| OCR Text |
Show "v. ILLIONSJgLJJrERs'AND BALONEY; BALL-OUT, BILLIONS BALLOONING BUDGET Following not too far behind publication of a book called "Billions, Blunders and Baloney" comes Sylvia Porter's "Bailout, "Bail-out, Billions, Ballooning Budget" in Monday's Deseret News. The book was an on-the-scenes report of the fallacy and futility and idiocy of the American State Department's efforts ef-forts to win friends and influence nations with American taxpayers' tax-payers' dollars. The Sylvia. Porter column is a prophecy on this year's Administration budget requests, and how they plan to get rid of the dough. . The book didn't seem to do much good. At least we're still blundering away billions and the baloney is getting sliced a lot thicker. And we don't think Sylvia's words will sink in very deep the American taxpayer is so used to playing Santa Claus to the world that he's forgot how to howl. Miss Porter prophecies that we'll spend billions bailing Britain and West Europe out of the economic crisis caused by the Suez Canal episode; build the Aswan Dam after all; spend billions to improve the Suez Canal; industrialize India; and irrigate ir-rigate the Jordan Valley... Our own defense budget will be . upped so high that 90 days ago defense budget-makers would have termed the figure "nonsense." She points out that more than 60 billion dollars has been poured out to other nations in economic and military aid in the 10 years since World War II. The aid will go on, she says, and will increase this year with only part of it showing in the budget. The rest will be in the form of "hidden" aid flowing to other nations via the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Export-Import Bank, etc. And the always hard-hit American taxpayer will go on paying, with only isolated howling. Most of them have either forgotten how to howl, or else the agony of too, too many years of being gouged has dulled the ability to feel the pain and realize real-ize the seriousness of the malignancy. Wonder if our Congressional delegations, who "go along" with administration requests for billions in foreign aid, really think the taxpayer approves of their acquiescence. Wonder if it wouldn't be a major shock to see the results if one of our national pollsters put a straightforward question to the voters, such as : "Do you approve of paying billions in taxes to be. given away to foreign nations?" We'll add a phophecy to the 1957 budget prophecy of Miss Porter: When the voters finally DO wake up, and tell their Congressmen exactly what they think about all the billions, blunders, baloney and ballooning budgets - and the bailouts -there'll be a helluva lot of new faces in Washington. And our personal opinion is there ain't no time like the present. Let's get back to the truly sound American philosophy of "Billions for defense, but not one more cent for bail-outs and appeasement." We can build H-bombs cheaper than we can try to buy the wishy-washy world away from Russia and Russia understands H-bombs. |
