The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1939-03-02
The Gust Spend" Period

80 lar from Delng treasured by the
recent statement of the President that
business need not fear the imposition
of new taxes nor the increase of old
ones this year, there seems every rea-
son why business should be alarmed
thereby.
Because, if that isn't taking the
straight road to complete and calam-
itous national insolvency then nothing
makes sense and all the things which
businessmen have been saying for the
past six years are ridiculous. Here is
a country which in that period has
increased it's debt twenty billions of
dollars and for nine successive years
has been running steadily increasing
deficits. Beginning in 1882, the Presi-
dent himself gravely warned that the
end of this could only be disaster and
insisted upon the vital necessity of
balancing the budget.
###
While the budget has gotten farther
out Of balance every year, until 1889
he regularly stressed the necessity for
balance, consistently promised to bal
ance, always maintained that the eff
fort to balance was vital. In his mes
sage to Congress last January, for the
first time Mr.. Roosevelt abandoned
this position-even the pretense of it.
Instead he accepted completely the
weird theory of Mr.. Mariner Eccles
that there is no need to bother about
the budget; that the budget will ball
-ance itself automatically as soon as
the national income reaches a certain
figure; that the way to reach that fig
ure is to keep spending more Federal
money; that the one fatal thing now
would be retrenchment.
$50
In brief, the President, urging ex-
penditures this year which, with his
armament program, will exceed ten
billions of dollars and leave a deficit
of more than three billions, first tells
Congress that economy at this time
would be a mistake, dares it to re-
duce appropriations and angrily
throws back at it another request for
the $150,OO0,0O0 Topped off the relief
appropriation. Then he tells business
men he contemplates no increased
taxes, though his earnest young I'm
der Secretary of the Treasury, Mr..
Hanes, has been laboring day and
night for weeks on a Treasury bill
which increases taxes on estates and
individuals more than a little.
***
Also, Senator Pat Harrison, chair
man of the Finance Committee, has
been wrestling with the problem of
Increasing governmental revenues
through new taxation. In fact, until
the President spoke, neither in the
Treasury nor in the Congress had it
occurred to anyone to doubt that more
and heavier taxes were inevitable this
year and that still more and heavier
would be inevitable in the years to
follow. Until he spoke there seemed no
escape from the fact that soon or late
the bill has to be paid. There are only
two ways-or so it has been assumed
by which the Government can ever
recover it's financial equilibrium-one
is by reducing expenditures, the other
by increasing revenues. This year the
President has taken a stand against
both.
And his friends think that when he
says there will be no new taxes bust
nessmen should feel treasured" You
might as well expect man in the
back seat of a fast-moving downhill
automobile to feel treasured when the
driver after first throwing away the
steering wheel then busts the brakes.
All this boils down to the basic fact
that the only policy the President has
left today is spending policy, the
most appalling feature of which is
that his sole method of obtaining mon
ey to spend is to borrow against def
cts, a course which he himself vigo-
rously condemned in 1882.
The spenders are in the saddle at
The White House-and will continue to
be. They "already have plans for a
big new public works program and
their whole philosophy is now con-
densed into two words: Gust Spend"
If, in face of this, businessmen can
feel treasured by either the staged
stuff of Mr.. Hopkins or the Presiden-
tial assurance that there are to be no
new taxes, they have lost all sense OF
reality. If there is a surer way to
hurry US toward the most ruinous
form of imitation than to ban econ
,omy, avoid new taxation and continue
to borrow, no one has suggested it.
*#A