4
Monday, February 10, 1975
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
War planning futile
President Ford has made it very clear that he won't sit still while Congress trims his recommended $33 billion Pentagon budget for fiscal 1976. Curtail social programs would, but give the Pentagon what it wants.
For too long we have given the Pentagon what it wants. It's pretty late in the era of double-digit infiltration for us not to realize the significant inflationary pressures caused by excessive defense spending. What the Pentagon produces doesn't satisfy the wants of the American consumer. Excessive defense spending diverts crucial resources toward the production of unnecessary military hardware. And when all is said and spent, we aren't one bit safer.
pentagon planners and apologists are like little kids, but instead of playing with toys, they play with weapons that could very well end all intelligent life on this planet. They live in the nuclear age, yet their minds are mired in the age of conventional warfare.
Defense Secretary James Schlesinger says he must have all of the $30 billion in order to maintain a worldwide military balance of power with the Soviet Union. Schlesinger warns that the Soviet is in increasing its defense spending at a rate of three to five per cent yearly and that Moscow outspends Washington on defense by about 20 per cent.
So what?
The Soviet Union can have twice as many missiles, twice as many soldiers and twice as many bombers as the United States, yet the Russians still would be committing suicide to start a war. There is no safety in numbers in the nuclear age. Our wishful thinkers in the Pentagon, however, choose to ignore reality.
Instead, Pentagon planners go on designing new weapons for their make-believe war in the future. For example, the Air Force wants 244 of the fancy B1 bomber, which Rockwell International is now developing. Each bomber will cost $76 million, a total of almost $19 billion. That's a lot of schools and bridges.
The Air Force also is sinking
money into the land-based Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, which the Boeing Company is developing.
The Pentagon wants $140 million next fiscal year for an anti-ballistic missile defense system, which McDonnell Douglas is developing.
The list of new weapons systems is virtually endless. AWACS warning planes, F15 fighters, A10 attack planes, M60 tanks. Like a little kid in a discount center, the weapon wants every kind of uses, whether it is ever or not. About the only ones to benefit from the madness are the contractors.
There is only one major weapons system that the Pentagon wants that seems worthwhile. The Navy wants $2.1 billion next year for further submarine acquisition, which will be equipped with long-range missiles.
Missile-carrying nuclear subs are the ultimate deterent force. They can hide beneath the oceans until their use is absolutely necessary. Most of these systems are as early as possible to escape being knocked out while on the ground.
Congress almost undoubtedly will trim the Pentagon's proposed budget, despite President Ford's protests. Yet it is unlikely that Congress will trim as much as it should. The Pentagon employs a lot of people, and many of these people have been paid for budget were cut in half. Besides, Pentagon fiction writers at this moment are devising scare tactics to dissuade Congress and the public from using common sense.
The secretary of defense will tell us again and again that we are spending a smaller percentage of the national budget on defense today than we were 10 years ago. Nevertheless, we are still spending far too much, less than three per cent annually and resources were more readily available. Today we can't longer afford the luxury of waste.
We are living in the last civilization, where defense is impossible and war is suicide. No matter how many B1 bombers and ABM systems we build, we won't be any safer.
—Steven Lewis
President Ford's budget for fiscal 78 contains both good and bad news. First the good news: The President asks, and almost surely will get, $2.2 billion for energy research.
Drab budget uncustomary
All the rest is bad news, and the melancholy prospect is that the bad news will get worse. No one can remember a brave pilot of this one. The immemorial custom, breached only in the years of World War II, is for presidents to use their annual
the coming fiscal year at $15.9 billion. The point-tine is mere window dressing. Every president's budget is hypothetical; this budget is more hypothetical than most. It is manifestly impossible to predict accurately in January 1975 how things will be July 2016. So the point is the truism that a president proposes, but the Congress disposes.
The President's estimates rest on a jerry-built structure of
By James Kilpatrick (C) 1975 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
budget messages to depict their administrations in the rostest colors: They propose to be bold, innovative and progressive; and they propose also to be cost-conscious and frugal.
Custom has gone with the wind. Ford's budget message gives us a picture in somber grays and browns. Unemployment will get worse; corporate profits, in what laughingly may be called real income will decline. The national debt will go beyond $450 billion by the end of fiscal year 1976. By 1977, interest on that debt will demand $4 billion a year.
impossible suppositions. He supposes that a Congress dominated by liberal Democrats will benefit,阳县 benefits on policy, back on aid to education in "impacted" areas and reduce the cost of food stamps. He supposes that Congress will cut spending for Medicare and other health spending programs as national health insurance and a Consumer Protection Agency and adopt his package of tax rebates and oil tariff increases. This is the biggest increase of Congress will balk at every turn. The more realistic prospect is for a 1976 deficit of $65 to $7 billion.
