Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 6

Tues, Nov. 21. 1978 me ail gpmniyg William Safire The Arizona Republic Jimmynomics: An Exercise In Weasel-Wording that wordlne oushes the comoarlson Washington This essay is intended for the eyes only of profes- Object to appear strong on defense matters, ac4 to assure allies that we will keep our increased spending end of a bargain without having to spend the money. Here's the wording: "We have encouraged our NATO allies in particular to increase their expenditures for a joint defense of Europe, and there NIN A PIUL1AM President MASON WALSH Publisher ARROW TUU.Y El GENE PtTXJAM Associate PublisherGeneral Manager 1M7 Publisher 1946-1975 FREDERIC S. MARQUARDT Editor ROBERT J.

EARLY Managing Editor PAT Ml'RPHY Editorial Page Editor VI writers; its pur-Jv rJ pose is to illustrate niques in Of course, we all know what the budget is going to be after the coming three-month charade is over. Take today's level of $490 billion, add 7 percent for Inflation, add a smidgin for NATO, chop a few billion from Western states for the appearance of hard-heartedness at little political cost and you have $530 billion of spending, figure tax-bracket creep to filch an extra $10 billion from taxpayers and you come up with a projected deficit of $29.2 billion as promised. IN THAT WAV, you rely on high interest rates, which you can start denouncing next year, to trigger the housing recession; meanwhile, you are able to adopt the stern demeanor of budget-cutter without actually having cut the budget Thanks to this use of weasel words, you have avoided taking the painful step of using genuinely restrictive fiscal policy to brake the boom. Comes the recession, blame the damn bankers and the greedy businessmen. You back eight months, to June 1976.

when sensible economics demanded a high deficit to bring down high unemployment Carter's pushback to mid-1976 also removes the embarrassment of having to compare with the $68 billion deficit he presented when he became president adding, $11 billion to the budget submitted by the outgoing President Ford. By this neat pushback trick, Carter can present himself as less a deficit-projector than his predecessor, when the opposite is true. THE $12 BILLION In trying to appear to be cutting spending, he has hiched his wagon to a soaring standard of comparison the gross national product. The trick is to say you are "holding" the federal spending rate to 21 pecent of GNP, which gives you room to spend more, since the GNP must rise. But at the last minute.

Carter inserted the key weasel word in his White Paper "about" 21 percent Whenever a political figure inserts a slightly awkward or out-of-sync phrase into a speech or press conference answer, or when he slips a last-minute qualifier in front of what is seemingly a ringing pledge, members of the old profession know he is weasel-wording. Where The Spirit Of The Lord Is, There Is Liberty II Corinthians 3:17 Editorials Death In Guyana fore us, by 3 percent a year above the inflation rate. I intend to honor that commitment." SOUNDS LIKE a commitment to a 3 percent real increase in military spending, no? Ah, but you've missed the weaselwords "For a joint defense of Europe." He's committed himself here only to a 3 percent increase in money we spend to defend Europe, which is a minor portion of the U.S. defense budget does not cover the Navy, or strategic arms, or the Pacific. That zipped past everybody.

Students of political slight-of-hand will note that images are not made by weasel words alone. Photographers will have to be invited in for pictures of a grim-faced president sharp pencil in hand, making the "hard decisions" leading to a "tough, austere" budget. And the secretary of health, education and welfare will be encouraged to let out great bellows of anguish about how his Inflated "requests" have been "cut to the bone." than 40 people from the dead, to have cured cancer, and to have made the blind see and the crippled walk. He cast a hypnotic spell over his followers, mostly Negroes, and those who eventually saw through him were too afraid JIMMY CARTER is getting good at it Observe: The six-month pushback. Your object is to minimize your budget deficit for the coming fiscal year, thereby creating the impression you are not a big spender.

