The Administration: A Team Player for the Council

As a tank gunner in World War II, Beryl Sprinkel came through the Battle of the Bulge unscathed by keeping his head down and blasting away. In his new post as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, to which he was appointed last week, he may have to hold his fire. Sprinkel’s predecessor, Martin Feldstein, resigned last summer after openly saying that taxes might have to be raised to reduce the budget deficit. That brashness so angered the antitax forces in the White House that the Administration cut Feldstein out of high-level strategy sessions.

Sprinkel, 61, is expected to be less controversial. After spending 29 years as an economist at Chicago’s Harris Bank, he joined the Administration in 1981 as Treasury Under Secretary for Monetary Affairs and earned a reputation for loyally supporting White House policy. Sprinkel is a monetarist who thinks that the money supply is the main force behind economic growth and inflation. He has often chided the Federal Reserve Board for letting the money supply grow erratically, thus producing sharp swings in the economy. Sprinkel also believes that Government interference in business should be kept to a minimum, a philosophy that makes him a kindred spirit with President Reagan.