Logansport Pharos-Tribune from Logansport, Indiana • Page 4

PAGE 4 /AW.4.Y4. THURSDAY. 4. 1982 OPINION Tin' free ix the cut of liberty. Price Controls For Health While the overall inflation rate in 1981 was 8.9 percent, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, the increase in health care costs was 12.5 percent, 3.6 percentage points more.

No single component of health care costs was as low as the inflation rate. In all aspects they increased more rapidly than inflation. The rate of increase in the cost of hospital beds, 17 percent, was almost double that of inflation. And while inflation rose at the lowest rate since 1977, physicians' fees rose faster at 11.7 percent than at any time since 1975. Prescription drugs rose at a 12.7 percent rate.

Medical supplies other than drugs increased at a 10.3 percent rate. Dental services increased in cost at a rate of 10.2 percent. According to ELS economist Brian Beaulieu, among the reasons for the increase in hospital rates were the high cost of capital for new hospital construction and the cost for maintaining empty beds in existing hospitals. The cost of labor makes up about half of all hospital expenses. With a na- tionwide nurse shortage, hospitals pay rates to compete for the limited supply.

Public employee unions demanded and got a share. Other reasons offered by economists for the surge in hospital rates include an end to fear by the health industry that the government, under the Reagan administration, would regulate rates: continued "third party" payment of bills, which hid the true cost of health services from consumers; increased use of expensive medical technology and an aging population to which greater intensity of care was given, both often unnecessarily. The health industry accounts for at least 10 percent of the Gross National Product in the United States, which the Reagan administration now believes is too much, since it pays about one-fourth the bill. If its program to bring rate increases -under control by encouraging competition in the industry fails, it is prepared to "regulate rates." That means imposing controls. The industry, unfortunately, is moving toward no alternative.

Microelectronic Car With electronic controls and adjustable shock absorbers and springs, a car ride can be kept level and smooth regardless of road conditions. The technology already exists and is used in Army tanks. Within 10 years it will be available in more expensive cars. Already American-made cars are coming into the market with computer-adjusted carbura- tions, emission control, gearing and trouble-shooting. The marriage of on-board computers to automobiles is the next major step in the development of the industry in the United States.

One reason is that this is an area where U.S. car marketers do not trail the Japanese, although there is no question that Japan's auto industry has the capability. In 1982 and 1983 model-year U.S.-made cars, American makers will have completely caught up with foreign makers in the mechanical aspects of fuel saving and other mandated improvements. They hope to use on-board computers to regain the lead in car sales. The ways in which computers and microelectronics can be applied in cars are limited only by designer imagination.

There are some guidelines which sales departments are giving the engineers. Except for highly specialized marke'ts, computer displays on the dash mustn't make the driver feel like a pilot in a cockpit. What the driver. passenger need to know is that they are being protected, not that they are in a space shuttle. With the variety of applications, Detroit's public relations geniuses will have a new way to tout top-of-the-line, now that weight and engine power are no longer promotable.

Sales strategy will be to pack the higher-priced models with electronic features. The "stripped down" model of the future will be the one lacking microcircuits. It has never been enough for Detroit to make the best possible car and sell it on merit. It has always had to sell the dream machine, the car that's as American as apple pie. Computers, in which the U.S.

stills leads the world, make a perfect match with cars, in which America would like to lead the world again. It might even work! Berry's World "The price on these polo shirts is higher because they are VERY exclusive. Notice there is no little symbol on the chest?" In The Past Ten Years Ago Twenty.Years Ago Reese We Must Be Responsible If I had to choose seven words which offered the best hope for turning this nation around, I'd choose Ihese: "I arn responsible for my own life." The physical growth of the welfare state has caused a concurrent growth of a deadly disease endemic buckpassing. the pernicious notion that we can survive in a sort of no-fault state and that responsibility for our welfare rests with someone else Let's suppose I am an auto worker and I'm laid Off. That's bad news.

I don't want to be unemployed. I don't want to have to change my occupation. 1 don't want to move to another part of the country. But, who is responsible for feeding my 1 am. Not the auto industry.

Not the world economy. Not the federal government. So I should do what I have to do to find productive work. In an earlier time, this was so ingrained in people that nobody thought twice of doing it. If the soil went bad.

you moved on; when the gold ran out. you moved on: when the trees were cut. you moved on. When cars replaced horses, you gave up harness-making and blacksmithing and became something else. If our forefayiers had adopted the modern attitude that their welfare was someone else's responsibility, they woiitd still be in Great Britain and Europe and wherever else they left to come to this new land.

I hear complaints about the elderly having a hard time making ends meet, and I'm sympathetic to that, but whose responsibility is it to make provisions for our old age? Ours. It's not the responsibility of the government. It's ours. Every elderly person today was once young and had deca'des-in which to prepare for an event they knew with certainty would come. Take the young man on (he street with no education and job skills.

