Does this country have more will than wallet? That's what President Bush told us in his inaugural address last year, and his policies have been consistent with that assertion. But Herbert Stein, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Nixon and Ford, doesn't agree. In a recent article in Fortune magazine (Feb. 12, 1990), Stein says the President has things backwards and that we lack vision, not money. In fact, though Stein is too gentlemanly to use the word, he suggests that we are being selfish as well as shortsighted in our unwillingness to spend money on things that are important to us as a society and a nation.

Stein reminds us of America's major accomplishments over the past 60 years: reforming the economy (mainly through the New Deal); winning the war against fascism; and continuing efforts (which now seen to have been successful) to hold back communism. But he notes that achieving them required flexibility, adapting our "policies and institutions to changing problems and to changing views of the national goals." And winning often required "substantial sacrifice" - by which Stein means, in part at least, financial sacrifice.

Have we lost this flexibility and willingness to sacrifice - and the vision to see where they are needed? Stein does not say so. But he does point to a number of "critical problems" that call for our ingenuity and our money - and that aren't getting much of either: "improving education, fighting crime, reducing poverty, increasing investment in America by Americans, and helping Third World and Eastern European countries." Here's how Stein describes some of these problems:

♦ "We have in the U.S. a number of people who constitute an 'underclass.' They are not only poor. They have high rates of illegitimacy, illiteracy, crime, drug addiction, hostility, and alienation, and little attachment to the legitimate work force. The number is small by some standards, perhaps not 1 % of the population, but large enough to create, a danger for life in our cities, and even more important an insult to the conscience of a nation as rich as ours. We should be trying to reduce that number radically.

♦ "Aside from these poorest of the poor, we also have a fraction of the population that is poor enough to be the subject of national concern, even though they do not suffer from the social pathologies of the underclass. They may be about 10% of the population, half as many as there were 30 years ago. The worrisome face is that the number does not seem to have declined during the 1980s. We should try to do better.

♦ "We have a costly and frightening crime and drug problem, even apart from that connected with the underclass. We ought to be able to make our cities as safe as they were a generation ago.

♦ "The condition of education in America is bad, it not atrocious. This has become a cause for national concern mainly because of its implications for productivity ... That is all to the good. But improving education is mainly about our society's quality of life. We should not be satisfied to be a country that is getting richer faster while the people are getting more and more ignorant.

♦ "The rate of national saving is low, lower than in most of the periods for which we have statistics and lower than in many other countries. This is where the budget deficit comes in. It offsets private savings, making them unavailable for private investment. As a result, investment in the U.S. by Americans is low relative to the national income. We should be aiming for a budget surplus.

♦ "A large part of the world's population lives in conditions of abject poverty, and we have to ask ourselves whether we care, now that we no longer see the Red Menace behind every palm tree. I think we should. It matters to us morally, and probably economically and politically as well ... [ And] we have not exhausted the possibility of doing good by combining money with high-level attention to the improvement of economic and political institutions.

♦ "We now face a new international economic problem: to assist and encourage the transition of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to democracy and a market economy. This is a delicate task. The economic difficulties the people have been suffering are primary impetus for the changes that are now occurring. But the process of change is also painful, and the benefits may be long delayed ... We should provide the kind of assistance that will make the transition less painful. .. Surely the goal is worth the devotion of resources and attention."

Stein does not offer plans for dealing with these problems, but he does believe we can do something about them. And he talks about where the money will come from. We are a country where, Stein says, "private consumption by people who are not poor ... absorbs 60 to 65% of GNP." And considering the tasks that face us, it's not too much to expect well-to-do Americans to consume less -- and pay more in taxes.

Stein is one of a growing number of conservatives who don't flinch at the idea of throwing money at our problems: Money may not be enough, Stein says, but it is "often critical." There are worse sins than spending money - and raising taxes to get it. The biggest is ignoring the problems that demand our attention as a society and a nation.