As much as 50% of the nation’s wheat, corn, oats, rice, barley, rye, and sorghum have been treated with EDB.

The Reagan Administration has joined in legislative efforts to weaken federal pesticide laws by limiting the access of independent scientists to critical health and safety data and by forbidding states such as California to write stronger regulations than those proposed by the federal EPA. The administration has also opposed efforts to strengthen current pesticide law.

Natural Resources and Land Use
The Interior Department, responsible for the management of the nation’s public lands, was headed for nearly 30 months by the flamboyant James Watt, whose outspoken disdain for the environmental movement provoked 1.1 million signatures on a Sierra Club petition calling for his resignation within six months of his taking office. Likening conservation organizations to “Nazis,” Watt called them “left-wing cults which seek to bring down the type of government I believe in.” He told Michael McCloskey, executive director of the Sierra Club: “We’re going to get things fixed here, and you guys are never going to get it unfixed when you get in.” It is important to remember that President Reagan supported Watt every step of the way, and he accepted Watt’s resignation reluctantly when his Interior Secretary’s insults to minorities began to cause him acute political damage.

Public Lands. Though the number of visitors to National Parks continues to increase, Reagan has not asked Congress for one penny to buy new parklands.   He has opposed buying parkland already authorized by Congress and helping states or cities to purchase their own parks. By the end of 1983, Reagan had spent only half of the $168 million designated by Congress for parkland acquisition that year. The Interior Department has concentrated spending on roads, sewers and facilities for visitors rather than on protecting natural areas.

The Reagan Administration has proposed development near parks and in wilderness areas. It has:

• Supported a coal strip-mining project only a few miles from a viewpoint in Bryce Canyon National Park, in plain view of the 400,000 people who visit the spot each year.
• Proposed coal-lease sales in New Mexico which will damage or destroy archeological artifacts in the nearby Chaco Culture National Historical Park, which date from prehistoric to recent Indian cultures.
• Considered putting a high-level nuclear waste dump within a mile of Canyonlands National Park, close to the Colorado River.
• Promoted motorized rafts in the Grand Canyon and environmentally destructive dune buggies on the national seashores.

About 12% of public lands are designated wilderness areas, but they contain only 1% of the producible oil and gas found onshore in the continental United States. Even though companies haven’t touched most of the leases they already have on 137 million acres, the Reagan Administration announced a new policy of “opening up wilderness areas” to energy development.  It proposed that the president, without congressional approval, would be able to allow development in any wilderness area by executive decree, and that protection for the entire wilderness system would run out in the year 2000.   Congress flatly rejected this idea and passed legislation to ensure that no wilderness could be leased.

But leasing on other public lands has been accelerated. In 1982 alone, the Reagan Administration leased 50 million acres of onshore public land, more than in all of Carter’s four years; 90% of the leases were offered first-come-first-serve, with no competitive bidding. By vastly expanding coal lease sales in an already glutted market, Reagan has cost the public hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In 1983, Congress voted to bar further coal leasing until an investigation of these policies has been completed by a special commission.

Ignoring market realities and multiple-use principles, the administration has pushed the Forest Service to double the amount of timber cut on the National Forests. The Forest Service admits that frequently trees are sold for less than it costs to produce them.

In January 1981, Reagan announced that over the next five years he intended to sell 35 million acres of America’s public lands—an amount roughly equivalent to the area of the four northernmost states of New England combined. The sale would raise $17 billion, he said, and would help reduce the national debt. Such a rapid sale would cause real estate prices to plummet. Even if $17 billion could be raised, this would only cut the annual Interest on the national debt by 3% a year. By June 1983, Secretary Watt blamed himself for this “stupid” announcement, but still declared that 3.5 million acres were under consideration for sale. Congress has so far blocked any large-scale land sales.

Wildlife. To his credit, Reagan has strongly discouraged foreign nations from killing whales commercially. But his domestic wildlife policies have left much to be desired.

Some scientists estimate that one million species of plants and animals will become extinct between now and the year 2000. Each year, however, Reagan has proposed halving the budget for listing new endangered species; until he was threatened with lawsuits, he had virtually halted such listings. For the last three years, he has tried to stop all federal matching grants to the states to help save endangered species.

In 1983, the Reagan Administration approved regulations to allow trapping of the eastern timber wolf and commercial trading of its pelts. He relaxed restrictions on international trade of certain rare and endangered species such as the lynx, river otter, bobcat, Alaskan grizzly bear, and Alaskan wolf, abandoning U.S. leadership on this issue.

The president repealed a 10-year-old executive order issued by President Nixon which bans the use of compound 1080, a very lethal and persistent poison. Before the ban, 1080 was used to kill livestock predators (mainly coyotes) but it indiscriminately killed many other species too. The EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus has decided to permit the selective use of 1080, opening the door to widespread poisoning of thousands of coyotes, foxes, bobcats, eagles, and other mammals.

Reagan has tried to stop all grants to states and universities for wildlife and fishery research and training. He has cut a third of the budget for studying the effects on wildlife of proposals to dredge and fill wetlands but supports federal funding for the Garrison Diversion Water Project, which alone would devastate eight National Wildlife Refuges.   He has halted nearly all habitat purchasing programs for endangered waterfowl, migratory birds, crocodiles, bald eagles, falcons, sea turtles, and the California condor.   Violating a Congressional ban, he traded away part of St. Matthew’s Island Wildlife Refuge—the home of five million protected seabirds and waterfowl—to Atlantic Richfield Company (ARC0) for use as a major oil exploration base.

Ocean, Coastal and Wetlands Protection. Reagan did support a legislative initiative to protect coastal barrier islands. However, he has greatly accelerated offshore oil and gas leasing while at the same time crippling the government’s capacity to evaluate the impact of offshore drilling on fish and wildlife. Interior Secretary Watt announced he would lease every square inch of the outer continental shelf to industry over the next five years—25 times the acreage leased over the entire 30-year history of the offshore leasing program. Several states filed suits to limit the sales, but William Clark, Watt’s successor, has so far not changed the program significantly.   The program offers huge areas—up to 100 million acres—at a time for leasing, compared to the previous limit of two million acres.   Such large areas cannot be adequately studied for environmental impact; chances of oil spills and blowouts increase due to ignorance about problems specific to drilling sites. Funding for environmental analysis of these areas dropped from $45.7 million in 1980 to $29.5 million in 1983, though Reagan is trying to lease 10 times more land.

Ironically, demand for these leases is low—less than half of the leases in the past have been purchased. Huge lease offerings and slack demand drive lease values down.   Because of this, the Reagan leasing plan may cost taxpayers up to $46 billion. Coastal and inland wetlands are disappearing; over half the nation’s original wetlands have been lost and hundreds of thousands of acres are destroyed each year.

