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Show Council Exposed Republican Lack of Economic Program It is becoming more and more obvious that the Republican administration has not nor has it ever had a realistic program pro-gram for building the nation's economy. This was brought into sharp focus recently when the national na-tional Democratic Advisory Council issued a statement on the economic conditions in the country. The statement says in part: Events have now caught up with Republican economic policy. The American people farmers, workers, small business men, those who live on pensions and savings no longer have to be persuaded that something is very wrong with Eisenhower-Nixon Eisenhower-Nixon policies. (Continued on Page 4) for growth, For renewed economic expansion every citizen must have a chance for useful and remunerative employment. His production produc-tion then adds to total output it is growth. There was never a time when such employment was more easily provided than now, or there never was a time when there were so many urgent tasks. Defense needs, aid to our allies and friends abroad, research, re-search, health facilities, highways and other civilian requirements require-ments are all urgent. Beyond these are housing, the renewal and rebuilding of our urban areas, the replanning of metropolitan metro-politan transportation, and a score of other urgent tasks. A resumption of growth would speedily make urgent the expansion expan-sion of our energy and resource base, and it would emphasize the importance of the conservation of renewable and non-newable non-newable materials. These tasks are important for their own sake. To get ahead with them is also the way to insure the resumption of economic expansion and avoid serious economic waste. rVi Council Exposed Republican Lack of Economic Program (Continued from Page 1) What has happened? We are experiencing the most serious drop in employment since the nineteen-thirties. Millions of workers are on a short work week. Farm income is down. So are nearly all of the economic indexes except living costs. This is also a recession that was foreseen. The tight money policy designed to cut down business investment in-vestment and expansion, especially of farmers, home builders, and smaller businessmen was deliberate, premeditated and stubbornly stub-bornly pursued by the Republican Administration. Last fall we warned that "if this policy is continued, it may stabilize living costs by causing unemployment and economic recession. This has happened before. Excessive reliance on tight money has brought depression in the past." We now learn that apparently appar-ently some of the President's own economic advisers had the same fears. The tight money policy did not stabilize the cost of living. After years of talk the Republican administration has yet to come up with a program for protecting the purchasing power of our dollars. It has not even recognized the nature of the recent inflation. With both automobile and steel production down to 60 per cent of capacity, It should now be abundantly clear that this inflation is not due to an excess of demand over supply. Large corporations in concentrated and organized industries in-dustries have been able to raise their prices even when demand is faling and they have substantial amounts of unused capacity. Only a part of these advances can be justified by wage or other cost increases. This particular type of inflation has a two-pronged effect. On the one hand housewives and consumers generally have to pay higher and higher prices; on the other hand workers are laid off in increasing numbers as the corporations cut production pro-duction in order to hold up their prices. Nor has the Administration any program for checking and reversing the downward trend of economic activity. It has contented con-tented itself with saying that recovery is around the corner or, anyway, will come in the third quarter. The President has said that "pauses and some downturns" are inevitable while the economy catches its breath. We last heard this defeatist doctrine from Herbert Hoover. But the Republican failure is more serious. We must do more than avoid depressions and inflation, important as this is. We must also have vigorous expansion. Every year we add three million people to our population. This is the equivalent of the total population of Kentucky. It exceeds the present population of 29 other states. Every year some three quarters of a million men and women are added to the labor force. This is more than total employment on the production lines of the automotive industry. A growing population without growing opportunity means disappointment, idleness, and frustration. During the past few years, our rate of economic growth as a nation has in fact sunk to only about half of what it might be. During the past year or two, it has been a quarter or less of what we could have. Instead of reversing this trend, the Eisenhower-Nixon Eisenhower-Nixon strategy has been to tell us that each year was better than the previous year. And the practice has been to stress those very policies which first repressed the rate of economic growth and then brought on recession. During the past five years we have lost tens of billions of dollars of production that we would have had with proper expansion, and we have had from 6 to 8 million man-years of unnecessary unemployment. We are now wasting productive capabilities which past growth would have given us amounting to some 25 to 35 billion dollars a year, and we are wasting the productive effort of several million men and women who need not be unemployed. Eisenhower and Nixon have no program |