The Economy Is Out of Joint
every official calendar in Washington js Feb. 5. On that day the Bureau of Labor Statistics is due to announce the unemployment figure for the first month of the new year.</br></br>The figures for January as they are assembled will be as closely guarded as a top-secret military operation. So much turns on the trend in 1971. But whether the percentage of the labor force out of work is 6, the level for December, or higher, as many now expect it will be, is academic. The number of persons out of work and seeking employment will be $6lMmlliwM'lrat Traditional money is nowhere in sight in the budget of either the city or the state.	,</br></br>This is to confront another Nixon pledge^revenqe sharing with the states. Given the squeeze on the federal budget, with rising defense costs, it is most unlikely that Mr. Nixon c^n share out anything like the amounts urged by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York and other state executives contemplating empty treasuries and diminishing tax returns.</br></br>The economy is seriously out of joint, and the approach of the Nixon administration thus far is to deal only with the shadows cast by the deep-seated causes of the dislocation. The shadow play is revealing of what is too little and certainly too late in the administration approach.</br></br>When he announced in his "conversation" with the television interlocutors that he would ask for no new taxes, the President shut the door on meaningful remedies for inflation on the one hand and the plight of the bankrupt states and cities on the other. A tentative trial balloon was sent up for a value-added tax on manufactured goods; in effect, a sales tax. It would have taken courage to propose such a lax and real grit to try to push it through a balky Congress with Democratic majorities conditioned against sueh a tax or, for that matter, any new taxes.