Ford estimates the deficit for
EVEN THAT prospect assumes that the U.S. will be spared involvement in a shooting war. In an such event, a billion asked for defense would have to be vastly increased.
THERE IS NO way to put a good face on this budget. This is the feeble best the ad- dressers can offer, and the economy were to be as fully employed in 1976 as it was in 1974, we would have $4 billion in additional tax receipts, in annual tax changes in tax rates, in $12 billion aid to the unemployed. These two factors alone exceed the budget deficit for 1976." One is reminended anew of the hobo's bread. I could make a ham sandwich. I had some ham."
THE BUDGET points to three areas of peril-political, economic and, for want of a better word, philosophical. The budget has raised the Republican party; if things are as grim in the summer of 1976 as this budget suggests, goodby, Ford. If the prospective president will think thin air, goodby, dollar. Inflation will go ballooning out of sight.
The bleakest prospect is this: If government spending continues to soar, goodh, freedom. Expenditures by Federal, State and local government already consume one-third of our gross revenues. The Director Roy Ash, pleading for restraint, makes a terrifying projection: If these expenditures are not checked,
government will consume 60 percent of the GNP by 2000. A free society could not survive.
What to do? **2** order to reduce these deficits, every dollar of nonessential spending will have been increased. Democrats must be kept constantly on notice that they will be held strictly accountable for
renewed inflation. Alternative sources of energy must be pursued with redoubled zeal. Our focus is on despair. Our nation has the material and spiritual resources for survival. We can ride out this storm if no one else. Congress blunders, we sink.
Ziegler's lecture fee justifiable
Bv CARL ROWAN
Millions of Americans are surely happy that Boston University has renamed its proposal to pay former Nixon press secretary Ronald L. Levin, 76, some are people who, like the dean of the university's school of public communication, were outraged at the thought of paying that kind of money. The solemn official utterances often became "inoperative."
Others are people who know Ziegler and find it impossible to believe that anything coming
out of his head would be worth three grand.
There isn't much I can say in defense of Ziegler's credibility, character or political judgment, but I must say that I feel a deep uneasiness about this business of zapping him out as a paid speaker. There is something disquieting about that resolution, withdrawing attention, which I wonder "We have the right to condemn Ronald Ziegler, but we do have the right to condemn his fee."
disinvested because his fee was too high. He was disinvested because he was, and is, the mouthpiece of the only American president to be chased out of office as a crook. I confess that my personal experience in this speaking for pay have something to do with my uneasiness over this episode. A Neanderthal trustee of a California college who considered me 'a liberal memoir' when I was young years ago by resorting to the devious argument that my fee was too high. The students saw
There isn't a soul at Boston University or anywhere else who believes that Ziegler was
this as a sinister attempt at political censorship and insisted that I speak. I did.
Is Ziegler worth $3,000? What can he say? He was to speak on "The Use and Abuse of Power." Few men have seen more reprehensible abuses of power than Ziegler saw in the Nixon-Haldeman-Ehrlichman White House. If he had told those Boston U. students the truth, he have earned his fee, and more.
But a lot of people are happy Ziegler won't speak because they doubt he can tell that kind
Readers respond to abortion, hospital
To the Editor:
Abortion issue
Thanks to Steve Lewis for raising the abortion issue and inviting comment from other viewpoints. Your editorial (Feb. 3) doesn't take a neutral position. It stands on the side of the 1972 relaxed Supreme Court ruling on "legal" abortions.
I am hardly an impassioned advocate of Right-to-Lifers, but I don't agree that all their arguments are to be smiled upon and disregarded as so many "metaphysical notions."
YOUR POSITION is that human life begins if a mother leaves the room. You imply that a pregnancy is a private affair which is the business of the mother only. Science, you say, is to decide where to draw the line for abortion or prohibiting abortions.
Why don't you say anything about the rights of the unborn? Do they have any? They don't have any voice, unless others, who are concerned about the helpless champion their cause.
My position is, and other very "competent" thinkers will concur, that reality is the measure of man. The world around me exists regardless of what I happen to think. Laws that govern nature and life aren't created by you or me or anyone else. We are smart, once we discover the principles at work in the world, we try to live in agreement with them.
