MONEY: Shaky Budget Preview

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U.S. budgets are always rather dubious documents, based on tenuous guesstimates of anticipated revenues and expenditures. Even in this uncertain com pany, though, the spending plan for fiscal 1975 that President Nixon will un veil next month will stand out as an exceptionally shaky exercise in pondering the imponderable. The big unknown, of course, is the effect of the energy crisis, which could plunge the U.S. into a recession, slash Government tax revenues, and force big additional outlays for new job programs to ease the impact of unemployment. Whether or not Nixon formally proclaims the figure, the budget could well run a deficit of $15 billion, nearly double the red-ink figure that now looks likely for the current fiscal year.

Complicating the budgetmakers' problem in striking the proper balance between federal income and spending will be an attempt by the Administration to finally define what it means by "full employment." For twelve years, the official numerical definition has been a 4% jobless rate; Nixonian economists have long grumbled that that goal is now unrealistically low, but they have never set a new target figure, and have often said that there should not be one. To ensure that the budget gives just enough boost to the economy, however, they have concluded that they have to pick a number. Officials of the Treasury Department, Office of Management and Budget and Council of Economic Advisers are framing a new goal that will probably be between 4.5% and 4.8%.

That does not necessarily mean that the Government should not try to get job lessness lower; it does mean, in the Administration's view, that trying to do so by manipulating the level of demand in the whole economy would produce more inflation than jobs.

Though the revision may seem a rather lame attempt to explain away the Administration's failure to reduce unemployment below this year's average of 4.9%, many liberal economists agree that some redefinition is needed. Recent unemployment rates have been persistently higher than in the past because of a huge influx of female, nonwhite and teen-age would-be workers, many poorly educated and unskilled, into the labor force. These people have trouble finding jobs even in a boom economy; the best way to help them may be by expanding job training programs and making structural changes in the employment pattern.