Carter v. Carter on the Budget

By Hugh Sidey

It could be that in the new budget and the economic and tax messages that came with it. Jimmy Carter has delivered a statement about his leadership that is clearer than anything else he has tried.

His answers to questions seem to change from day to day, his big speeches to drift away by the next week. But the budget is hard fact printed in cold type. You can feel it and rime it, a 7-lb. 10-oz.. 2,050-page document between stolid beige covers. You can profile a good portion of this nation by journeying patiently through its ranks of numbers. There is something final and real about it, and the sense here is that this one has captured a good piece of Jimmy Carter's quicksilver soul.

The budget is an engineer's document with no flashes of inspiration or insight but with a cautious and thorough probing of the national machinery, a bit of tin; kering here, a new part there, a yank on a lever or two and a squirt of the oilcan.

In the Cabinet Room at the White House, where most of the budget was threshed out with the President, Carter had to confront himself--surely one of his most difficult tasks. He is at least two people in budget matters. He is the parsimonious Depression-ridden small-town boy, the self-made millionaire out to work and save and waste not. But he is, too, the evangelical populist, bora again to minister to the needy. The contention of these two Jimmy Carters has confounded the experts for a year because a different Carter seemed to win out on different days.

Over the past three months the two Carters made hundreds of decisions, the populist Carter sometimes winning but the tightfisted Carter always there to rap his knuckles. The budget and economic experts who huddled with the President could see the inner struggle. More than once the troops of Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal, back in their offices, would look at each other and say, "We do not know where the President stands."

But budget time inexorably forces-a President to stand somewhere. Carter rejected gimmickry. Should the budget be tailored to come in just a shade under $500 billion so the people would feel they were getting a bargain? No, decided Carter. His budget was pegged at $500.2 billion, a merchandiser's nightmare. Though he knows that a balanced budget in his first term is probably impossible, he was nearly apoplectic about waste when discovered, against direct Government payments in areas where private business could do the job. And yet he was always suspicious of bankers and other money manipulators, a firm conviction ever shining about the blessings of low irfterest.

The preacher in Carter spoke up for economic and social equity at every budget turn. To tax business lunches and first-class air travel was not worth the political battle and probable defeat, Carter was advised. So what, he answered. It is not right that businessmen can deduct their martinis if workmen cannot deduct their sandwiches. And, said Carter, he had campaigned all over the country for two years riding in tourist seats, and he found room in which to do his work.

Many of Carter's budget decisions came down on the side of the young, the black, the poor, the small businessman. Small was beautiful, large was suspect. Yet the mathematician in Carter dragged him to the understanding that he had to entice corporate America to greater efforts through tax incentives. The welfare of Ms little people depended on it.

Through all the budget process, there was the note that Carter was not fully convinced that Government could really deliver many of the thousands of promises that its budget said it could. So a zero dropped here, a restraint applied there sounded the most persistent theme. He wants to show the American people that his Government will try to stay out of their lives as much as possible.

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