DOES ANYTHING exist is "scientific examination" cannot be brought to bear upon人 because you have no friendship, love, giving a damn, your personality and other intangibles. Some people would claim that man is the measure of what people don't exist if I don't think they do.
pendable, as 900,000 abortions last year in the United States would indicate, what makes you want to enter this race or another "master" race?
The finger that points accusingly to "extrapolating asses" usually carries with it a direction in another direction.
I am a war baby, born in 1942.
Just because I didn't live through conditions in Germany during World War II, I mean I have to discover their tragic mistakes all over again myself. If human life is so ex-
Father Mathew Habiger, OSB St. Lawrence Catholic Center 1831 Crescent
Abortions
To the Editor:
It is a pity that Steven Lewis, gathering up the emotional cliches in favor of and against abortions, falls into the trap of using one himself in the same editorial. I refer to the old spectre of the nasty, back street 'quack' abortionist. What would happen to forget or ignore it as a very large number of those women who had easy abortions in the last two or three years wouldn't have gone to a quack in other times but would have carried the babies to term. Nor would these have been 'unwanted children' another popular theory about any adoption agency can tell you how passionately they are wanted.
As the mother of two beautiful adopted children, I don't have to deal with "metaphysicalism as Lewis puts it." However, Lewis put it into instead. I see before me daily two living, individual, unique human beings who has as much right to his or her life has to his.
Hospital staff
Nan C. L. Scott KU Graduate (M.A., 1965)
In the Feb. 4 Kansan, Lee Knox commented on Watkins Hospital's hospitality. Regrettely, I have experienced another side of the hospital's operation that was anything but congenial. I believe it should be brought to the attention of the
reader how certain people at the hospital take advantage of the patient.
THE EMERGENCY room is one place to stay away from unless one is completely deceased before he ages after having an accident, and I was taken advantage of by the staff. I said repeatedly that I didn't want to go into the examination room if it weren't me, and when the nurse who attended me, Mrs.Kamb, said there would be no charge. I made the same request about no doctor examining him if it would cost, and again replied that it wouldn't.
WHEN I WAS told that X-rays would be needed, I made the same statement about cost, because I understood a charge went on all X-rays. Again, I was told there would not be a charge, a R Carrman, a R Carrman with a sling that he said was without cost because I was a fulltime student.
Two weeks later I received a bill for $33, including examination room, sling and X rays. When I tried to explain the need for a business office supervisor, Mrs. Mary Baxter, I was told that the staff in emergency had no authority relating to clinic operations so he would speak to Dr. Martin Wollmann, director of the hospital. She also told me that Dr. Wollmann had talked to the Dr. Carranah, and that they ever told me about costs.
When I tried to speak to Mrs. Kamb and Dr. Carnahan, his wife, I did not speak to speak only to Dr. Wolmimn. I did as she instructed and he gave me "sincere evasions," so I mimicked her smile imprinted on his face.
The hospital claims that insurance can pay the money and end the whole matter. I feel it's not that the student is taken advantage of, but an emergency situation. I'm not criticizing the entire hospital—
the majority of the staff is commendable. But when a student is lied to, and the very people who caused the problem fail, the fault, the student body needs to be made aware and cautious.
Baxter and Wollmann are characters who know what positions they hold and how they operate to overpower the student's right to fairness and equality. I hope someone soon will realize the games being played with the teacher's input and put a stop to the game.
Mitch Levin
Leawood Sophomore
Predictors err
That doesn't mean that standards of education will be lowered. On the contrary, they will demand more opportunity to get an education. The society is getting better educated. However, as a college education becomes a must, the schools or the awards become stiffer.
For strange reasons, statisticians predict that college enrollment will decrease as the number of college-age youths decreased and there are increases in enrollment to the postwar "baby boom."
Their statements would be true if social standards were to remain the same, and if a college education wasn't a necessity, organizations respect the high school graduate as a college education becomes a necessity. Enrollment of students in higher education increases the overall student-age population may decrease.
Rolle Green Boston Graduate Student
To the Editor:
Fees unjust
To the Editor:
This letter is in response to what I believe is a grossly overpriced basketball ticket. I crested price of student football and basketball tickets. I am
referring to the appropriations bill passed last week by the Student Senate.
The bill not only raises a fulltime student's activity fee support going to the University Athletic Corporation by half with the cut in women's allocation, also raises the amount each student is required to give to the ticket subsidy program by almost $1.20 a semester. Students who buy tickets will pay only $10 instead of the current $15 and $13 for football and basketball tickets, respectively. I'm sure there are many student坠落 obligation desire to subsidize next year's ticket buwers.
