GEM: (8) Could those problems be fixed by some other approach?

Ms. Abzug: Well, we haven't had real enlightened thinking in government for a long time. These problems have to be fixed by having governments and people realize that there are human priorities that have to be dealt with. I remember when they decided that [human priorities] going to have a bigger role in the determination of the budget in the Congress. We thought we should first sit down and have a set of priorities and how to fix them. In other words, analyze what was going on in the country and, say, we have a serious problem of alcoholism or drugs or a serious problem of unemployment, or certain industries need quick help-- We did that pretty well. We gave nice subsidies to Chrysler and things like that. But what we had in mind was to decide what the priorities were in the country and to develop the budget around that. But of course that was considered a very radical idea, although it wasn't.

So I think we have to be more prepared to plan. Of course under the present conditions with the majority of the members of Congress believing that government doesn't have any such role, we can only get into worse trouble. We are in worse trouble already. Take a million people and tell them, "You get off welfare. Get jobs," and so on when there are no jobs for them to get-- This can be very serious. We may have kids roaming the streets a year form now if we don't do something about real child care and real training for jobs for people on welfare. That certainly is the wrong approach. There's a lot of wealth in this country and in the world, and that wealth not only remains in the hands of a few people but is there increasingly so. I don't care what your political philosophy is, what party you belong to, this can't go on forever. The gap between rich and poor has grown enormously.

I mean there's over a billion people who hunger every day in the world. If we had a 5% cut in the military budget, it would be a banquet for the world's poor--just a 5% cut. This is the post-cold-war era, and thinking has not changed sufficiently as to how to create a world that is significantly at peace. The poor and middle income people are not getting the just dividends of the end of the cold war or the harvest of what could happen in this country and in others all over the world. So I think that you've got to have the right people to do it. We don't, at the moment, in either party--Democrat or Republican. The Democrats have moved more and more to the center, and the Republicans have moved more and more to the right. None of that is improving the lives of most people. That's regrettable.

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