Whose fault is that? It's his. Every human being has a choice. Every human being in this country is presented with opportunities opportunities for education and opportunities tor learning marketable skills. And it is his responsibility to take advantage of those opportunities. We can't force people to be responsible, but we could and we ought to allow them to suffer the consequences of their own decisions.

Now. of course, there are those among us who are striken by disease or accident or just bad luck, and 1 doubt if there is a single American in this nation who would not willingly share with those people to cushion their misfortune. But sharing and charity are quite different from obligations and demands. No one has the right to demand that another person assume responsibility for his life. No one has the obligation to assume that responsibility; yet this is the very idea that has been fostered on the American people and which too many of us are beginning to accept.

Too many Americans are becoming envious cry-babies. They covet other people's possessions, resent other people's good fortune. These are the human worms necessary for a socialist state. Your standard of living has nothing to do with my standard of Jiving. Whether you have a yacht or a dingy has no effect on whether 1 am earning what I think I should be earning.

Yet. you hear people complain about parties in the White House as if there was some relationship between social affairs at the White House and the standard of living in Opp. Alabama. If government spending needs to be cut, it needs to be cut whether the Reagans drink California wine or tap water. My economic welfare depends on my decisions; not on the dining habits or recreational past- times of David Rockefeller.

If American Telephone and Telegraph records huge profits measured in billions, am I supposed to complain about my $12 a month telephone bill? Not if I have any sense, because I should recognize that profitability of is one of the reasons I have a telephone which is exceptionally reliable and reasonably priced. I am responsible for my own life. We ought to paste those words all over America and put them in every schoolroom. Accepting responsibility for our own lives is a pre-requisite for liberty. No one is free who is dependent on another.

The whole reason for seeking political freedom in the first place was to allow people to accept responsibility for their own destiny. If you don't want to do that, you don't need to be free. There's no point. The only thing freedom gives you is opportunity. The people in the Soviet Union are guaranteed jobs, housing, food, medical care and old age pensions.

They don't have anything to say about the quantity or the quality of those things, but the.v are all guaranteed. The Soviet citizen's only responsibility is to do what he's told. Nicholas Von Hoffman Is The Deficit Enough? The 1908 structure of Dukes Don B. Panton. 809 W.

Miami Memorial Hospital in Peru will soon has been named alternate to. fall as part of a remodeling program Ronald Steen of Zionsville, who has to help meet health needs of the been chosen for admission to the community through 1980 at least. United States Military Academy. He didn't mean to do it. it wasn't his intention but Mr.

Reagan has stumbled "into Keynesianism. so- called after the English economist. Lord John Maynard Keynes. whose memory tortures the reactionary almost-as'painfully as the naked ladies in Hefner's magazine. If the noble lord were alive today he would commend Mr.

Reagan for coming to Congress with a $100 billion deficit in the federal budget. That is what Keynesian economists prescribe when unemployment grows high and the economy turns flabby. A healthy deficit makes especially sense during this period when so many highly paid white collar people are being laid off, even while inflation continues tq up buying power, albeit at' diminishing rates, and the much talked about tax decreases are cariceljed-put by high Social Security payments. The result is that people have less money to spend, therefore there is less demand for goods and fewer jobs for the people who make them. Supply side economics isn't yield up iti cornucopia of prosperity unless money is quietly inserted into wallets o( the multitudes.

If you are a business person why supply, why make and manufacture if you can't see enough people out there the wherewithal to buy? If yau want supply you'd best make sure there is demand. To get people working, we've got to get other people buying, and one of the ways to get money into people's pockets is to have the government, spend more than it collects in taxes. That's the infamous deficit spending for which Democratic Party has been castigated so loudly, although Mr. Ford and Mr. Nixon were rather good at it too.

Now comes Ronald the latest of a seemingly endless line of men who run for office promising a balanced budget, only in his turn, to give up and tell us that receipts and expenses will not even out. When the lines in front of the unemployment shorter there will be time enough to rededicate ourselves to bringing income and outgo into line-. What we pught to be doing now is throwing off this conviction we've saddled ourselves with that deficits equal inflation. They don't. A hundred billion, sounds like a humongously large sum, and it's more than jelly beans, but it is not big compared to some past deficits have not brought on inflation, jf you look at the red ink in the last years of Herbert Hoover's administration, you'll see that as a of either the Federal 'budget or gross national product, President Reagan's deficit is quite It figures out to be about a third of Hoover's.

The Hoover deficit, as members of grandparents' generation will bear witness, did not lead to inflation. Prices collapsed. purchasing power of the dollar grew. It was a paradisical moment for lenders who were being repaid their loans if they were being repaid in dollars that were worth 10, 20 percent or more than they were when the money was originally lent. Despite a massive federal deficit the country was going through a de- not an in-flation.

