Bernard Axelrad Scholarship Fund

While President Reagan is still garnering lofty personal approval ratings in the polls, his programs are foundering and his ability to lead is being called into question.

If not the general public then certainly Congress (including his own Republican cohorts) is guilty of rebelling and balking at his programs as never before.

Is that teflon coating that has layered his political existence finally being pierced? Is he finally being treated as a lame duck?

Let's take a peek at three public events where the drift and stalemate are most noticeable.

Tax Reform Fiasco

The great promise held out by the initial proposals of Donald Regan's "Treasurey I" for meaningful tax reform has deteriorated into rank disappointment. The heralded goal of simplicity in tax laws and fairness in the tax burden have been discarded along the way. In February, 1985, I wrote ("Goring the Ox"):

"The key to the passage of any such tax bill is President Reagan. Only his charismatic leadership and unique ability to communicate with the American people can lead us to the promised land. He can seize the opportunity to soar above the politics of the moment, free himself of hidebound dogmatic shackles, and stamp his personal imprimatur on tax revision. All this must be done before the entrenched forces of the status quo regroup and assault the battlements in earnest."

But Regan did not follow through with sustained leadership and the lobbyists mounted their onslaught unchecked. What tortuously evolved through the House Ways and Means Committee was a mere shadow of the acclaimed Treasury proposals.

(If you want an inkling as to why lobbyists have so much power, bear in mind that it costs $3 million, on average, to campaign for the U.S. Senate. Where do you think that kind of money comes from and what do such contributors expect in return?).

The proposed tax bill in its emaciated form could not muster great public support, or even approval of the President's own party in the House. Properly so. The tax bill that finally emerged was neither simple nor fair, but just a rearrangement of loopholes and deductions. It weighs in at more than 1400 pages, so how simple (or fair) can it be?

The public does want real tax reform and not any of the ersatz rehash and reshuffling that go on periodically. Perhaps some of the horror stories eventually will cause the uprising of the public that's needed for massive strip-ping away of the tax loopholes which subsidize the affluent, people and corporations.

Is it mere coincidence that General Electric is buying RCA for over $6 billion in cash? Do you know that General Electric earned more than $6 billion between 1981 and 1983 but used "tax incentives" not only to ruminate its entire federal income tax liability but also to collect funds of taxes paid in previous years?

Few tax preferences are defensible on their own merits. They endure only because their proponents can point to existing other deductions as justification for similar treatment.

We won't have simple, fair and meaningful tax reform until the tax laws no longer are used to provide partisan political, social and economic engineering. Tax laws should be designed purely to raise revenue and for no other purpose. Personal exemptions should be at least $5000 for each individual and dependent. Even without deductions, but at much lower rates, most of us would end up paying much less tax than we do now. And with no muss and no fuss.

Gramm-Rudman Abdication

The national debt has more than doubled to about $2 trillion during President Reagan's short tenure. Budget deficits of $200 billion have become common-place. Both President Reagan and the Congress spoke out righteously about a balanced budget.

And did nothing.

So the Senate came up with the facile Gramm-Rudman legislation which is as phony as it is simplistic.

In essence, it specifies that for the next five years the annual deficit would be mechanically reduced until the budget was in balance by 1991. In actual practice, it would mean that the President and Congress would submit their annual deficit budgets (as at present) which then would be cut by a certain percentage across the board (except for social security and interest on the national debt), until by 1991 the budget finally would be shoehorned into balance.

This scheme indicates that Congress and the President are completely helpless to perform their fiscal tasks and need an artificial, arbitrary and non-discretionary method to bail themselves out. While at first blush this method sounds ingenious, it really is a gimmick, a cleverly disguised fraud which ultimately will satisfy no one. The President will be extremely unhappy at the cuts in the defense budget, and the ax will fall with mindless savagery on social programs that service the disadvantaged and the poor, who have no political clout.

Instead of the heart and the brain, the calculator will reign.

Even though the Gramm-Rudman bill was passed with the approval of the President by a Congress prepared to abdicate its primary discretionary function, I predict that in practice it will cause more problems than it solves. it's a cop-out, pure and simple, and so revealing of the malaise of the body politic.

The Summit as Theater

As Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Golliariev prepared to meet in Geneva during the third week of November, many of us hoped the tidings would bring forth a memorable Thanksgiving. Alas, while their summit meeting was not a turkey, it was nothing to immortalize, either.

Reagan's first meeting with a Soviet leader after five years in the White House was a masterfully staged public relations ploy, but it solved nothing of substance.

The press seemed more concerned with whether Gorbachev or Reagan was the more photogenic, along with the subsidiary contest between spouses. Raisa and Nancy as to their own images.

For me, it appeared at times like the theater of the absurd — two characters in search of a photographer, vying for approval on a world-wide stage. They tried to charm each other as well as the rest of the world.

Caught up in the fanfare, pomp and grandeur of the event, there were times when I expected the smiling Gorbachev and the genial Reagan to break into a pas de deux, a la Astaire and Baryshnikov.

It was hard to bear in mind the awesome power held by these two cheery men amid all that pageantry. Sadly, not a single, deadly, superfluous weapon will be disengaged as a result of the summit meeting.

I cringed involuntarily (recalling Chamberlain's "Peace in our time" at the Munich summit in 1938) when Gorbachev proclaimed at the conclusion of this summit: "I would say the world has become a safer place in which to live."

Nevertheless, the two most powerful men on earth did meet, and there were no shoes banged on the table or imprecations hurled about the Evil Empire. So I suppose we should be thankful for small favors in this perilous world of ours.

Yet, I can't help but dream of what might have been as these two omnipotent men met on cordial terms and had the golden opportunity to defuse the cold war and reverse the process of ever-spiraling armament.