This Day In 1970's History: Monday February 3, 1975
- President Ford forecast that the nation's unemployment rate would be about 8 percent of the labor force for the rest of this year and next year as he submitted a budget of $349.4 billion to Congress. The new budget will have the largest peacetime deficit in history, $51.9 billion for the fiscal year starting July 1. The deficit will be much bigger if, as expected, Congress rejects most of an unpopular $17 billion package of spending cuts President Ford has proposed. [New York Times]
- "It must mean that he's going to be a two-year president," said Representative Sam Gibbons, Democrat of Florida. His remark reflected the shock and indignation professed by leading Democrats in Congress that President Ford's budget anticipated high unemployment for the rest of the decade. Senator Hubert Humphrey, chairman of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, declared in a Senate speech that it was "unbelievable" that the President could propose record federal deficits and "not put America back to work." [New York Times]
- Businessmen, traditional foes of deficit spending, seemed to be accepting with resignation the $51.9 billion deficit projected in President Ford's budget for fiscal 1976, but some expressed support. "My conservatism causes me to blink several times," Joseph McFarland, chairman of General Mills, Inc., said, "but I don't see what else you can do." [New York Times]
- The House Ways and Means Committee approved an $8.4 billion reduction in taxes on 1975 income for persons with low and moderate incomes. The tax relief this year would involve an increase in the minimum standard deduction and a special tax credit for the working poor and would be in addition to a rebate of a portion of 1974 income taxes that the committee is expected to adopt later this week. [New York Times]
- The General Motors Corporation reported that its profits for the final quarter of 1974 fell 2 percent from the same period a year earlier, and that its 1974 earnings were down 60 percent. The company, no longer the world's largest industrial corporation -- its earnings are now exceeded by those of the Exxon Corporation and other oil companies -- said its fourth-quarter earnings totaled $508 million, or $1.76 a share, compared with $517 million, or $1.80 a share, a year earlier. Its dividend this year was reduced to 60 cents a share to conserve capital, the chairman said. [New York Times]
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