Swamps and marshes are essential to the survival of two-thirds of all sport and commercial fish species. Yet Reagan has deprived them of most of their federal protection. Reagan’s Corps of Engineers now grants “general permits” allowing developers to dredge and fill most freshwater and some saltwater wetlands without even notifying regulatory agencies. Federal wetlands purchases have dropped from 70,000 acres a year under Carter to 30,000 acres a year.

Water Projects. Despite his crusade to “stop government handouts,” Reagan has supported funding for all the highly controversial dams and diversion projects that environmentalists have been fighting for years—including one waterway (the Tennessee-Tombigbee) which alone will cost $4.5 billion and destroy 100,000 acres of wetlands, forests, farmlands, and wildlife habitat. Reagan asked for and got a 25% increase in the 1984 budget of the Bureau of Reclamation, bringing western water spending close to record levels. However, he has tried to cut or eliminate funding for mitigating the damage done to fish and wildlife by these programs.

Although taxpayers foot the bill, many water projects benefit only a few powerful agricultural and industrial interests. At one time Reagan supported cost-sharing—the notion that those who benefit should pay 70% of costs. He has now reversed this policy and said their share of costs could be worked out on a “case by case basis.”

Irrigators in the West, on average, get their water for less than 10% of its true cost, leading to profligate use and lower water tables. Reagan signed a bill in 1982 giving agribusiness huge amounts of subsidized irrigation water originally Intended for small farms.

Reagan has also eliminated:

• The interagency planning body designed to develop an overall water policy(
• River Basin Commissions, which tried to coordinate state activities on each river; and
• Public notice requirements, making it harder for citizens to “watchdog” government water contracts with big landowners to make sure they pay a fair price.

Strip Mining. Each month thousands of acres of land are disturbed by strip mining for coal. In the East, the soil is pushed over mountainsides, causing landslides, rubble-clogged streams, and floods. In the Midwest, strip mining has destroyed vast areas of some of the most productive farmland in the world. In the West, the arid land is so fragile it is almost impossible to restore without long-term irrigation, but water is usually scarce. Strip mining interferes with groundwater, contaminating or drying up wells on nearby ranches and farms.

In 1977, Congress passed the Surface Mining Act to end the environmental abuse caused by strip mining. Reagan has rewritten the regulations that enforce the act to make it “less burdensome” to coal companies. He has allowed companies to evade the Act’s most Important requirement—returning the land to approximate original contours after mining. By paying a fine of a few thousand dollars, companies can save the millions of dollars it often takes to do this. After a court suit by environmentalists, the administration is reconsidering this policy. Reagan has reduced the number of federal inspectors who enforce the strip-mining code by 70%, directed them to seek approval from their superiors before issuing violations, and failed to assess and collect $59 million in fines from coal companies.

Energy
President Reagan appointed former South Carolina Gov. James Edwards, a dentist who knew almost nothing about energy policy, to be head of the Department of Energy (DOE). In January 1981, Edwards said his goal was to close down the department by July and go fishing. He resigned after it became clear that his ignorance was not helping anyone and was replaced by Donald Hodel, a former Watt deputy and former head of the Bonneville Power Administration when it endorsed the financially disastrous nuclear project, the Washington-area Public Power Supply System (WPPSS).

Energy Conservation and Renewable Energy Sources. According to President Reagan, “conservation means we will have to be too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter”—a remark which reveals his basic misunderstanding of the principle that conservation means hot using less energy per se but using energy more efficiently. Reagan proposed cuts of 98% in funding for energy conservation and 86% for renewable energy sources. In 1981, he cut the solar budget by $366 million but raised the nuclear power budget $420 million.

Carter’s DOE developed conservation programs it estimated would save Americans $34 billion. Reagan, however, proposed for 1984 to:

• Divert all the money from low-income weatherization programs to the Department of Health and Human Services where it could be used for unrelated purposes. This program helps people caulk and insulate their homes, and could reduce the need for government energy assistance (which Reagan also cut, from $2 billion to $1.3 billion) to people unable to pay huge heating bills.
• Abolish the Solar Energy and Conservation Bank which was designed to help finance solar and conservation investments.
• Cut research and development for conservation by 76% and for renewables by 84% below 1981 levels.
• Eliminate the Residential Conservation Program, which provides homeowners with an inexpensive energy audit.

Reagan opposes extending solar energy tax credits beyond 1985 and has abandoned stricter miles-per-gallon standards for cars and energy efficiency standards for household appliances. He fired the director and 300 staff members at the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), which used to be the world’s premier solar lab, and suppressed a study showing the significant potential of “soft path” energy strategies and reporting on public support for solar energy and conservation measures. The White House announced that at several national labs research on alternative energy will be replaced with efforts to develop new weapons. These labs command an annual budget of $15 billion.

Nuclear Power. The free market is killing nuclear power. In the last six years, no new reactors have been ordered and 80 proposed plants have been canceled. Instead of letting it die, Reagan wants to rescue the industry with increased federal subsidies. He asked that 84% of the energy budget be spent on nuclear power, with only 11% spent on conservation and renewables. When he took office, the two received equal funding.

Reagan blames the industry’s financial problems on “overregulation” and has proposed weakening safety standards and “streamlining” licensing.   The DOE has proposed new regulations that would restrict the public’s access to information about nuclear hazards, even when the information is unclassified and is unrelated to national security.

The Reagan administration has opposed efforts to clean up high-level radioactive wastes at major nuclear weapons production complexes such as the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, which has over 28 million gallons of liquid, highly radioactive waste stored near major population centers and regional watersheds.

In 1981, an administration plan was uncovered that would have used public funds to promote nuclear power “public information” activities.

Nuclear Proliferation. President Reagan advocated large subsidies for the nuclear industry to develop technologies that would allow the production and extraction of weapons-grade plutonium from civilian reactors. Such developments promote international trading in plutonium, the raw material of nuclear bombs. Reagan pushed for $250 million a year for the $3.6 billion Clinch River breeder reactor and more for the Barnwell Nuclear Reprocessing facility. Reagan also publicly suggested taking spent fuel from civilian reactors, processing it, and putting it in nuclear weapons. This would set a dubious example to the third-world countries the U.S. is attempting to dissuade from turning their nuclear power plants into bomb factories. Large electric utilities, which had spent years on public relations campaigns to convince people that nuclear power is not linked to nuclear bombs, were aghast. Fortunately, Congress rejected this proposal and finally killed the Clinch River Breeder Reactor.

Secretary of State Schultz, circumventing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, promised India spare parts for its nuclear plants even though India refused to open its nuclear facilities for international inspection. Reagan reversed U.S. policy and approved a sale of “heavy water” to Argentina for its reactors, even though Argentina has insisted on its right to stage “peaceful” nuclear explosions. He also lifted the ban on supplying military and economic aid to Pakistan, a country known to be developing nuclear weapons, without any guarantee of Pakistan’s future direction in this area.

