The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 64, No. 16, Ed. 1 Monday, November 1, 1976 Page: 1 of 12
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Gerald Ford endorsement: Keep the President
by Carla McFarland
and
Jim Beall
For many Rice students, tomorrow
will be their first chance to participate
in a presidential election. Yet a large
number of people are still undecided;
and many don't wish to support any of
the candidates that are running for the
presidency of the United States.
The campaign has dealt little with
issues and specifics. More important
have been the public images of each
candidate, his views on morals, and his
speaking ability. There are important
isues in this campaign; there are major
differences between Gerald Ford and
Jimmy Carter.
President Ford has consistently
pointed to the need for rational,
realistic programs; such programs
may not sound as good in print and on
television commercials as promises
made in the heat of a campaign, largely
because they're not made to gloss over
and hide the realities of life. Ford's
record can be attacked because he has
a record; he has had national
experience that Gov. Carter lacks.
Carter's record in Georgia is not well-
known nationally; his effectiveness as
governor is disputed. Carter has
promised many things to many people;
upon taking office he might find it
much more difficult to deliver
programs than to promise them. If
Carter believes he can accomplish all
of his plans and programs, and still
balance the budget, in four years (as he
promised in his acceptance speech at
the Democratic National Convention),
he is sadly deluded.
Many of Gov. Carter's issue stands
are vague and misleading. He has
promised to reorganize the federal
government, but when pressed will
admit that the federal payroll will not
be reduced by reorganization. He has
jumped back and forth on his tax
reform proposals and ignored the fact
that the Congress, not the President,
writes the tax law. He endorsed the
massive spending of the Democratic
Party platform, then promised he
would postpone any new spending
until the budget could be balanced.
Carter's contention that increases in
employment, and the expected
economic growth, will pay for new
programs without large tax increases,
has come under increasing fire from
the rice thresher
economists. The governor endorsed
gun control, then implied (in the third
debate) that Atty. Gen. Levi's proposal
to ban Saturday-night-specials was
undesirable. Recently, there has been
criticism from Democratic party office-
holders of a lack of communication and
respect for them by the Carter staff.
And Carter's accusations of a
government by veto is put in a new
light by the 150 bills he vetoed while
governor of Georgia.
President Ford has a good record to
stand on and clear, reasonable plans
for the future. He took office in the
worst economic crisis since the
depression, and turned the economy
around. The inflation rate has been cut
in half; the housing industry, on which
so many sectors of the economy
depend, has finally started to turn
around. Ford has made an effort to
compromise with an often unreason-
able Congress; his years in that body
have enabled him to have an effective
relationship with it. He has been
strong enough to use the veto power to
prevent Congress from spending the
country into even higher inflation.
The Republican Party platform is a
responsible blueprint for the future. It
recognizes that the federal government
cannot possibly give everyone
everything that is necessary for their
health and happiness". It recognizes tht
many problems are best left with the
private sector rather than the
government. It recognizes that
government at the local level is most
aware of the needs of the local
community. The platform cites
inflation as the economy's greatest
problem, which should be dealt with by
the federal government. Unemploy-
ment should be reckoned with through
private enterprise; jobs created by the
government only create the illusion of
solving the unemployment problem
and further increase the burgeoning
bureaucracy. Ford and the Repub-
licans believe in trying to find
solutions to problems through the
private sector; Carter and the
Democrats seem to turn to the federal
government first.
President Ford has been working
toward reduction of the federal
bureaucracy; he has been working to
keep America strong, prosperous, and
at peace. Ford supports right-to-work
legislation; he is opposed to
compulsory national health insurance,
a massive federally funded jobs
program, and divestiture of the oil
companies. On each of these issues,
Carter's stand (or that of the
Democratic party platform which he
supports) is exactly the opposite.
Perhaps the most important thing
that President Ford has done since
taking office is restoring the trust and
confidence of the American people in
the Presidency. One of Jimmy Carter's
major campaign themes has been the
need for an honest, decent government
yet even Gov. Carter will admit that
Ford is an honest, decent man —
perhaps the most honest to occupy the
office in the past 10 or 15 years.
President Ford is a figure of proven
strength and leadership; he has done a
reasonable job in his two years in
office, and promises a good
performance for the next four years.
Why change to an unknown
quantity?
election eve
volume 64, number 16
monday, november 1, 1976
Jimmy Carter supported: Leadership for a change
by Dave Fleischer
I have heard of a man who had a
mind to sell his house, and therefore
carried, a piece of brick in his pocket,
which he shewed as a pattern to
encourage purchacers.
