The Waterbury Democrat., 1938-01-26
. BEHIND THE SCENESl WASHINGTON Ley RODNEY DUTCHER-1
 Democrat Washington
 Correspondent
There Won't Be Much of Q Howl from Busi- ness If the Budget Isn't Balanced :. Thot WPA Mirage Gathers Substance.

Washington, Jan. 26-One of the rareSt birds to be found in recent White House conferences has been the big business man who believes that this is the time to balance the budget. Equally scarce, however, is the big business man who cares to make public admission of this "heresy."
 Some of the most important fig ureS in big business heartily favor a substantial intelligent spending program, holding that the most im- portant objective is to boost 1a tion- al income. Bigger national income means bigger profits, better wages, more employment, more federal revenue.
 That's at least large part of
 the common ground on which
 the TausSig Tugwell Berle
 brain trust" group operating
 in New York, was able to cor-
 ral Capitalists Owen Young and
 Thomas Lamont and Labor
 Leaders John Lewis and Philip
 Murray into cOngenial confer
 ence with Roosevelt at the
 White House.
 It is now being assumed rather freely that budgeJ-balancing sen timent in the country is confined chiefly to farmers and oLArr fru- gal middle class Americans. Budge7 balancing was conspicu- ously absent from the 12 point White House agenda of the 5C-odd business leaders on the Business Advisory Council.
 The obvious implication is that bigger expenditures for relief, armament and new federal housing program will be greeted by few business howls. The na- tlonal advisory council proposed by Roosevelt after the Young Lamont Lewis conference would plan with the President on such questions as whether a pig gov- ernment home-buIding program was advisable.
 A Concrete WPA Mirage
 Talk of an additional appropria- ton of up to $500,000,000 for WPA for this fiscal year seems less and less like mirage. WPA figures not previously made public show that S857 100000 had been allocated to states up to December 31, and that only $540,000,000 was left available. with a terrific demand for more WPA jobs expected in early Feb ruary.
 The bulk of WPA funds was
 spent, it will be seen, in months
 when the need was less than it
 now is and will continue to be.
 WPA rolls have been expanded
 to cover 1,9OO,000 heads of fam
 lilies, whereas WPA officials esti- mate the figure should go to B. 5OO,OOO to meet the need caused
 by new unemployment.
 With existing funds the rolls would have to be cut at least to 1,5O0,c0o by April if those funds were to last until July. By late spring hundreds of thousands of those temporarily tided over by unemployment compensation ben efits will be stranded again.
 Systems Don't Dove-Tail
 The extent of inequalities aris- ing from the effort to dove tail the relief policy with the so- cial security system are becoming all too obvious.
 Persons who become 65 years old and are knocked off WPA rolls to exist on old age assistance pay ments usually then receive much less than they had been paid by WPA. And WPA workers in the g states which have unemploy- ment compensation systems, re- moved from the rolls because they're entitled to such compen- sation, find themselves on the average much worse off than workers in states having no such systems, but who are kept on WPA rolls at full WPA pay. Copyright 1888, NEA Service, Inc )