Transportation
At the same time Reagan worked to cut funds for mass transit he increased funds for building new highways, with a special emphasis on the roads which encourage the most wasteful use of the car—urban commuter freeways. He proposed raising gasoline taxes by 5¢ a gallon and spending much of it on building new Interstate freeways, raising that budget to $4 billion a year—four times more than is needed to complete important routes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. To win Congressional approval for the 5¢ tax, Reagan said 1¢ of the tax would go to mass transit. Yet after the bill passed, he submitted a budget that contained no new money for mass transit.

Population
Rapid population growth is at the root of many of the world’s problems. The population problem is not confined to the third world. The United States has about 6% of the world’s population and consumes between 40 to 60% of the world’s resources. A baby born here will put far more stress on the global environment than a baby born in a developing country.

To his credit, Reagan considerably increased funding for international population programs in 1981, but not in other years. However, he has personally tried to eliminate the family planning program in the United States. “I regret,” he wrote to a senator, “that we do not have the votes to defeat the Family Planning Program.” He cut the Public Health Service budget by 25% and proposed that a proportionately larger part of that cut come from family planning.

Reagan personally endorsed the “squeal rule” to require health care workers (under the threat of criminal punishment) to notify parents whenever they give a teenage girl a prescription for birth control. Many doctors protested this as a violation of patient confidentiality. A federal judge eventually found the plan contradictory to the intent of Congress and the administration’s defense of it “mere sophistry.”

International Environment
At present, American corporations export pesticides and drugs that are banned for use in the U.S. to other (largely third world) countries. Reagan revoked an executive order controlling such exports, and the United States cast the only negative vote on a U.N. General Assembly resolution calling for an international list of banned products.

Reagan opposed an international moratorium on ocean dumping of low-level radioactive wastes. He also refused to sign the Law of the Sea Treaty, an international agreement for the management and protection of world ocean resources that was carefully crafted in the United Nations for eight years and signed by 131 countries. Reagan was concerned the treaty would limit U.S. corporations’ ability to conduct unrestrained deep-sea mining.

At the United Nations, Reagan has tried to cut or eliminate programs that address global environmental problems such as deforestation, the spread of deserts, pesticide misuse, and chemical waste disposal.

Reagan supports the negotiation of a “minerals regime” to facilitate oil drilling in Antarctica, but has cut to zero the research budget to assess the impact of such development.

The Reagan Administration has still made no substantive proposal to reduce air pollution causing acid rain in Canada. In 1982, the Canadian Government accused the administration of a breach of faith under a 1980 agreement to try to solve the problem.

Agriculture
President Reagan’s agricultural record is mixed. Two weeks before his election, he stated: “I think the farmer would be the first one to volunteer if, in the interest of national security, we were forced to say someday to the Soviet Union. That’s all, quarantine, no trade, we’re going to have no more trade with you until you do such-and-such or so-and-so.’” However, conscious of his Republican supporters in the farm belt, in April 1981 he disavowed using farm exports as foreign policy weapons and ended the grain embargo that Carter imposed on the Soviet Union because of the invasion of Afghanistan. On October 1, 1983, Secretary of Agriculture John Block signed a five-year grain agreement with the Soviet Union resulting in an increase in guaranteed Soviet purchases of wheat and corn.

A combination of high-interest rates, low commodity prices, and natural disasters have hurt farmers badly in the last several years.   Real farm Income in 1982 fell to its lowest level since the 1930s; for the first time, average interest costs to farmers have been higher than average net farm income.   According to the Farmers Home Administration, 15,000 farmers went into liquidation, foreclosure, or bankruptcy in 1983; as many 100,000 may go out of business in 1984.   House-passed emergency bills to extend credit to farmers failed to get through the Senate or White House in 1983 and 1984.

The 1983 Payment-in-Kind program, which Block called “a crazy idea, but we’ve got to do something,” was a last-ditch attempt to deal with huge crop surpluses and huge budget outlays.   In return for taking acreage out of production, the government “paid” farmers with surplus commodities instead of cash, which they could then sell on the market or feed to their animals.   The PIK program was a lifesaver to many farmers, but it was far more expensive than anticipated ($12 billion) and was attacked by some as inequitable, favoring larger farmers over smaller ones.

The President has opposed legislation designed to study and develop cost-effective organic farming methods and has reversed Carter Administration directives to encourage the use of “integrated pest management” rather than exclusive reliance on pesticides.

Saying that the marketplace should determine the fate of prime farmland, Reagan has delayed implementation of the Farmland Protection Act of 1981 and discontinued previous federal efforts to assist state and local governments in land use planning designed to preserve agricultural lands. However, the administration should be commended for supporting legislation to deny federal assistance to farmers who bring highly erodible land into production, and for establishing a $20 million pilot program to pay farmers to take erodible land out of production for five to ten years.

Foreign Policy and the Military
President Reagan would like the U.S. to return to its postwar role as the world’s policeman.  His world view interprets changes in the third world solely in terms of East-West confrontation, and he appears to practice a form of international McCarthyism, where liberalism is seen as a step toward communism and reform movements for nationalistic, economic, and social rights are all seen as moves on the Soviet-Amerlcan chessboard.   “Let’s not delude ourselves,” he said in I980.   “The Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on.   If they weren’t engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn’t be any hot spots in the world.”

Reagan has thus sought alliances on the basis of one criterion: whether the nation professes to be anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. How a government treats its own citizens is not the point: the only relevant question is, “Are they on our side?” The Reagan Administration has abandoned the goal of a strong and even-handed human rights policy, even though such a policy distances the U.S.   from repressive regimes, increases the influence of the voices of democracy and freedom, and provides the third world with a model distinct from that of the Soviet Union. Instead, practicing what is called “quiet diplomacy,” the administration has publicly praised and aided right-wing authoritarian regimes such as those in Chile, Haiti, Guatemala, South Korea, and the Philippines—regimes which are consistently cited by international observers for flagrant human rights abuses. Torture and repression in these countries are treated with silence while human rights abuses in left-wing totalitarian regimes are loudly proclaimed.

Guatemala. On March 23, 1982, a military junta led by General Rios Montt seized power, suspended political parties, and embarked on a “pacification” strategy for the countryside involving bombings, shellings, and massacres of villages and “scorched earth” tactics.  According to Amnesty International., 2600 civilians were killed in the first three months of the Montt regime. One month after the coup, the Reagan Administration announced its intention to end the four-year-old ban on sales of arms to Guatemala; the freeze was actually lifted in early 1983, but before that the administration had managed to circumvent human rights provisions in existing law and sell trucks, jeeps, and other equipment to the Guatemalan military.