—Jonathan Swift
The ease and futility of oversimpli-
fication face not just Swift's house-
seller but all politicians. These men
need to sell themselves to work their
programs, do our deeds. But policies'
complexities make difficult the
sharing. Simple ideas, small in scope,
politicians often hope suffice.
That hope, I think, is unfulfilled. In
politics particularly, we accept
grotesque generalizations at our peril.
What we buy with votes, we keep.
In this Presidential election, what we
buy we'll keep four years.
To their credit, both men we can
choose have, beyond hyperbole,
presented their complex ideas for us to
gauge and contemplate. From Jimmy
Carter's speeches and remarks, I have
compiled his aspirations; I trust Gerald
Ford's supporters have done the same
in their endorsement. To the extent
that it has been possible, this essay
presents not my profile of Carter, but
his own — in his own words.
Government reorganization
Carter notes that when he took office
in Georgia, state agencies were not
organized by the services they
provided. As legislation mandated an
agency one simply developed with no
ties to those doing similar tasks. His
response:«
We reduced the number of state
agencies from about 300 to 22 major
operating agencies and combined
functions to eliminate duplication and
overlapping of services. For instance,
33 agencies were combined to form the
Department of Natural Resources.
While Governor, he became aware
that the federal agencies were no more
organized than Georgia's had been:
I wrestled with the unnecessary
regulations, and the paperwork and
the red tape and the overlapping
jurisdictions. I know what it is to try to
start a state drug-treatment program
and have to negotiate with almost a
dozen different federal agencies that
have separate legal responsibility for
the drug problem.
Carter has presented several specific
examples where he would reorganize
federal agencies. Health care is the
clearest example:
The structure of our health insurance
encourages in-hospital care. A patient
with the same illness would be kept in
the hospital an average of four days in
Santa Rosa, California, and thirteen
days in Brooklyn, New York. We have
no adequate explanation for the
difference.
Similarly, the likelihood of surgery is
related to the state where a person
resides as much as the state of his or
her health. A patient in a New Yo/k
City hospital is twice as likely to be
wheeled to the operating room as a
patient on the Upper Peninsula of
Michigan . . .
We have not until now controlled
costs with incentives for efficiency .. .
Federal policy is equally a problem.
Federal programs are fragmented
among at least fifteen departments —
and the health responsibilities of
H.E.W. are subdivided further among
ten parts of that one cabinet-level
agency. This bureaucratic sprawl of
agencies cannot provide effective
direction and coordination. Instead, it
is a "disorganization " of overlapping
jurisdictions and redundant program's,
each of them with separate grant and
reporting requirements. The result is
more loss of money and time, and the
wasted talents of administrators.
The administration of Medicare and
Medicaid presents a perfect example of
the need for government reorganiza-
tion. The two programs often serve the
same people. Each program is in a
different agency of HEW. Neither
agency is a health agency. Neither
relates to programs to provide much
more professional and allied health
manpower, or to research programs. ..
We have built a haphazard, unsound,
undirected, inefficient non-system
which has left us unhealthy and
unwealthy at the same time.
The crux of the solution, says Carter:
Reorganization of our government is
one of the most important steps we can
take. A random system tends to
perpetuate every effort of the past, no
matter what its record may be, because
each agency defends its own fragment
of the policy. A consolidated system
and coherent planning can weigh
competing alternatives, judge
comparative results, and budget
resources for the best returns in terms
of health.
In addition to reorganizing
government agencies, Carter notes
that tax money is spent more
effectively when zero-base budgeting
replaces incremental budgeting:
Georgia was the first government to
implement a program of zero-base
budgeting. Under this novel concept,
every dollar requested for expenditure
during the next budget period must be
justified, including current expendi-
tures that are to continue. It also
provides for examining the effective-
ness of each activity at various funding
levels. This is a dramatically different
concept from that followed by most
governments, which concentrate
almost totally on proposed new
expenditures when considering a new
budget.
Zero-base budgeting has a further
advantage — fully opening the
government to public examination:
On a larger scale, zero-base
budgeting in Georgia has peeled the
veil of secrecy from around
bureaucracy by opening up for
inspection and scrutiny the activities
of every single state employee. For the
first time, a Governor, a legislator,
department head, or anyone else can
study in detail what is being
accomplished at the lowest level of
state activity.
(Continued on page 4)
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McFarland, Carla. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 64, No. 16, Ed. 1 Monday, November 1, 1976, newspaper, November 1, 1976; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245307/m1/1/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.