Business: Who Runs Policy?

Nobody, really—except the man in the Oval Office

During its ten months in office, the Carter Administration has put together an economic policymaking apparatus that often seems to be running a Washington replay of the classic Abbott and Costello baseball routine "Who's on first?" As the President and his aides have zigged and zagged—proposing and then abandoning a $50 tax rebate, touting a major tax-reform program, then delaying it and shifting the emphasis to tax cuts—businessmen, brokers and economic forecasters have complained that the Administration's economic voice is muffled and mystifying.

Such criticism is...