In the fall of 1982, announcing that the human rights situation in Guatemala had “improved,” the Reagan Administration proposed selling the Guatemalan military $6 million worth of helicopter spare parts; Congress delayed the sale. On Aug. 8, 1983, Rios Montt was overthrown by General Mejia Victores. Although the new general had served as defense minister under Montt and was closely associated with the policies of repressive violence, the U.S. immediately praised the new government in hopes of encouraging it to join in regional efforts to destabilize the Nicaraguan government and Salvadoran rebels.

Chile. In 1973 the CIA helped the Chilean military overthrow and kill the democratically elected socialist leader Salvador Allende and replace him with General Augusto Pinochet, who promptly closed down political parties and later used rubber-stamp elections to solidify his rule until 1997. U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, visiting Chile in 1981, praised Pinochet publicly, even though Amnesty International and other groups have consistently singled out the Chilean regime for torture, political repression, and other human rights abuses. Later in 1981, the Reagan Administration approved $483.4 million in multilateral bank loans to Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay—all under right-wing military control—in direct violation of human rights clauses in existing law.

The Phillipines. Vice-President George Bush, visiting the Philippines in July 1981, praised Marcos for his “adherence to democratic principles and democratic processes.” Despite enthusiastic support from the United States, the Philippine leader is recently beginning to show signs of losing political support at home, while the human rights abuses documented under his dictatorship continue to grow.

Haiti. “Baby Doc” Duvalier continues his notorious father’s ways as he terrorizes and represses his nation’s impoverished five million people. The Reagan Administration’s support for this regime lets the situation fester until a revolutionary one-party movement develops to remedy and exploit it.

South Africa. South Africa is a racist police state with an official policy of segregation called apartheid. The nation’s 4.5 million whites enjoy civil liberties and own 87% of the land, while 23 million blacks cannot vote or participate in politics and live on impoverished enclaves called black spots. President Reagan, calling South Africa a “friend” and an “ally,” has eased restrictions on selling U.S. goods to South Africa’s military and police (direct sales of arms were banned in 1978). National Security Advisor Richard Allen announced in 1981 that relations with South Africa from now on would be based on U.S. self-interest and not disapproval of apartheid. The country of Sweden, several private investment firms, and numerous individuals have refused to do business with South Africa, but the U.S. Treasury supported a $1.1 billion loan to South Africa from the International Monetary Fund. Since South Africa professes virulent anti-communism, the Reagan Administration considers It a bulwark against the spread of communism in Africa.

South Korea. To save South Korea from communism, 52,246 Americans died in the Korean War. South Korea was and still, is a right-wing police state that matches the left-wing police state in North Korea. Gen. Chun Doo Hwan seized power in a bloody coup in October 1979, condemned the leading opposition politician, Kim Dae Jung, to death, and banned opposition political parties. Later, to appease the U.S., Kim was released and exiled. Though grateful for his welcome to the United States, Kim told the New York Times: “America has helped dictatorial regimes in the name of anticommunism, security, and economic rehabilitation. But in so many of these countries, like South Korea, democratic forces are still of minority weight and are pressed from both sides, by the Communists on one side and on the other by fascist power elites supported by the United States. We feel sad and betrayed by this.”

The United States has strong military ties to Chun Doo Hwan’s authoritarian regime and has tactical nuclear weapons stationed in South Korea. We may never know whether the ill-fated KAL 007 airliner shot down by a Soviet fighter over Soviet airspace was on an intelligence mission by the United States, but a growing body of evidence suggests that it was. An article stating this by an eminent British defense expert was recently taken seriously enough by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger that he castigated it roundly as “lies.”

El Salvador. In October 1979 members of the Salvadoran armed forces led a coup that was intended both to rid the country of a corrupt dictatorship and forestall an armed uprising similar to the Sandinista revolution. During the ensuing years of civil war, the United States has supplied $800 million in military aid and Amnesty International estimates that more than 42,000 civilians have been killed, the great majority by “government security forces” known as death squads. Yet Reagan continues to certify “progress” in human rights in El Salvador and advocates much higher levels of military aid, raising fears that the U.S. may once more be drawn into a no-win “Vietnam” situation, struggling to defend a repressive regime against a revolution fomented by poverty and political Injustice. As of late April 1984, approximately 1800 American military personnel had been stationed In El Salvador and Its ally Honduras, and the New York Times reported on April 23, 1984, that the U.S. had established a “forward base structure” and was now in a position to assume a combat role in Central America.

More than 100 American churches, in open defiance of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, are sheltering and aiding thousands of Salvadoran refugees in the United States who have fled their country’s strife. The State Department refuses to give these refugees “political asylum” because that would be tantamount to recognizing the violent tactics of the government the United States is sustaining. In late June 1984, an American woman was arrested in Texas for transporting Salvadoran refugees, an ominous sign that a crack-down on this “illegal” humanitarian relief work is imminent.

Military Intervention
Reagan has disturbed conservatives and liberals alike with his willingness to resort to military force before avidly pursuing diplomatic channels to resolve conflicts. When Reagan in 1976 suggested sending U.S. troops to Rhodesia to save the toppling white government, Republican Sen. Howard Baker said Reagan was “too reckless to be President.” Reagan has publicly suggested blockading Cuba and issuing an ultimatum to the Soviets: “Suppose we put a blockade around that island and said, ’now, buster, we’ll lift it when you take your forces out of Afghanistan?'”

His bias in favor of military solutions is apparent; his fiscal year 1982 budget requested a 27% hike in foreign military aid (up $1 billion) and a 26% decrease in economic aid. The U.S.   is the world’s largest arms supplier; in his first three months in office, Reagan offered foreign nations $15 billion in arms sales, including many advanced and sophisticated weapons. By 1983, the United States had quadrupled its weapons sales to the western hemisphere.

Lebanon. Israel invaded Lebanon in the summer of 1982. In September 1982, President Reagan dispatched U.S. Marines to Lebanon without placing his actions within reach of the authority of Congress as the War Powers Act seems to require. The president declared that deployment of the Marines was “absolutely crucial” if “Soviet-sponsored aggression against Lebanon is to end.” As the civil war escalated in 1983 and 241 Americans were killed in a truck bombing of the Marines’ headquarters in Beirut, the exact mission of the U.S. force became increasingly unclear. When the Marines were finally recalled in the winter of 1984, leaving Lebanon no less in bloody chaos than when they came, both Congress and the President appeared to be at a loss to explain why they had been sent.

