Seeing Red

An organization called the National Rivers and Harbors Congress, composed of state and city officials, port authority members, engineering company executives, etc., is to the pork barrel what Boston is to baked beans. Last week doughty Budget Director Maurice H. Stans. who doesn't care beans about pork-barrel politics, went before an N.R.H.C. conference in Washington to explain why there just isn't enough money for all the rivers and harbors projects that the organization urges on Congress. In fiscal 1959. said Stans, the Federal Government faces a deficit of $8 to $10 billion. True enough. President Eisenhower sent to Congress last January a 1959 budget showing a $500 million surplus, but since then the 1959 revenue estimate has slid from $74.4 billion to $70 billion. Meanwhile, the spending has soared at least $4 billion above the original budget total of $73.9 billion.

The looming 1959 deficit, said Stans, compels the Administration to "look critically at each one of the additional expenditure proposals being urged upon us." And a little elementary arithmetic shows that it will also compel the Administration to ask for another boost in the federal debt ceiling, which Congress reluctantly upped from $275 billion to $280 billion only three months ago.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.