542 ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

A. You mean the revenue estimates or the budgets?
Q. Well, the budget requests seem to be running high.

A. Yes, I think the budget requests are running about what they
usually do, according to Mr. Slicher and the budget people. The
revenue estimates haven't crystallized to the point where I'm willing
to make any statement on them, and Mr. Goldstein and I had a pre-
liminary conversation just a few days ago about them and agreed to
meet again in December, at which time we hope that the information
would be a little more reliable than it is right now. The problem is
that the new tax, the graduated income tax, is an unknown quantity
particularly when you consider that some people may be over-withhold-
ing, and that what's been paid in may not be entirely an accurate re-
flection of what's going to be due.

Q. How much would you estimate, at this point, that the budget will
increase?

A. I just don't have any way of knowing at this point. It's going to
depend a lot on what we're able to do to hold down the escalating
health costs which were affected by the Federal law. It's going to de-
pend a lot on the educational picture, and I wouldn't want to predict
the overall percentage of increase. We do know it's going to go up.

Q. Did you use this year's budget, of necessity, as an economy budget
or do you feel that the spending will increase in its normal pattern as
it has?

A. Well, I guess every public official likes to think that he's putting
out an economy budget and it's always been a popular pronounce-
ment. But in total realism it's impossible for me to call it an economy
budget when we're talking about programs which are mandated at the
Federal level, and we're talking about innovative new programs such as
the alcoholism problem. We know that the initial expenditures—when
I say initial I mean in the early years or the coming years—are going
to be heavy. Now, I could say that I think they are going to be eco-
nomical measures from the standpoint that if we're able to make a
formidable assault on alcoholism, we're going to cut down expenses
in the area of welfare, aid to dependent children, mental hospitaliza-
tion and these things. But the effects are so subtle, and so difficult to
relate in any fashion that can be relied upon, that the only thing the
public sees at present is escalation in governmental costs.

Q. Don't you feel that economy is the first order of this year's budget?