Reagan Budget’s ‘Warped Vision’

Thank you so very much for including, along with the large article dealing with the President’s trillion-dollar-plus budget, a small box that synthesizes where every dollar collected will come from and where every dollar spent would go. In a little obscure sentence we discover that 29 cents of every dollar proposed to be spent will go toward national defense. The enormous significance of it lies once again in the fact that presenters of the budget state that the defense budget represents less than 4% of the gross national product (GNP). The reasons for using the GNP as a measuring stick are obvious. “Less than 4%” is a far more modest number then close to one-third of all that the government hopes to collect and spend on defense--29% for defense, in spite of the fact that we have been told over and over again that we have a nuclear arsenal and the effective means of delivering it (God forbid!) sufficient to kill each man women and child 10 times over.

Paying the interest on our national debt, now at 14 cents of every dollar of the budget, will, in a few years, bury our children and grandchildren, with the inevitable increases already proposed, in a way that is absolutely unconscionable to contemplate.

We don’t need 500,000 Americans stationed in Germany to operate our sophisticated equipment of destruction, which we don’t want the Germans to have access to. A fraction of that number should be able to protect our national technological security.

The Germans would be less competitive in our domestic markets if they had to spend more money on defense. So would Japan. Cut the military budget to 25 cents of each budget dollar and spend it here at home.

JEROME MAUTNER

Laguna Hills