Reagan Echoes LBJ’s Error : Refusal to Choose Among Valid Goals Will Weaken Nation

You don’t have to be a dedicated Reagan-watcher to notice that the President likes to invoke the names of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy in his speeches. In an important sense, however, comparisons with Lyndon B. Johnson would be more appropriate.

During the mid-1960s President Johnson decided to escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, but he couldn’t bring himself to cut his cherished Great Society programs in order to help pay for the war. He tried to go full-speed ahead on both fronts--and ended up losing both in Vietnam and at home.

Johnson’s failure to put the war on a pay-as-you-fight basis led to inflation and other economic distortions that plagued us for years. While U.S. resources were drained away in the futile pursuit of victory in Vietnam, the Soviets embarked on a major military buildup. Thus his ultimately futile pursuit of victory in Vietnam had a negative effect on the overall balance of military power with the Soviet Union.

In the end the Johnson presidency was destroyed--and in the process, the seeds of the still-dominant backlash against domestic spending programs were sown.

President Reagan, arch-foe of big government, would no doubt object to the drawing of any parallels between himself and Johnson, who created or enlarged many of the social programs that the present occupant of the White House is dedicated to dismantling.

Johnson left office because he knew he couldn’t be reelected. Reagan won a second term by an overwhelming margin, and he remains popular with the American people.

In one major respect, however--the refusal to choose between incompatible goals--the Johnson-Reagan parallel is disturbingly clear.

Since his days as a touring speaker for General Electric 20 years ago, Reagan has consistently hammered away at two themes: the need to control the Big Spenders in Washington and the need for a militarily strong America. For good measure, he also favored balanced budgets.

All three are respectable goals for a Republican President and, in general terms, all have bipartisan support. The problem lies in trying to accomplish all three goals at once.

By now it is obvious to most Americans that the enormous commitment of tax dollars to programs aimed at helping the poor has not produced results commensurate with the costs. Alternative approaches are in order. Disenchantment also has set in with the notion that federal taxpayers should help foot the bill for local and state spending programs.

We really did under-invest in national defense during the 1970s--and the need for a boost in military spending was widely recognized before Reagan became President.

As Harold Brown, Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary, stated in 1979, “The gap between U.S. and Soviet defense expenditures cannot continue to expand without a dangerous tilt in the relevant balances of power and a weakening of the overall U.S. deterrent.”

So Reagan entered the White House dedicated to shrinking the domestic, non-military side of the government while enlarging the defense side.

Perhaps in theory enough money could have been saved by the shrinkage of one to pay for the expansion of the other. Realistically, it was not possible because, while a majority of Americans favored cuts in domestic spending as a generality, there was no consensus on which programs to cut.

Reagan could have bridged the gap between rhetoric and reality by settling for a more restrained defense buildup, or by calling for a modest tax increase. Even leaving the tax structure as it was would have helped.

But, as in the case of Lyndon Johnson, wishful thinking prevailed. Reagan chose to believe--or pretend to believe--the supply-side economists who argued that lower tax rates would actually produce larger revenues. So he went for a tax cut.

As a result, Reagan has actually proved to be the biggest spender of them all. The federal budget he inherited from Jimmy Carter was less than $70 billion out of balance--itself the largest peacetime sea of red ink in U.S. history. Under Reagan the annual deficit quickly ballooned to more than $100 billion, then above $200 billion.

The national debt has doubled to $2 trillion during his five years in office. Even if the Gramm-Rudman law’s strict timetable for deficit reduction is enforced--which seems doubtful--the accumulated deficits will grow by close to another half-trillion dollars by the time Reagan leaves office.

The increase in military spending is, of course, only part of the explanation. The refusal of the nation, as reflected in Congress, to really roll back the Great Society was another factor. Then there was the Reagan tax cut.

When the President and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger say that the Soviet challenge is real and we must maintain a certain level of defense spending no matter what, they are right. But when they refuse to engage in the trade-offs that are normal in a democracy, they invite the kind of destructive cuts in the defense budget that will leave America weaker rather than stronger in the long run. Anybody who reads the newspapers can see that it’s already happening.

Ronald Reagan may very well last out his term without paying the piper; it takes time for consequences to catch up with causes. But the interest of the American people is, or should be, a little different.

The tragedy of Lyndon Johnson was not his alone; his refusal to make rational choices deeply affected the moral and pocketbook interests of the American people. We will be just as affected by Reagan’s ability or inability to choose between his cherished goal of avoiding higher taxes--and his other cherished goal of keeping America strong in the face of the very real military challenge from the Soviet Union.