The trick: find a time when the deficit was at a high and make it seem as if that was when you entered office That accounts for the careful wording of his goal as "a budget deficit less than half what it was when I was running for office." Why "when I was running" instead of the more natural "when 1 became Because can half-truthfully insist you tough-mindedly reduced the deficit "to less than half of what it was when I was running for office," that you "cut" spending to "about" 21 percent of GNP, and that you have "honored your commitments" on military expenditures to (mumble, mumble) "3 percent a year above the inflation rate." Since each one tenth of 1 percent equals about $2.5 billion, that "about" still less than 21.5 percent gives him a $12 billion cushion. The firm percentage of the amorphous subject. This is a Carter innovation, and deserves close study by aspiring weaselwordsmiths. Update! Ralph De Toledano Medical Woes Made Political By Califano NO congressman is ever called upon to die for his constituents, but Leo Ryan did. When he set out for Guyana, the former British colony "on the northern coast of South America, he knew he was flying into danger.

That did not deter him; in fact, that's why he went. Constituents had told him that relatives of theirs were being kept captive, brutalized and terrorized in a commune in the jungles of Guyana by the Rev. James W. Jones call me a self-styled "Prophet of God," and the founder of a religious cult, the People's Temple. The U.S.

Embassy in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, reported that it could find no evidence to support the charges, so Ryan went to investigate them for himself. The charges, it turned out, were all too gruesomely true. When Ryan attempted to leave with several members of the cult, who had been held in the commune against their wishes, other members mowed him down, along with four others, including two NBC newsmen and a photographer for The San Francisco Examiner. By their deaths, Ryan and the journalists made the nation aware of a horror that had existed for many years. Jones founded his cult in Indianapolis, and.

as far back as September 1972, The Indianapolis Star, a Pulliam newspaper, exposed him for the fraud he. was, and exposed the way he was keeping his followers, who then numbered about 4,000, under his thumb by brainwashing, violence and threats of violence. The Star reported that Jones was claiming to have raised more to leave the cult. The authorities took no action against Jones in Indianapolis, nor did they in Ukiah, to which he moved his People's Temple. In L'kiah, his assistant pastor also was assistant district attorney of the county, which explains the inaction.

Jones extorted from his followers almost every penny they had or earned or received from welfare. With the money, he was able to buy at least '25 pieces of property in Ukiah, and properties valued'at $1.5 million in Mendocino and San Francisco counties. He apparently mesmerized, many politicians, including Gov. Jerry Brown of California, Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, and Mayor George Moscone of San Francisco. Moscone made him chairman of the city's Housing Authority.

Later, complaints from those brutalized by him forced him to resign and depart with 1,200 of his followers to establish the commune in Guyana. Questions arise: Why didn't U.S. authorities ever take action against Jones? Why couldn't the embassy find anything wrong with his commune, later the scene of a mass suicide? Why did Ryan and the journalists have to die? Is occupational safety and health a medical or a political problem? The average citizen would say, "Medical." Wrong. In his anti-inflation speech, President Carter con I i i We will you (Khrushchev) "neutron WARHEfD BOfViT" (BRElHNtV) hi mm a mm? firmed this when he said he was going to restrain the small army of bureaucrats keeping their jobs alive with scare talk. But when Secretary Joe Califano of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare throws out a bunch of doctored statistics to frighten the American people into going along with an inflationary push of billions of dollars, can an objective reporter get a word in edgewise? it it it NOT ON YOUR life! He is immediately attacked as a prostitute for "big business" no matter what scientific evidence he produces.

Time and time again, HEW and its handmaiden, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, are caught lying to the people. The great "right to know" media will do a little story, buried among the legal notices, and that's that. Slothful Committee fiepuWic editonol cortoonist important assignment. The draft legislation it must agree to by June 30 will go to the governor Lowell Parker Republic Editorial Columniit Phoenix Hosted Aviation Pioneers seven years after first heavier than air hop, was the premier performer. Last of Two Parts Although the crowd was not as large as anticipated, opening day of the great Phoenix International Aviation Meeting was nonetheless a WATER has been among Arizona's biggest problems since long before the Ho-Ho-Kams dug the first canals in the Valley of the Sun.