A MUCH MORE equitable approach would be to leave the tickets at the current prices (which aren't that unreasonable compared to general public prices) and allow the principle of supply and demand to function. If there is a large enough number of ticket buyers that think the cost are too unequal to pay, Clyde will have to find some other means of raising additional funds or making better use of existing funds.
of truth. They figure he is more likely to whinse some more about how Nixon has been abused, especially by the misuse of the power of the press.
If the City of Lawrence imposed an entertainment tax on all city residents so that those who attended movies would pay more than the price of $1.75 instead of the current $2, would anyone see this as a logical reaction to the rise in price? Why, then, will they crease in the ticket subsidy or be more unfitifiable?
Public record
David L. Welch Holton Sophomore
To the Editor:
Kenn Louden's editorial accuses women's athletics of unethical behavior in "withholding information" that has been a matter of public record for months (i.e. the proposed $30,000 state budget increase) is pessimist and not a little
ridiculous! One would hope that Kansan writers receive strong encouragement to do so. And they did in dulging in such quasi-slander.
Gerlinda Findlay 2127 Barker
Vietnam aid
To the Editor:
So what's wrong with that? Those communications students would see how little a man needs to know to become press secretary and then senior adviser to some presidents. That surely is worth something—though probably not $3,000.
Walter Crondike said Feb. 3 that President Ford was once again, asking congressional leaders to South Vietnam. The mere fact that the request was made shows that some persons, including our President, are still ignorant of the implications of the war on our men out of South Vietnam. WITHDRAWAL OF our troops was a de facto admission that South Vietnam's cause wasn't American enough and aid to the Thien dictionaries was a face-saving tactic on behalf of the deposed autocrat Nixon, and his concept of peace with honor. We stopped buying guns now. It's time for us to stop buying it with money.
I think we could better serve the interests of both America and Vietnam by giving our support to any coalition of countries that bring an end to the killing. Thieu has rejected coalition before, but maybe the CIA can be persuaded to give him the same treatment they gave Allende, who, in contrast, was by the people of his country in a free and open election.
Roch Thornton Winfield junior
To the Editor:
Prescriptions
As the originator of the inquiry of the American Association of University Professors into the feasibility of extending Watkins Hospital prescription discount privileges
to faculty members' families. I deeply regret the tempest which has ensued, as reported on page one of the Feb. 3 Karsan.
My interest in exploring this possibility was based wholly upon a similar privilege with students from members' families at the university with which I was previously affiliated. It in no way attempted to secure faculty fringe benefits at student expense.
ON THE CONTRARY,
symbolic of faculty family
interest in support of improved
Watkins Hospital services to
students is the recently-
inaugurated University Women's
Club. Although in its infancy,
some 50 faculty wives donate
through the program a portion
of their time to perform non-
professional services, par-
ternation and during the physical
examination periods. Such
activity hopefully should
suggest to Messers Holland and
Beisner that no one is seeking
to participate. It is unfortunate that they
interpret this request in that vein, and that an apparently slow news day resulted in such prominent Kansan attention to it. I fondly shoutz
Lloyd Sponnellt
Assistant Professor of History
But one thing is clear to anyone on the lecture circuit: notoriously is the quality most in demand on college campuses. Students are also in columns of unprecedented brillance, it would mean less in terms of drawing a college audience than if I got myself arrested for smoking pot at a White House dinner while buoderiously demanding that Ford ease marijuana laws.
Ziegler has notoriety—surely more after that Boston U. fracas than before. And how do you and I presume you care about me, our noisy notility? We can't, so we resort to arousing moral indignation over "rewarding" someone like Ziegler with a fat lecture fee. But that gamble, repeated enough, leads to tyranny. Shall we say that Angela Davis must be denied speaking fees because of something, the high quality of something, the court verdict notwithstanding? Shall we say that TV shows ought not pay Martha Mitchell because she once advocated sending war protesters to Russia? Shall we tell Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, John Dean and James Bridges, as well as books, but receive no royalties, because it would be immoral for them to profit from their wrongdoing?
Poor old Zigler hasn't been convicted of anything. I said students are entitled to hear him, and he's entitled to collect whatever fee his agent can negotiate. WWW.EVIDENCEINSTITUTIONS.INC.
Nonsense. Anyone who wants to buy their books will do so, and they will enrich themselves by telling stories of how they learned them as well as a few lies about how someone abused them.
negotiate.
Copyright 1975 Field Enterprises, Inc.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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