'Affirmative information and thought regarding our progress as a nation' - 'The Nation's Business' statement of purpose - Editorial

Nation's Business, Sept, 1992

Eighty years ago, a presidential commission proposed that the chaotic arrangement then passing for a federal budget process be transformed into a centralized, efficient system.

The result, said President William Howard Taft in endorsing the recommendation, would be "a clear-cut, concise, understandable statement" of federal finances.

Taft was quoted in the first issue of The Nation's Business, a newspaper that had been launched by the newly formed Chamber of Commerce of the United States to "set forth periodically affirmative information and thought regarding our progress as a nation." The date of that issue: Sept. 2, 1912.

Taft had played the key role in the creation of the U.S. Chamber when he cited the need for a single entity through which government could deal with American business at the national level.

Government finance was a key concern of the new organization and its publication. The Nation's Business tracked the Taft budget recommendation over the ensuing years.

The budget-reform plan was still a major subject in November 1915, when the publication was converted from a newspaper to a magazine (the photo shows the first issue in each format; "The" was dropped from the title in 1925). An article in that 1915 issue suggested that the budget proposal would permit "a business-like comparison" of overall revenues and expenditures. That would be achieved by substituting a comprehensive budget plan submitted to Congress by the president for the practice under which each federal agency dealt directly with its related congressional committee.

(It was also held that the proposed approach would "lead to real public understanding of the functions of the federal government," but prospects for achieving that goal obviously receded substantially since 1915.)

The budget policy proposed in 1912 was finally adopted in 1922. We were still around more than 50 years later to report on the adoption of yet another budget-reform plan. It was, ironically, debated in much the same terms as those used the 1912-22 consideration of the presidential budget plan--the need to centralize the consideration of individual appropriations bills and relate the total to available revenues.

And the subject of efficiency and economy in government remains one of our major areas of coverage as we observe our 80th anniversary. We continue to monitor and report as government officials struggle with what appears to be an unending challenge of taming the federal budget.

But much has obviously changed in those 80 years. Fifteen presidents have occupied the White House over the history of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Nation's Business.

The 1912 budget that produced Taft's concern was $690 million; the equivalent sum in today's dollars runs the federal government for about three days.

Two World Wars and many regional conflicts, the rise and fall of communism, and vast economic, social, and cultural changes are among the other developments since 1912.

But some basics endure. A statement of purpose in the first issue of this publication declared:

"The nation's business is to learn the extent of our resources and to understand the interests of our population, without whose activities resources have no value.

"The nation's business is to regard the use of our resources as better than either waste or disuse and therefore to move for conservation that shall safeguard the future while serving the present.

"The nation's business is to believe that all who render service are entitled to reward and to implant the element of hope and courage in every human being who . . .is doing his duty well.

"The nation's business is to safeguard from exploitation all who come from foreign lands to throw in their lot with us and to impart immediately to their children the sense of actual inheritance in all the deeds and growth and successes that have been ours since we first breathed the breath of life as a nation.

"The nation's business is to place before each American child such educational opportunities as can prepare it for the battle of life.

"The nation's business is to work for unity of purpose in a variety of tasks; to seek to produce one spirit of patriotism ... and to look forward to more cohesiveness and riper judgment in the years that yet stretch before a nation so young."

Eighty years later, this mission is still a sound one.