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13. Kennedy was seriously concerned about these boasts, though his worries
were reduced somewhat when Walter Heller pointed out that if the US
boosted its growth rate to 4.5 percent the USSR could not catch up
until the year 2,010, even given a very high sustained growth rate in
the USSR. This is discussed in Hobart Rowen, The Free Enterprisers -
Kennedy, Johnson, and the Business Establishment (New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1964), p. 162. For an updated general discussion of
Soviet growth and the likelihood of the USSR overtaking the US in real
GNP, a good place to start is Paul Samuelson's classic textbook,
Economics, Tenth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 877-884.
The besc guess today is that it ;s possible that the USSR might match
US GNP at some point after the year 2000, but it will be long indeed
before it can hope to match the US in per-capita GNP. Moreover, &ince
less-Caeveloped ecnnomies tend to be able to sustain higher growth
rates than those which are more developed, it is entirely possible
that as the Soviet economy develops its growth rate will become
slower, in which case the gap between the US and the USSR economies
might narrow at an increasingly slow rate, if at all.
14. During the campaign, for example, Nixon charged that the Democrats
were soft on inflation and condemned "the concept of artificial growth
forced by massive new federal spending and loose money policies,"
Sundqt,.ist, supra note 3, p. 33. See slso: Rowen, supra note 10,
which on p. 19 ,iuotes Eisenhower as saying, in his 1961 budget
address, "If.. .we deliberately run the government by credit cards,
improvidently spending today at the expense of tomorrow, we will break
faith with the Americcn people and their children."; and Walter Heller,
New Dimensions of Political Economy (Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard
University P"ess, 1966), which on p. 30 quotes Seymour Harris as
saying that Kennedy at first seemed "alergic to modern economics."
15. The various books from which information about Kennedy's program was
drawn include:
Sorenson, supra note 9.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Caiibridge,
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965).
Massacnusetts:
Sundquist, supra note 3.
Hodgson, supra note 3.
p" .
Stevens, supra note 7.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973).
4.
4-33
,