Grenada. Reagan’s surprise invasion of the tiny island of Grenada, supposedly in order to stop Cuba and Russia from turning it into a “giant airstrip” and at the request of several other Caribbean nations, is fraught with unanswered questions, particularly since the press was barred from observing initial activity on the island. Among these questions are whether the 1000 American medical students were in fact in any danger (no attempt was made to evacuate them peacefully), whether the “warehouse full of arms” in fact only contained rifles and outdated ammunition, whether the suspect airstrip was merely being built to increase tourist trade, and whether diplomatic channels should have been tried before force was used. Only one thing was clear: the president had demonstrated his willingness to use thousands of Marines as an invasionary force.

Nicaragua. After the revolution that drove dictator Anastasio Somoza from the country, President Carter sent aid to the Sandinistas in order to encourage the pro-democratic groups within their ranks and aid them in their social and economic reforms. In sharp contrast, Reagan has used the CIA to foment a covert war against the Nicaraguan government, and the U.S.   is presently being sued in the World Court by Nicaragua for sponsoring the overthrow of a government without a declaration of war and in explicit defiance of the charter of the Organization of American States.

About 5000 members of Somoza’s national guard fled to Honduras after the revolution and began preparations for an invasion. It Is now openly acknowledged that the majority of the “contra” army (whom Reagan calls “freedom fighters”), which now numbers about 15,000, are soldiers recruited, paid by, trained, and directed by the CIA.   The contras’ stated purpose is to overthrow the Sandinistas, but President Reagan insists that the covert war is being waged merely in order to discourage Nicaragua from stirring up trouble in El Salvador. On April 4, 1984, he declared: “The present government of Nicaragua is exporting revolution to El Salvador, its neighbor, and is helping, supporting and arming, and training the guerillas that are trying to overthrow a duly elected government.” However, the American Embassy in El Salvador has refused to give any material proof of supply shipments from the Nicaraguan government to Salvadoran rebels. A Salvadoran military commander said on April 17, 1984, that the rebels he’s trying to control receive mostly medicines and ammunition, not weapons, from Nicaragua.

Nicaragua, which has diplomatic relations with the United States and has repeatedly made clear its hope to establish strong diplomatic and economic ties, is being driven to seek help from Cuba and the U.S.S.R. A week after assuming office Reagan suspended a planned $78 million in economic aid for Nicaragua. In 1983 restrictions were placed on the amount of sugar Nicaragua could sell in the U.S. The secret mining of Nicaraguan harbors in an attempt to weaken the country’s economy scandalized even conservative members of Congress when it was exposed in spring 1984.

Reagan has openly admitted that the CIA should .engage in covert military activity abroad: “I think this nation should have a master plan…based on what we believe is the enemy’s master plan.” Newsweek said in the fall of 1982 that it had learned that the CIA was then running paramilitary operations in about 10 countries in addition to Nicaragua.

Relations with the Soviet Union. President Reagan has what can be termed a “devil complex” about the Soviet Union. His statements to and about the Russians have ranged from the belligerent to the insulting.   Some examples:

“The Soviets reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to obtain…their objective.”

“The Russians make promises; they don’t keep them.”

“Communists are not bound by our morality.”

“I wouldn’t trust the Russians around the block.   They must be laughing at us because we continue to think of them as people like us.”

“We are told that we can sit down and negotiate with this enemy of ours, that there’s a little right and a little wrong on both sides. How do you compromise between good and evil? How do you say to this enemy that we can compromise our belief in God with his dialectic materialism? How do you compromise with men who say we have no soul, there is no hereafter, there is no God?”

“(Russia is) the focus of evil in the modern world.”

Reagan has never attempted to meet with a Russian leader. In view of these remarks, it is not surprising that the Soviet Union has repeatedly declared that little progress can be made toward settling superpower differences while Reagan is in office. Although his recent public statements have been more conciliatory, there has been no change in his positions on arms control and his willingness to blame the unrest of the world on the Soviet Union. The Russians are angry, afraid, and stubbornly determined to match his belligerency—a dangerous state of affairs in a world bristling with nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control
President Reagan possesses a concept of military “strength” and “weakness” that sidesteps the complexities of deterrence and security in the nuclear age. Simply put, more weapons means more strength and more security to Reagan: fewer weapons, and the U.S. puts itself into a dangerous position of weakness. In every major controversy over a weapons system, from the neutron bomb to binary poison gas to the MX, he has committed himself and his administration to the system’s manufacturer. In his I980 campaign, he stated: “I have never seen us get into (a war) through strength.” On April 6, 1964, he said: “The simple fact is that in the last half of the 1970s we were not deterred, as events from Angola and Afghanistan made clear. Today, we are, and that fact has fundamentally altered the future for millions of human beings. …Peace through strength is not a slogan, it’s a fact of life.” His 1980 party platform made it clear: the goal was to restore to America “overall military and technological superiority over the Soviet Union.”

The problem comes in defining what such superiority means when the United States and the Soviet Union today possess 50,000 warheads—enough for each to ‘destroy the major cities of the other nation about 40 times over. The extraordinary destructive potential of nuclear weapons has made traditional, pre-nuclear concepts of military strength (“more is better”) obsolete. Was a lack of nuclear and conventional weapons on our part really to blame far Angola and Afghanistan? If so, why did our unquestioned military superiority fail to prevent Hungary in 1956 and Vietnam in the I960s? Are the people of Afghanistan benefiting from our military build-up? Do more weapons today make us stronger?

Each time the U.S. develops a new weapons system, the Soviets follow several years later with their own version in an attempt to match us. This has happened with the atomic bomb itself (U.S.   1945, U.S.S.R.   1949), the intercontinental bomber (U.S. 1948, U.S.S.R.   1955), the hydrogen bomb (U.S.   1954, U.S.S.R.   1955), the multiple warheads (U.S.   I966, U.S.S.R.   I968), and the multiple independently-targeted warheads (MIRV) (U.S.   1970, U.S.S.R.   1975). The Soviets are currently working on developing their equivalents of the long-range cruise missile and the neutron bomb.   They have stated repeatedly their intention not to be left behind in any category of weaponry.

But Reagan apparently believes that the United States can decisively move ahead of the Soviet Union in numbers and kinds of weapons and achieve nuclear “superiority.” In 1978 he stated: “The Soviet Union cannot possibly match us in an arms race.” Given our superior industrial and technical power, he believes we can outdo the Russians once and for all, and this gives rise to his belief that negotiations can only be achieved when we have frightened the Soviets into submission through the threat or the actuality of an accelerated arms race. “The one card that’s been missing in these negotiations has been the possibility of an arms race,” he said during his 1980 campaign. When Reagan speaks of negotiating from a position of strength, he means putting off arms control until after we have completed such an enormous arms build-up that the Soviets will give up in despair. Then he’ll be willing to talk. Paul Nitze, a top Reagan arms negotiator, told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that there could someday “be serious arms control, but only after we have built up our forces.” The reporter asked how long this would take. “Ten years,” replied Nitze.

