POLICY: Carter's Stand: Democratic Orthodoxy

In at least one all-important area, the accusation of fuzziness that has dogged Jimmy Carter throughout his 18-month campaign cannot fairly be sustained. In a stream of speeches, position papers and interviews, the Democratic front runner has expounded his ideas on all of the major, and some of the minor, questions of economic policy: jobs, prices, taxes, energy, even regulation of the trucking industry. No one who pays attention can miss his general drift: Carter is a mainstream Democrat, who offers primarily an updated version of the economic policies of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. His keynote: a major effort to reduce unemployment, principally by Government stimulation of the private economy.

Oddly, Carter's economic views have never received the attention they deserve−mostly, no doubt, because until very recently the campaign spotlight focused on delegate counts. Also, Carter has voiced his ideas in a characteristically bland tone: no purple rhetoric, no sweeping simplifications, no attempt to jam complex proposals into catchy headlines. That low-key approach so far has defused possible controversy even over some striking proposals. For example, Carter advocates taxing capital gains, such as profits on the sale of stock or real estate, as heavily as income from wages and salaries (capital gains now are usually taxed at half the ordinary-income rate). That idea created an uproar when George McGovern voiced it in 1972, but this time around, coming from Carter, it has gone almost unnoticed.

Now that he seemingly has the nomination locked up, Carter's economic program undoubtedly will come in for closer scrutiny, and he will be under pressure to amplify it. But there is little chance that the program will change substantially. With minor exceptions, Carter has been quite consistent in his economic pronouncements, and he pledges that as President he would follow steady, predictable policies, avoiding the sudden lurches−from a free market to wage-price controls and back again−of the Republican years. His major views:

JOBS. Carter's overriding objective is to cut the unemployment rate, now 7.3%, to 4.5% (3% for "adults") as rapidly as possible. To do so, he would rely principally on those most orthodox tools of Democratic policy: higher Government spending, temporarily larger budget deficits and an effort to persuade the Federal Reserve Board to increase the nation's money supply more rapidly. He also proposes a variety of Government inducements to private industry to step up hiring, including more money for on-the-job training programs and research assistance to develop promising technologies such as solar energy. Another Carter recommendation: an intriguing plan under which a company that would ordinarily lay off, say, 10% of its employees would instead keep all of them on the payroll for a shorter week−and the Government would share the extra cost.