One of the many official groups looking into the water problem is the state's Groundwater Management Study Commission, which is supposed to come up with a program to submit to the Legislature next June 30. The commission met in Phoenix last week. Eleven of its 25 members were present. The Mr. Roberts who wrote Roberts' Rules ot Order must have turned over in grave when the chairman managed to get a quorum by adding those in attendance at the last meeting to those in attendance at this meeting.

Arizona Republic reporter Earl Zarbin included an attendance-record In his story that should have embarrassed some of the commission members. One of them had missed 12 of the 13 meetings the commission has held since it was established by the Legislature in 1977. Others had missed five, six or seven meetings. The commission has a truly and the final report must be in his hands by Dec. 31 of next year.

The Legislature will have until September 1981 to enact a groundwater management code. The code will be as important as the Kent Decree under which water rights were established for Maricopa County. It will cover the whole field of groundwater rights, and transfers from one basin to another or within one basin. Kathy Ferris, executive director of the Groundwater Management Study Commission, has suggested a series of eight meetings at which the commission can agree on the draft legislation June 30. The commission, with or without a quorum, agreed to the schedule.

We shall watch with interest to see whether it can accomplish in the next seven months what it has not accomplished in the last 15 months. And we trust reporter Zarbin includes the attendance statistics, completed with names, in future reports just as he did in the last one. thrilling occasion that brought gasps A wiry little fellow weighing 105 pounds, he had experimented with dirigibles in Japan and was knowledge able about kites and gliders. Hamilton already held the world speed record, having once achieved a remarkable 50 miles an hour. Only other flier in the so-called international meet was Charles F.

Wlllard at the helm of a four-cylinder Curtiss biplane. To an even greater extent than Hamilton he was the victim of numerous breakdowns and sudden unexplainable disappearances over the fairgrounds fence. THE CROWD picked up on the second day of the meet and an estimated 7,000 fascinated groundlings watched Hamilton buzz around the track for a track record mile in one minute, 15 seconds. Best speed of the day was 11 miles in 14 minutes, 40 seconds. However, the really big event came on Saturday with a 10-mile race between Hamilton and Mel Johnson at the wheel of a Buick White Streak.

gles" in the Studebaker. He lost the race by 13-45 seconds. Saturday was to have been final day of the meet but the fliers decided to extend their efforts one day with the feature performance to be a powerless high glide by Hamilton. Attendance that day was poor, chiefly because church-goers disapproved of such Sunday festivities. Final event was a two-mile race between the Curtiss planes and a motorcycle, also Curtiss built.

WITH ONLY two pilots and three American made planes participating, the great international air meet turned out to be not very international. But, still, it gave little Phoenix, remote as it was from the outside world, an unusual preview of the air age in the offing. From Phoenix Hamilton went down to Tucson where, to prevent gate crashing, he had to use a tiny field surrounded by a high board fence. It was a suicidal take off and landing spot, but he did it without mishap. And only a year later Arizona witnessed breaking of the world's sustained flight record when Robert G.

Fowler flew non-stop the 165 miles between Yuma and Maricopa. His time was 206 minutes. But when Califano, whose knowledge of medicine derives from his law degree, announces at an AFL-CIO conference that all cancer in the United States "may" be work-related, it's big news. But pardon me, Califano, if I ask where you got your fright-wig facts? The American Industrial Health Council points out quietly that there is no scientific or statistical underpinning for your inflammatory statement, but who listens? The American Industrial Health Council asked the bureaucrats to document their claims about cancer. And what did HEW say? No facts, just a blast at critics and a charge that "this is what you'd expect from industry." When a government body like the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health takes exception to what Califano or OSHA says, the response is to go out and hire an outside "consultant" who is not about to bite the hand that feeds him.

