Reagan to Intensify Push for Tax Reform : Plans Trip a Week to Virtually Every Part of U.S. in Next 2 Months

President Reagan’s promised fall campaign for his tax package is shaping up as “roughly one major trip a week” during the next two months, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said Thursday.

“We will go to virtually every part of the country to talk tax reform to the people,” Speakes said. “It will be a major effort on our part to focus attention on the President’s tax package as it gets down to the tax-writing stage in the (House) Ways and Means Committee and then later for consideration in the Senate.”

The proposal, which seeks to lower overall tax rates by eliminating many widely used deductions, faces strong opposition from a wide array of powerful interests dependent on those tax breaks.

Passage in ’85 Unlikely

Opposition from various influential lobbying groups is so strong that some in Congress have said it faces virtually no chance of being passed this year.

Reagan’s first stop on his tax-package blitz will be Independence, Mo., as he returns to Washington Monday from his three-week vacation here. In a town most famous as the birthplace of former President Harry S. Truman, Reagan will speak from the steps of Jackson County Courthouse.

His second trip, announced Thursday, is scheduled for next Thursday, to Raleigh, N. C. There, he will speak at North Carolina State University and have lunch with student leaders.

On another matter, Reagan Thursday urged no increase in the pay of federal employees for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. He made the recommendation as part of an annual report to Congress required under a 1970 federal pay law.

Pay Freeze Approved

Congress had approved a pay freeze for next year in the budget resolution it adopted earlier this month. Reagan’s initial budget request last February called for a 5% cut in federal civilian employee pay.

White House pay advisers have estimated that it would require a 19.15% increase next year to bring federal pay scales in line with those offered by the private sector.

However, Reagan said in his official recommendation to Congress against such an increase that it would add $20.6 billion to the gaping federal deficit and have an “adverse effect” on economic growth. The recommendation will go into effect unless both houses of Congress vote to override the presidential action.

Panel Recommends Increase

A civilian advisory commission had recommended a 4.7% increase to compensate for next year’s expected inflation and make up for ground that federal employees lost to inflation with this year’s 3.5% raise.

A White House spokesman said that the President’s recommendation does not include postal workers or blue-collar government employees, whose wages are set independently.

However, the congressional budget resolution anticipates a pay freeze for blue-collar workers as well.