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Of Character and the Economy
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20006 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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8 / 1992 |
5,922 Words |
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An Interview With J. Peter Grace
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THE WORLD&I: Present economic news is not cheerful. Right now people feel the pinch. Bankruptcies are rising, the banking system is in trouble. People feel a lack of job security. How did we get into this mess in the fist place?
J. Peter Grace: We got into it because we've been living an artificial life ever since LBJ. He started it, the Great Society, with the government paying for this, that, and the other thing.
When I went down to Washington in 1982 to work for President Reagan on the President's Private-Sector Survey on Cost Control, he said, "Now you get all your information from the Office of Management and Budget." So the first few days we worked in the Executive Office Building and I said to the staff people who were made available to us, "How many social programs are there?"
"We don't know," they said. "Maybe a hundred, a hundred twenty-five."
One of our people was in a bookstore, and he found a book called How to Get Yours in Fat City. It had three hundred social programs listed in the appendix, showing you how you could get into the different programs and how you could get into seventeen social programs simultaneously.
So he took that back to the OMB and said. "Hey, the staff says there's a hundred, a hundred twenty-five, but here's an appendix with three hundred." They threw up their hands and said, "We don't know how many there are. You find out." Well, there were 963 social programs, and now there's 1,157.
Why do we need 1,157 different social programs? This is crazy. I mean, this is not the way things are supposed to work. So I say we got into this mess by having not had one year of a balanced budget since 1969.
W&I: We're in the middle of campaign '92 and everybody is talking about our economic problems. What do you regard as the top economic priority for the next administration?
Grace: To bring back fiscal sanity in this country. I mean, we've got to--and it's going to be very difficult. We've got to get people off complete dependency. Generation after generation of many families are completely dependent on the federal government and they believe the federal government owes them a
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