The Pentagon’s 1982 five-year defense guidance plan could not be more explicit: the United States should develop weapons that are “difficult for the Soviets to counter, impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military competition, and obsolesce previous Soviet investment.” This dictum not only ignores the toll the arms race takes on the U.S. economy, but it also fails to explain why threatening the Soviet economy would be to our advantage. Indeed, deteriorating economic conditions might increase the hostility of the U.S.S.R. and force them to become aggressively expansionist, if for no other reason than to divert the attention of their populace away from domestic troubles. This plan amounts to a direct challenge to the Soviet Union and taunts them to launch into an all-out arms race of their own. Nothing in Soviet history, actions, or policy hints that they would be willing to settle for a position of nuclear inferiority.

The Reagan Administration apparently is aware that the American public might Interpret this policy as lunacy. Therefore, Reagan has attempted to sell Americans a line that the Soviet Union has a “definite margin of superiority” and we must catch up, notwithstanding his own 1982 Department of Defense report which states plainly: “The United States and the Soviet Union are roughly equal in strategic nuclear power.”

Increased Cold War rhetoric and the tried and true method of “gaps” have in the past been used to justify the expansion of U.S.   nuclear forces.   The 1955 “bomber gap” and the 1957 “missile gap” both turned out to be fabricated exaggerations; the real gaps turned out to be in favor of the U.S.   President Reagan has resorted to a “spending gap,” claiming in February 1981 that “since 1970 the Soviet Union has invested $300 billion more in its military force than we have.” The basis for this figure is unclear, particularly since the Defense Department reported in 1981 that NATO (including the U.S.) had outspent the Warsaw Pact (including the U.S.S.R.) in every year of the 1970s for a total gap in NATO’s favor of $207 billion.

In the spring of 1982, a senator asked General John Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Would you swap U.S. military capability overall…for that of the Soviets?” Vessey replied: “I would not.” At another Senate hearing, Defense Secretary Weinberger was asked: “Would you rather have at your disposal the U.S. nuclear arsenal or the Soviet arsenal?” Weinberger replied: “I would not for a moment exchange anything because we have an immense edge in technology.”

Yet the “need to return to parity” has been used to justify the largest peacetime increase in military spending in U.S. history—from $160 billion in 1981 to nearly $300 billion in fiscal 1985. The 1980 U.S. weapons program cost $35 billion; in 1984 it cost $94 billion. For 1985-1989 Reagan seeks a staggering $2.2 trillion for military spending, as compared to a total of $1,8 trillion spent on the military between 1960 and 1981. Because defense contracts extend over several years, Reagan has at present locked the government into numerous weapons contracts for the years ahead. What the Washington Post called a “giant bow wave” of defense costs will hit in the second half of the 1980s. Some of these new weapons include:

Nuclear Build-Up

• 1000 new warheads on 100 MX missiles ($34 billion)
• 100 B-1 Bombers ($28-40 billion)
• development of the Stealth bomber ($34 billion)
• additional five Trident subs (making 20 total) and
• 900 Trident II missiles ($92 billion)
• 384 Pershing II missiles
• 3000 long-range cruise missiles on B-52s and B-1s, and additional numbers on submarines
• 1000 Midgetman missiles ($70 billion)

Conventional Build-Up

• $2.5 billion for expanded Rapid Deployment Force
• Four new Army divisions
• Five more Air Force wings
• 144 new Navy ships (making a total of 600)’
• Three new aircraft carriers (making a total of 15) at $2.5 billion each

What’s Wrong With Trying for Superiority? The problem with the build-up is not only that the weapons are extremely costly and represent new stockpiles of destructive power.   The MX, Trident II, and Pershing II missiles are worrisome because they represent a whole new kind of nuclear weapon. They throw new, dangerous light on the arms race because they are first-strike weapons instead of second-strike weapons.

The basic principle of deterrence lies in the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), developed by President John Kennedy and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. This doctrine assumes the important principle that U.S. strategic nuclear weapons exist only to prevent Soviet nuclear weapons from being used. That is, they do not exist in order to further foreign policy objectives through threats (as they did after World War II when the U.S. had undisputed nuclear superiority). According to MAD, an adequate strategic nuclear deterrent means possessing sufficient second-strike weapons so that no matter how efficient a first-strike attack one side launched, the other side could respond with a second-strike that would devastate the attacker’s country. Thus, with nuclear attack a guaranteed suicide move, neither country dares to use nuclear weapons first. McNamara calculated that about 400 warheads averaging 500 kilotons each would be sufficient to qualify as an adequate nuclear deterrent because they could kill approximately 100 million Russians. Currently, our invulnerable Poseidon submarines carry about 3200 warheads, and this represents only a third of the U.S. strategic arsenal. Many people believe that this theory of deterrence is still the governing nuclear doctrine of the U.S. In fact, the Reagan Administration has abandoned it in favor of a “war-fighting doctrine.”

Subscribers to the war-fighting doctrine believe that a nuclear war can have a winner and a loser. They believe that nuclear weapons have two purposes: winning a war against the Soviet Union, and gaining superiority and threatening war, thus to dominate the Soviet Union and the rest of the world (as we did in the postwar era).

Even though both countries had plenty of weapons to ensure second-strike retaliation in the 1960s, new weapons continued to be deployed, with the United States leading every step of the way and the Soviet Union close behind. The arms race continued because of an unfortunate mixture of bureaucratic momentum, corporate greed, the presence of a military “hard-liner” group who hoped to get back to the good old days of superiority, increasingly sophisticated technology, and a political desire on the part of American and Soviet leaders to “act tough.” The arms race fed on itself; growing weapons stockpiles fueled each country’s worst suspicions about the other, and for understandable reasons: if 400 warheads are all you need for deterrence, why build 25,000 unless you have something up your sleeve? Both began to suspect that the other was trying to achieve a first-strike capability.

A first-strike capability is one nation’s ability to launch a surprise nuclear attack against another without receiving unacceptable retaliatory damage in return. This is usually interpreted to mean knocking out the opponent’s missiles while they are still in their silos. Fear that the Russians were working to obtain a first-strike capability of knocking out our land-based Minutemen missiles was the original justification Carter gave for the MX. He feared it was vulnerable to a first-strike- attack by the Soviet Union’s missiles, and so proposed basing it in the famous “racetrack mode” under Nevada and Utah.   Apart from whether the Russians would truly be able to launch so accurate and devastating a first-strike, the “window of vulnerability” theory ignored the fact that our bombers and submarines have more than enough weapons to destroy the Soviet Union, and that gambling on the U.S. failing to retaliate after a first-strike attack (even a “counterforce” attack on U.S. military targets would kill an estimated 20 million people) would be even madder than policy under MAD.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had reasons of its own to get upset about the MX.   In order to threaten retaliation—a second-strike, which is supposed to prevent a first-strike—you don’t need very accurate or very powerful weapons. You just need to be able to Inflict “unacceptable damage” by wiping out some major metropolitan areas. The MX, a 96-ton, 71-foot-long missile carrying ten individually targeted warhead, which can fly 8000 miles and place its bombs within a circle 600 feet wide, is accurate and powerful enough to destroy missiles in hard silos. It is far more potent than necessary to launch an effective second-strike; in fact, it makes little sense as a second-strike weapon since Reagan is opting to put it in the same supposedly vulnerable Minutemen silos. It only makes sense as an offensive first-strike weapon designed for a pre-emptive first-strike on the Soviet Union.

