March 4, 1981

Six weeks after President Reagan's inauguration, a variety of strikingly different and strongly held views continue to mark an economic team in which, by all accounts, David A. Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, remains the central figure. By contrast, in a departure from past practice and from expectations, the Treasury Secretary, Donald T. Regan, has played only a modest role in shaping policy, and he has disappointed even his supporters in his performance as economic spokesman. That reading is shared by Reagan Administration officials and other Washington figures of various economic persuasions - though few, if any, are yet willing to criticize the Treasury Secretary publicly. In a series of interviews, officials credited Mr. Stockman and Murray L. Weidenbaum, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, with enforcing restraint by insisting on a credible economic plan and resisting more radical proposals sought by sub-Cabinet groups of ''supply-siders,'' who stress tax reduction and expectations, or of ''monetarists,'' who want slower money growth.

The Democratic chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, threw his support today behind a Republican move to commit the committee and Congress to an early effective date for tax relief for business. Representative Barber B. Conable Jr., the ranking Republican on Ways and Means, had proposed as an effective date Jan. 1, 1981 or possibly Feb. 18, the day on which President Reagan outlined his tax and budget proposals in a speech to Congress. Mr. Rostenkowski's willingness to cooperate with Mr. Conable was seen as politically significant because the Ways and Means chairman is understood to be interested in forging a consensus with the Republicans on a bipartisan bill. The chairman's assent seemed to make it certain that the depreciation provision would be retroactive, probably to Jan. 1.

NEW YORKERS buy an average of 6.5 million chickens a week, so it's no wonder that chicken companies compete for customers here with the intensity of promoters of designer jeans. Forty-five percent of the New York market is estimated to prefer brand-name chickens: Competition among Perdue, Cookin' Good and Paramount involves millions of dollars, and New Yorkers have been subjected to a barrage of advertisements in subways, on radio and television and in newspapers. So intense are the ''chicken wars'' that Frank Perdue, the largest seller of premium-priced poultry in the New York area, was charged recently in a Justice Department civil suit with threatening to deny distributors his product if they continued to handle poultry produced by his competitors.

''President Reagan says the one thing we're not talking about is going back to discrimination.

The Reagan Administration plans to ask Congress tomorrow for increases of $33.8 billion in military spending, including nearly $1 billion more for the Rapid Deployment Force and operations in the Indian Ocean, military officials said today. Among the requests are proposals to extend the airfield runways at a United States base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to accommodate B-52 bombers, to dredge the commercial port of Mombasa in Kenya and to improve the military port at Berbera in Somalia. The Administration's requests will include $7.4 billion more than what was included in the Carter Administration's budget for the current fiscal year, raising spending to more than $178 billion. If approved by Congress, the new proposal would also provide an increase of $26.4 billion for the fiscal year 1982, which begins in October.