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Show by JameS Preston When possible economies in government are mentioned to the average Washington advocate of spending, the usual answer is in the form of a question that is supposed to be a killer. "All right," the spend-without-end theorist says, "just where would you economize? Just what essential essen-tial services of government would you eliminate?" This leaves out of account the fact that nobody has mentioned cutting out entire services. The primary need, actually, is careful care-ful economy in each individual case. Thousands of small econom- ios which, individually, the bureaucrats bur-eaucrats would sneer at could add up to a pretty monumental sum. Here is a case in point: Printing the Congressional Record Re-cord is supposed to cost the taxpayers tax-payers of the nation about $50 a page. Anyone who has read the Record knows that Congressmen frequently use it as a sounding-board sounding-board for their political parties or for their own personal hobbies. Recently someone took the trouble trou-ble to check up on the amount of space used in a single day by members of both parties to air campaign views of one kind or another, an-other, and found that It cost the taxpayers $837.50 in one issue alone. Suppose there have been a hundred issues of the Record this year a conservative estimate: that would mean $83,750 annually. an-nually. It's not a huge amount as political money goes these days, but it would pay a lot of wages and buy a lot of meals! Washington's inside planners may not have been making newspaper news-paper headlines frequently, but they are as busy as termites behind be-hind the scenes. They now are working on a new spend-lend program for twenty BILLION dollars the biggest yet. tax bills pass about mid-year, and apply to that year's income, nobody no-body can plan more than six months ahead. This year there will be about three months to plan what should have been done the previous nine months. Another overlooked factor Is that spending money on tanks and tractors and guns is not productive. product-ive. When the tank is completed, the flow of money stops there. The tank is not designed to produce but to destroy. If the same money were spent on a tractor, that tractor would pull plows and cultivators which would produce farm goods. These goods in turn would feed the hungry hun-gry and provide jobs in factories and stores. That won't be talked about much because it isn't a good spend-lend "national defense" argument. ar-gument. Some folks in Washington won- That is nearly half the present debt of $44 billion. Their idea is that they will borrow bor-row the money from the people and? spend it on the people. They say that you can't go broke borrowing bor-rowing from yourself. These planners say it's just like a family one member borrows from another, but the whole family fam-ily can't go broke. Other economists say they overlook over-look the fact that if a broke mem: ber of the family borrows all the money of his relatives, and then continues to borrow against what his relatives will earn in the future fu-ture the breaking point must some day be reached. But the planners proceed. In the last 10 years they have boosted the public debt from $16 billion to $44 billion. They are now talking talk-ing about taking it to $75 billion. They figure that if they talk about it long enough, they will get the people used to it. Furthermore, the appropriation and authorization of some $15 billion for national defense has met with public approval, because the nation wants to be defended. The new $20 billion will also be "national defense." Meanwhile, the planners gloss over some essential facts. One is that Congress is now putting the finishing touches on its tenth tax bill in the last nine years, and there will be an eleventh next year. This means that since most der whether the 'planners had anything to do with a constitutional constitut-ional amendment to be voted on in Colorado in November. This amendment would, in effect, put a 1 per cent tax on borrowed money. In other words, the man who was forced to borrow to buy a house or for any other purpose would pay a 1 per cent penalty tax for the privilege of being in debt. That sounds like some Washington Wash-ington schemes anyhow. |
