The Week

■ The bureaucrats can’t wait to get the new loot. Mr. Hud, Under Secretary of HYDE, is reported to have told some pet troughers that Mr. Nixon’s spending cuts in social programs were a “disastrous mistake” soon to be corrected. If spending cuts are a disaster, we need Armageddon.

■ The House has passed a minimum-wage bill that would raise the pay of most non-farm workers to $2.20 an hour next year, and extend that minimum to domestic and farm workers by 1975-76. This is largely a ritualistic blessing for an accomplished fact: The 1971- 72 average hourly wage for female janitors, porters, and cleaners in 22 metropolitan areas was $2.27; the January 1972 average wage of California farm workers was $2.38. But in communities where living costs are low, and the employer often doesn’t earn much more than the employee, some jobs will disappear. Memphis secretaries, who average $2.91 an hour (as opposed to Detroit secretaries, who average $4.43), will simply stay home rather than pay $2.20 an hour for the domestic help that frees them to work, and teenagers will go on welfare when unskilled jobs disappear under the pressure of the new legal minimum.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

■ The bureaucrats can’t wait to get the new loot. Mr. Hud, Under Secretary of HYDE, is reported to have told some pet troughers that Mr. Nixon’s spending cuts in social programs were a “disastrous mistake” soon to be corrected. If spending cuts are a disaster, we need Armageddon.

■ The House has passed a minimum-wage bill that would raise the pay of most non-farm workers to $2.20 an hour next year, and extend that minimum to domestic and farm workers by 1975-76. This is largely a ritualistic blessing for an accomplished fact: The 1971- 72 average hourly wage for female janitors, porters, and cleaners in 22 metropolitan areas was $2.27; the January 1972 average wage of California farm workers was $2.38. But in communities where living costs are low, and the employer often doesn’t earn much more than the employee, some jobs will disappear. Memphis secretaries, who average $2.91 an hour (as opposed to Detroit secretaries, who average $4.43), will simply stay home rather than pay $2.20 an hour for the domestic help that frees them to work, and teenagers will go on welfare when unskilled jobs disappear under the pressure of the new legal minimum.