Vice-President Bush’s justification for the MX was perplexing: he said it “gives an ability to retaliate against hard silos.” The word retaliate means that presumably, the Soviets would have already launched a first-strike; therefore, the silos would be empty. Not surprisingly, the Soviets and numerous American intelligence and military figures (including William Colby and Stansfield Turner, directors of the CIA under Nixon and Carter, respectively) maintain that the MX is a destabilizing first-strike weapon that threatens deterrence. The Trident II missiles being developed for the new fleet of twenty Trident submarines are also clearly first-strike weapons—they can fly 6000 miles, land missiles within 400 feet of targets, destroy missiles in silos, and take ten minutes to reach Soviet targets. In addition, the 108 Pershing II missiles being deployed in West Germany are designed to inflict a “decapitation” first-strike on Soviet command and control centers.

Why Are First-Strike Weapons so Dangerous? Because they invite striking first by the other side. You don’t have to have an unanswerable first-strike capability to strike first—you just need weapons, fear that a pre-emptive first-strike attack by the other side is imminent, and a desire not to see your missiles go up in flames and your country die alone. First-strike weapons create what is known as a “use ’em or lose ’em” mentality. In a crisis situation, they can lead to pushing the button out of sheer panic that a pre-emptive strike is about to be launched by the other side. They can make the other side trigger-happy and prone to launching with insufficient or unverified information that attacking weapons are in fact on their way. This increases the risk of accidental war.   First-strike weapons decrease the security of our opponent and thus decrease our security. For the last thing in the world we want, if we’re interested in preventing war, is a panicked Soviet leader.

In addition, short flight times—five-to-seven minutes for the Pershing IIs, and 10 minutes for the Trident IIs—reduce reaction time so severely that they force the Soviet Union to go on “launch on warning.” This means the Soviet computers have to be programmed to begin launch procedures when their early warning system detects incoming missiles. If the computer has made an error, the Soviets only have a few minutes to figure that out.   Even worse than a panicked Soviet leader, perhaps, is a wrongly panicked Soviet computer.

First-strike weapons decrease everyone’s security and greatly increase the risk of war.   They are so dangerous that inferiority in first-strike weapons is preferable to parity.  That is, even if the Soviet Union is acquiring first-strike weapons (and the evidence they are doing so is not compelling), we would be better off by not building any of our own.   First-strike weapons cannot deter a first-strike attack—they can only prompt one.

So Why Are We Building Them? This question has several answers. The first has to do with “credibility,” the fatal flaw of the deterrence mind game. If nuclear weapons exist only to deter the use of nuclear weapons by the other side, they will only function as an effective deterrent if, in fact, one side believes the other side will fire back at the attacking side. That is, the Soviet Union has to believe that the president of the United States, knowing that his own country is about to be destroyed, will willingly incinerate the Soviet Union even though he knows it will do nothing to save his own citizens. If the Soviet Union thinks that the United States would not launch its second-strike, then all the nuclear weapons sitting in U.S. silos, subs, and bombers become absolutely useless as means of deterring Soviet attack.

Therefore, U.S. policy planners have been searching for ways to provide a more credible deterrent and give the president a number of options when responding to an attack other than a full-scale reprisal. They are trying to find ways to make the use of nuclear weapons more thinkable. One way to do this, which has been developing since the 1960s but was codified in Carter’s 1979 Presidential Directive 59, is to talk about “counterforce” strategy. Instead of targetting cities, the United States aims for military targets. This makes war sound more tolerable—who cares if some Russian military Installations are blown up? But this concept of a “clean war” is deceptive from the start: for example, 60 military targets have been identified in Moscow. Pentagon official Ron Lehman told the Catholic bishops as they were preparing their pastoral letter on nuclear weapons, “Even if we did not target any civilian areas and even if our whole force was made up of systems that could hit military targets precisely, the distribution of targets in Russia is such that the civilian casualties would be virtually the same as if we were targetting cities.” Nonetheless, “counterforce” is the present U.S. targetting strategy. It requires developing weapons that are extremely accurate and powerful. Unfortunately, these weapons happen to share the same characteristics as first-strike weapons.

The second answer is that some fear the Soviet Union is getting them, and many believe that anything the U.S.S.R. has we have to have too, no matter how much it decreases our security. It’s also possible to say that a number of corporations who can afford legions of lobbyists stand to make a good deal of money off these new systems.

The third answer, however, is the most disconcerting, yet Reagan’s actions and attitudes strongly suggest it.   The United States may be seriously interested in acquiring and possibly using a first-strike capability.   That is, present U.S. strategists may want to reach a point where we can end the Soviet “threat” decisively by destroying all their weapons in a clean surprise attack. This is a dream, a will o’ the wisp—as shown above, this action would require the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of millions of people, and, if the recent evidence predicting a nuclear winter is taken into account, the wiping out of a good portion of life on earth—but there is disturbing evidence that hard-liners in the Reagan Administration are interested in this “solution.” It is eerily easy to Interpret Reagan’s dream of “nuclear superiority” in this light.

What About the Euro-Missiles? Up to now, we have only been speaking about strategic nuclear weapons—those that one superpower aims directly at the other.   However, U.S. nuclear weapons have also been justified under a concept known as “extended deterrence.” NATO nuclear forces in Europe are meant to pose a deterrent to Soviet conventional attack. If tanks start moving into West Germany, NATO will respond with nuclear weapons. Again, for this to work, the Russians have to believe that we would escalate the conflict to a nuclear level with all the risks that would entail. We have chosen to make that more believable by creating small (relatively) battlefield nuclear weapons called tactical weapons. Some of these are only a kiloton in explosive power and can be launched by an infantryman. That is, the line between conventional and nuclear weapons in horror has become fuzzier so that it’s more thinkable to use nuclear weapons.

The Soviet Union and China have both signed a U.N. declaration that they will never be the first ones to use nuclear weapons. The United States refuses to do so because it fears this would “invite” Soviet aggression in Europe. The Reagan Administration continues to believe that such a “limited war” would not necessarily escalate to strategic levels, despite a wealth of military opinion to the contrary.   Reagan said in autumn 1981: “I could see where you could have the exchange of tactical weapons against troops in the field without it bringing either one of the major powers to push the button.”