If nothing else the harrowing experience of the early 30s should demonstrate that there is no one-to- one casualty between deficits and inflation. What occured during the Hoover debacle was that the Federal Reserve Board was diminishing the money supply. Instead of printing too much money the sin which brings inflation down on our heads they were gobbling up dollar bills and throwing them in a furnace. The total money supply was shrinking, thereby driving prices down and the purchasing power of the dollar up. So we can live with the minus $100 billion Mr.

Reagan is writing in the national ledger as long as he keeps the Fed from printing too much money. This the president is doing, but it comes hard to the Fed which prefers small budget deficits. That allows it to print money, foster lower interest rates and be popular. It's for elected officials, however.to be popular. The appointed ones are paid to get dead cats thrown at them.

Many a defunct feline is being tossed at the Fed just now for the tight money that people associate with high interest rates. That's for the board of governors to suffer in as good a humor as they can muster while we ponder whether or not Mr. Reagan's deficit is large enough to pull us out of our current economic funk. Evans and Novak Reagan's Armament Undercut WASHINGTON Quiet talks have started between senior White House staffers and Republican congressional leaders aimed at reducing defense spending below President Reagan's still-secret new budget, a backstairs campaign somewhat similar to the failed effort of senior presidential aides to change Reagan's mind on taxes. Shrouded moves made so far to shake the president's determination included a last-minute Oval Office appeal by budget director David Stockman.

Pentagon exemption from across-the-board budget cuts. he argued, must end. When that failed, the president was persuaded to delete a paragraph in the State of the Union address amplifying his pledge for "a strong national it could be included in a future message, he was told. At work here is the familiar failure syndrome of the Reagan White House. When defeated internally by a stubborn president convinced of his rectitude.

White House aides iourney afield for allies in their campaign to break down the boss's resistance. In their campaign to commit Reagan to tax increases he repeatedly rejected, senior aides led by chief of staff James Baker III leaked premature "decisions" that turned out to be inaccurate (leading The New York Times to report on Jan. 21 that Reagan "has decided" to ask for higher exise taxes The game of decision-by-leak not only embarrassed seasoned, conscientious, reporters; it failed to change Reagan's mind. But the new alliance of White House defense- cutters and congressional Republicans of similar persuasion has a far greater chance to succeed, even though success would come at (he expense of Ronald Reagan. What brings success within reach is the torrid mix of an election-year Congress charged with a new round of domestic cuts in major recession while facing a probable deficit far higher than the $90 billion to be disclosed in Reagan's new budget.

can't cut the budget this year and raise defense spending at the same time." we were told by a Reaganite loyalist who stayed with the president last year on bott 1 budget cuts and higher defense spending. A similar, though somewhat veiled, expression was sent privately to the president in a Dec. 9 letter signed by all 16 freshman Republican senators: the "Reagan class" of 1980. which includes some of the most conservative Reaganites in the Senate. The letter pressed Reagan to deepen his program for general budget-cutting and offered niggardly support for his higher defense spending "only at a arate that can be justified by meeting the most stringent test of serving undeniable national security- needs." The first draft of the letter was much more pointed.

It said that defense spending could not be divorced from limits imposed on the rest of the government. The change was agreed to only to get the signatures of Sens. Steve Symms and Jeremiah Denton, leaders of the pro-defense bloc. Instead of attempting to meet this threat to the defense budget head on. White House aides are manifesting an itch to take advantage of it.

Both Baker and Stockman have privately told Sen. Pete Domenici. hard- driving chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that they agree with the basic budget premise. Domenici believes that the fate of Reagan's drive to cut domestic spending is tied directly to Pentagqn cuts. Senate insiders told us that Stockman has given strong hints to Domenici that the administration will accept the senator's proposal to reduce Reagan's 7 percent increase in defense spending (slightly higher than the current fiscal year) percent.

That would cut only $5.5 billion from the new, $257 billion in 1986 below Reagan's budget projections. Late last August, when Reagan was preparing his second-round budget cuts for Congress, Domenici wanted the White House to approve a $30 billion cut for defense spending, a figure Baker then announced to the press as the agreed target. Reagan disowned the figure arid later settled for a small fraction. It is doubtful to say the least that the president is even dimly awarje that top aides are jiggering with his defense budget. Reagan puts high value on his pledge toward American rearmament, believing it essential to convince both U.S.

allies and the Soviets that the U.S. is on a steady course. Whether a majority in Congress can be found to support domestic cuts and defense hikes is admittedly a big question. But the answer will not be in doubt if senior aides, no matter how honorably motivated and no matter how convinced of their political realism, cut a deal before the battle starts..