76-02-B3
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Humphrey - Hawkins Bill (Jobs A)
TranscriptSometimes in the halls of Congress it seems as if "old bills" unlike old soldiers neither die nor fade away. They just live on under different titles. I'll be right back. Congress has before it Senate Bill 50 House Resolution 50 entitled, "The Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act." We first knew of this as the Humphrey-Javits bill. Fortunately it didn't get far under that title but now unfortunately it's back renamed the Humphrey-Hawkins bill. It is as persuasive and grandiloquent in its promise as the label on a bottle of patent medicine. It declares that every adult American has the right to, quote, "opportunities for useful paid employment at fair rates of compensation." Unquote. Surely no one wants to quarrel with that. But it sets a goal of 3 percent adult unemployment to be reached by 1980 which is better than full employment. During times of peak employment the percentage of workers temporarily and voluntarily between jobs and those looking for a first job total more than three percent. Humphrey-Hawkins as it's called requires the president to submit a complete plan every year for achieving full employment and balance growth. Now that too sounds all right. He's supposed to use fiscal and monetary policy, tax revision and other tools. Here there seems to be some fuzziness, because Washington estimates the cost of the bill at anywhere from 16 billion a year to 44 billion. But that phrase "other tools" is the one we should watch out for. To begin with Congress has to approve the president's plan or presumably come up with one of its own. Then if joblessness isn't reduced to the magic figure all sorts of employment and grant programs go into effect including public service employment and job training. We already have about 50 government agencies charged with training and assisting the unemployed. Make that 51. The bill calls for a new "Full Employment Office" in the Labor Department to administer a reservoir of last resort federal jobs. The bill makes sure that these make work jobs pay equivalent to wage scales in private industry. Now this means a built in inducement for some to quit their present jobs for the guaranteed public job because it would mean a raise in pay. In our experience so far with these emergency public job programs we've learned that they actually decrease employment because in many instances government entities only use the program to hire those they already intended to hire. But there's much much more to fear in Humphrey-Hawkins. Actually it follows a pattern once used in Italy by a fellow named Mussolini and then it was called fascism. The annual plan would involve the government allocating resources including labor. It creates government machinery for planning virtually every aspect of American life, projecting national goals for production, purchasing power and so forth. These words may not sound frightening but think of their meaning and application. Government not the customers would decide how much of what should be produced. You may think you want a new car but if government decided refrigerators were more important steel and other materials would be denied the automaker. That of course would mean layoffs which also means government would begin telling free Americans where they would work and what kind of work they do. Maybe it's a full employment program-but so was slavery. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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