Great Falls daily tribune., 1919-12-05
THE TRAGIC CASE OF THE FIXED SALARY

fering poor, gentle reader, save some OF 1t tor
the men and women who must live on fixed IN
comes these days. They divide themselves into
at least three general classes: Those who live on
interest money or dividends from investments; (;
those who hold official positions where the COM
pensation is fixed by statute; those who sell
their labor to public or private enterprises but
have no organization back of them to make de-
mands in their behalf backed by threats of
strike. Perhaps the first class needs our SYM
pathy most and gets it least. 1t is also in the
most hopeless condition, because can see no
practical or possible way of alleviating its dis
tress short of charity, and it is composed OF
sort of people who as rule would accept any
sort of suffering before they would either ask or
accept charity if the public were willing to ex-
tend it to them When we talk of class that
lives on interest money from investments or
dividends from corporations. the public has VI
sion Of individuals clothed IN fine raiment llv-
ing in splendid homes with retinue of servants,
and riding in imported motor cars. There are
such people in this class. But no one thinks OF
the widow or old persons who are incapable OF
labor, if they ever were capable of it, and who
live on very small incomes from securities that
either came to them by will or which represent
earlier savings. These incomes often were only
bare living before the war, incomes of thou
sand dollars year or less. That sort OF income
has shrunk instead of expanded with the increas-
ing cost of living, especially if it was derived
from corporation stock dividends. Such corpo-
rations have been loaded by heavy taxes on their
earnings during the war and in many cases their
dividends have been materially lessened and in
some cases disappeared entirely. Take such cor
porations as public service corporations like rail-
roads, traction, light and power and heat corpo-
ratons and study the distribution of their stocks
and bonds, and you will find that a surprisingly
large amount of it is held in small investors
hands. We have read that the Pennsylvania rail-
road system is owned by about $4,000 different
stockholders The stock of the Boston and Maine
railroad and the New Haven railroad is held all
over New England in small amounts, and neither
of the latter have paid any dividends for six
years When the writer Of this article was
young man it was favorite investment for ad-
ministrators settling up estates for women and
children to invest the proceeds of the estate IN
these two git-edge securities each of which had
record of more than forty years of regular stock
dividends of six per cent or better. Sometimes
not the entire fortune of small capitalists was in
vested in stocks of this kind but portion was,
and the failure of dividends added to the increas
ing cost of living has driven many family in
New England to despair Such investments on
the part of comparatively poor people are not so
common in the west as they are in the east, but
we have such cases with us also where income
has been shrinking while living costs have been
soaring.
We are however, more familiar with the sec
ond class. A good many incomes of public SER
wants are fixed by statute. This applies to depu-
ties and even to stenographers in some measure
as well as to the chief public servants. At the
same time in other departments of the public
service the compensation is more flexible and
can be fixed by the head of the department or
some board, or some official body, while it takes
an act of the legislature to change the compen-
sation Of the other class of public servants This
has led to much unfairness and dissatisfaction.
One public servant sees another who renders no
greater service paid increasing wages while he
or she can get not increased compensation be-
cause the statute fixes it at sum adequate
enough ten or twenty years ago and never
changed since. Our higher public officials are
nearly all in this boat. 1t is fact we'll known to
all who have had experience that most men have
claims against their earnings very much in pro-
portion to the size of their income, and public
official who got $4,000 year ten years ago finds
that its purchasing power is now reduced one
half, and he is confronted with almost as tragic
a financial situation as the man who had 81. 500
and finds that reduced one-half in purchasing
power.