The Waterbury Democrat., 1941-08-07

AAA6AAV SC AAoSA to make defense articles. AS those are the articles most commonly bought on time, one way to stop their production is by preventing their purchase on the installment plan.
 Second, because more people will be making more money in defense industries, they will be wanting more of these durable goods and feeling there are no hard times n sight for few years, they'll be willing to go deeper into debt to buy what they want. To curb this l defense boom demand, the idea is to prevent purchase by the in- stallment plan.
 Third, it would be just too bad to have this defense effort end some sweet day, only to find ali the good people head over heels in debt. It will be bad enough just having the government that way but with all the people that way too, there won't be anybody to pay the governments debts. Hence, to keep the populace solvent, there is this idea to prevent installment buying.
 To get the full significance of what legislation of this kind would do to your normal methods of liv- ing you have to spoon few statis- tics out of the Washington soup. At the end of 1940, the good peo- pie of the land were privately in debt to the tune of $27 billion = $20 billion due in mortgages on their homes, $3 billion due on autos, furniture, charge accounts and such, and g billion due to finance com panies for cash loans.
 YOU OWE $21O
 Getting that down to a per cap- ita basis, it figures approximately that every man, woman and child in the country was in debt $210 -$150 on the house, $40 owed to some retailer and $20 in cash bor- rowings. If your family has the average four persons in 1t, mul- tiply those figures by four and see how average you are by compar- ison.
 You may figure that if they pass law making it illegal for you to go into a store and charge it." you will be able to outsmart them by stopping in at the loan com- pany on your way to shop and bor- rowing the money there, but that's being thought of too. There may be no limitation on activities of lenders at first, but if cash loans start rising too much, there may be an effort to stop such borrow ing by simply having the federal reserve banks stop advancing funds to the personal finance companies, the industrial banking companies, the commercial banks and the cred it unions.
 The domestic distribution com- mitee of the United States Cham Der of Commerce has gone over the subject and issued a report saying that any curtailment of install ment buying is unnecessary. Ac- cording to this report, although re- tail sales reached SAT billion in 1940, only 10 per cent of them were installment sales and only 10 per cent of the 1,650,00 retail establish ments in the country sold on time.
 But in the 165, ,000 merchants who handle installment sales are 35,O00 auto dealers, 17,000 furniture stores, 14,000 home appliance stores, 14,- 900 auto accessory stores, 12yO00 jewelry stores, 5000 hardware stores, 5000 clothing stores, 4O00 depart ment stores and 25,000 miscellan- eouS merchants who are the lead- ing merchandisers, the big adver- tisers, the fellows whose entire business is built up on credit sales. There's no telling what would hap pen to them if they had to go On a cash basis.
 MIGHT BRAKE NEW DEAL
 The basic idea of limiting in- Stallment buying is not new. In- stallment buying has been con- demned as an inflationary in- fluence. but it has been used ex- tensively in New Deal reform to encourage home building, rural identification, home modernization housing and resettlement. If low down payment buying is to be stopped in private business, the government likewise would be forced to revise its policies. So far, no one has come forward with any ideas for denying man his God-given right to hook his watch. Trying to regulate the pawn shops would be just too much.
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