Just so the reader won't think I am riding a hobbyhorse, here is what Science magazine, which is light years away from the business establishment, has to say about OSHA's highly publicized efforts to frighten the American people to death: "The proposed OSHA rules (are) written in gobbledygook apparently by lawyers for lawyers. (They) invite ridicule, contempt and non-compliance." AND TO THIS can be added one simple fact to answer those who tell of fright and astonishment from spectators assembled around the rim of the fairgrounds race track. As one of Phoenix's two newspapers put it, "The Arizona atmosphere was split into fragments as fearless aviators in spectacular flights and notable speed tests spread their wings through the ozone." Of the six events staged that afternoon of Feb. 10, 1910, probably the most thrilling was C.K. Hamilton's five-mile flight around and around the one-mile track.

At times he was as much as 150 feet above the ground and cruising at the remarkable speed of one mile in one minute, 1914 seconds. it. it TRULY, thought the spectators, man at last had fully conquered the air. What particularly excited the groundlings was the way Hamilton's wood and cloth biplane dipped, soared and swayed as vagaries of the air at times almost tore control of the craft from the pilot's straining hands. Absurd Regulation.

The Buick, starting with a 20-second handicap, was ahead of the plane when, on the seventh lap, a plug blew out of the car's water jacket. A Stude-baker E.M.F. was hurriedly run into the breach to finish the remaining laps for the spectator's benefit. Both cars ran the following day with Bruce Burch "behind the gog G'ALIFORNIANS made an important decision when they turned down Proposition Number 5 in this month's elections. That was the measure that would have banned smoking in virtually all public places.

Its sponsor, Tom Moder, said "70 percent to 80 percent of the people want to regulate smoking in one way or another." When the votes were tabulated, it turned out that 55 percent of voters didn't want to regulate it the way Moder did. since Americans got rid of the constitutional amendment that tried to outlaw the manufacture and sale of alcohol. But the stupidity of that "noble experiment" apparently is no longer impressed on everyone's mind. There are times when cigarette smoke is a nuisance. But that's equally true of the breath of a person who eats garlic.

And of the odor which arises from a person who doesn't bathe very often. Nowhere is it written that all public places must be as sweet-smelling as a newly bathed and powdered infant. Aviation in Arizona had come that, far in the eight years since Orville Wright's first experimental hop. Every moment, it seemed, was one of deadly danger with disaster almost certain. Sounds emanating from the plane above were more a sputter than a roar for the eight-cylinder engine IWFtfTPH HGGesr 630 BOX.

us that because of the increased use of chemicals, we are all dying from cancer: Since 1950 there has been a tenfold increase in the production of industrial chemicals, yet there has been no calculable increase in cancer fatalities. But I am a fair man. I would like to put this proposition to Califano. Let him make all the regulations he wants. But the next time he pushes one through which puts thousands of' Americans out of work and is based on nothing more than the steam from some bureaucrat's eyeballs, let him pick up the tab.

If he accepts my proposition, I can guarantee that there will be a period of salubrious silence from HEW, OSHA and the legions of bureaucrats whose major aim seems to be to make as many Americans miserable as. possible. The theory behind Proposition 5 was that smoking not only hurts the person who does the smoking but also everyone else within sight. This is a palpably false theory for which there is no medical justification whatsoever. (In fact, no one has yet found a causative factor for cancer in tobacco.) tf the owner of a restaurant or the management of an airline wants to provide smoking and non-smoking sections in a dining room or on a plane, that's his But to pass a law saying a person cannot smoke a cigarette in a public place smacks of a police state.

Forty-five years have passed powering the Curtiss-built aircraft was anything but a sophisticated piece of machinery. The noise and moving shadows thrown onto the ground, however, were sufficient to spook most of the horses hitched to spectators' wagons. As a consequence, show authorities ordered all horses unhitched and relegated to a quiet area back of the barns. As at all outdoor events, excited stray dogs were omnipresent, posing a threat in the infield landing area. Only two planes were in the air that day.

Hamilton, a veteran pilot, if one could become a veteran in less than The Los Angeles Times, largest newspaper in California, said of Proposition 5: "We are alarmed by both the letter and the spirit of the law that would be put in place by Proposition 5." The Tines said the proposed restriction on smoking had "a sense of brooding government presence" and was "too sweeping." The voters agreed. The voters showed more sense than the do-gooders who sought to regiment them without being able to prove the need for so doing..