When the Soviet Union began modernizing its intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe, the SS-4s and SS-5s, into the more accurate and reliable SS-20s, the United States responded by saying that this meant the U.S. had to have comparable numbers of intermediate-range missiles in Europe too—despite the fact that France and Britain already had them, and that our bomber and submarine forces were already more than sufficient to deter an attack on Europe. After a great deal of false posturing on both sides at the Geneva talks, the worst possible solution so far as European and world security are concerned was achieved—the Soviets are deploying all of their SS-20s, and the U.S. all of its planned Pershing IIs and long-range cruise missiles (which create special problems because their size and mobility makes them easy to hide, and therefore, difficult to verify in any arms control agreement).

Where Are We Now? Reagan has abandoned the goal of a comprehensive test ban treaty and has failed to propose any negotiating positions that could be taken seriously by the Soviet Union. His “zero-option” initiative in the Geneva talks about the Euromissiles would have required the Soviet Union to dismantle a system they already possessed in exchange for the U.S. promising not to deploy a system it had yet to deploy. The START talks, which were supposed to take over from the SALT II talks (Reagan led a successful campaign as a political candidate to get the Senate to refuse to ratify SALT II) were aimed where the U.S.S.R. enjoys its greatest strength: land-based missiles and warheads. The quota of 2500 land-based ICBM warheads involved no sacrifice on Reagan’s part—the United States is already 350 warheads below the proposed ceiling because a proportionately great number of our strategic warheads are carried on submarines and bombers. Under START proposals, the United States could have continued to build the MX, the B-1 bomber, Trident submarines, and cruise missiles.   The Soviet Union, on the other hand, would have had to dismantle a significant part of its land-based forces.   Not only would the arms race continue, but the U.S. also would achieve nuclear superiority under the guise of arms control. Given this, the Soviets celebrated “walkout” in Geneva is understandable.

“While we plan to prevent a war, the Soviets plan to win a war,” says Reagan.   The evidence says otherwise. Although Reagan has taken to saying reassuringly, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” his advisors are more candid.   Vice-President Bush said in 1980: “I don’t believe there is no such thing as a winner in a nuclear exchange.” Richard Pipes, a Harvard professor and key national security advisor, states: “There is no alternative to war with the Soviet Union if the Russians do not abandon communism.” Defense Secretary Weinberger says the plan is “to prevail should deterrence fail.” Advisor Colin Gray says, “What is wrong with the U.S. planning to prevail, or win, in war?”

Other evidence the Soviets have to go on is also not reassuring. In what has become known as the Star Wars speech, Reagan in 1983 propelled the arms race into space, saying that he hoped the day would come when nuclear weapons would be made obsolete by space lasers that could shoot down missiles in mid-flight. There was no doubt whose missiles he meant, and Yuri Andropov reacted angrily, saying that rendering the U.S.S.R. “incapable of dealing a retaliatory strike is a bid to disarm the Soviet Union.” About $1-$2 billion is spent annually on research for such laser and particle beam devices. The Soviet Union, in its usual “match ’em inch for inch” mentality, will soon be doing the same.

Reagan has also revived the civil defense program, which had essentially been dead for 20 years. He called for a seven-year $4.6 billion program to prepare to evacuate 150 million Americans from 400 cities. While Reagan may have been interested in shoring up the credibility of the U.S. strategic deterrent, the Soviets can hardly be blamed for interpreting this as long-range preparations for war—especially when exaggerated descriptions of their civil defense programs were simultaneously being given as evidence that they are preparing for war.

“Each generation must learn that the things men prize the most, the things which make a civilization, are those things for which men have always been willing to die,” Reagan has said.   In view of his devil theory of the Soviet Union, this comment lends chilling support to the fear that Reagan may be fatalistic about war with the Soviet Union. In the fragile psychological game of deterrence, preparations for war mean that war is more likely to happen. This is the essential paradox of nuclear weapons that Reagan appears not to have grasped. Said Albert Einstein almost forty years ago: “The atomic bomb has changed everything, save our mode of thinking.   Thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

The renewed tensions of the Cold War have brought the U.S and the U.S.S.R. closer to the edge of a catastrophe than perhaps ever before. The Soviets have made it clear that they have given up on Reagan. Behind the tough talk and the party line, there is a noticeable element of fear. And fear, in the precarious hair-trigger balance of a nuclear world, is the last quality one wants in an opponent.

While Reagan must and should be held responsible for his dramatic changes in domestic priorities, his handling of nuclear policy deserves more scrutiny than all of the other Issues put together. For in this case, “the things for which men have always been willing to die” may go up in smoke.

Some Final Points
1) Ronald Reagan, like most first-term presidents, has been aware of the need to cultivate favorable public opinion in order to gain re-election. This curb on his actions will be removed if he is installed for a second term.

2) Many of Reagan’s proposals have been thwarted by Congress—both the Republican Senate and the Democratic House. There is no guarantee that the next two Congresses will be so willing to oppose him.

3) It is possible to be a Republican and still disapprove of Reagan. He has overturned many established Republican party traditions, such as support for the ERA, concern for the environment, and reluctance to create too large a federal deficit. Many courageous Republican senators, such as Mark Hatfield, Lowell Weicker, and Robert Stafford have vigorously opposed the president on several key issues.

4) The next American president may have the opportunity to appoint between three and six Supreme Court justices. Thus the philosophy of the next president may well be embedded in the Court for several decades.

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We prepared this summary with a fervent hope it will be used. To facilitate the dissemination of this information, we are deliberately not copyrighting this material.   Please feel free to reproduce, alter, shorten, lengthen, quote from, and so on anything herein. Our facts were all obtained from easily available public sources listed below. We would welcome your comments and suggestions. Good luck!

Gale Warner
David Kreger

July 1984

SOURCES
(partial list)

Books:
“On Reagan”.   Ronnie Dugger.

“Three Years of Accomplishment,” the Republican National Committee.

“Renewing America’s Promise: A Democratic Blueprint”.   House Democratic Caucus.

“World Military and Social Expenditures 1983”.   Ruth Leger Sivard.

“Presidential Profiles 1984”.   League of Conservation Voters.

“Free Speech 1984”.   American Civil Liberties Union.

“There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error”.   Mark Green and Gail MacColl.

“The Russian Threat”.   Jim Garrison and Pyare Shivpuri.

Reports and Articles from:
National Gray Panthers
National Organization for Women
AFL-CIO
Council for a Livable World
SANE
Coalition for a New Military and Foreign Policy
Children’s Defense Fund
NAACP
The Urban League
Harvard School of Public Health
American Friends Service Committee