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Show f fP JLOOKNG 'Ml: AHEAD by GEORGE S. BENSON I'' - 'M?S PrtsiictHitdit CclUn, I Scarey. Arkansas interest will be costing taxpayers taxpay-ers at least 7V2 billion dollars eh year. Billion Dollar Interest The future consequences of this constantly rising debt are many and grave indeed. But merely an examination of the cost in interest on today's federal fed-eral debt should be sufficient t) arouse the most indifferent taxpayer. tax-payer. But how much is five billion, seven hundred and twenty - five million dollars? How can we measure such a huge interest payment? Let's try. The first 14 presidents of the United States served a total of 76 years and the last of these, Abraham Lincoln, spent more than three billion dollars during dur-ing the Civil Dar. Yet, if every penny in taxes collected from the .people and the businesses of the United States in those 76 years were taken to Washington Wash-ington today, the total WOULD NOT BE SUFFICIENT to pay the INTEREST in the national debt fcSr the single year 1950. Painful Facts If the 45 million Americans who pay federal income taxes were forced to pay $125 each tomorrow, the resulting fund would not be sufficient to pay the interest on the debt for 1950. Five and three-quarters billion dollars may seem to be small potatoes to some of our big government spenders, but money is wealth, and wealth is created only through the efforts of men and machines (outside government), and to amass that amount of wealth would require the total pay of a force of 10,000 laborers working 75,000 work days, or 320 years, at $1 an hour. The interest on the federal debt has become a real burden to American taxpayers. It is saipping our creativeness and our production. If the overn-ment overn-ment could have kept the amount paid in interest on the debt in 1950, the money would have paid the full expense of all social welfare, health and security benefits, all of the assistance as-sistance programs and price support programs for agriculture agricul-ture (including potatoes), and the entire general expenses of the federal government which were $1,223,000,000. Permitting Permit-ting the debt to rise year after year is not only dangerous to our future economic security but is, to a painful degree, a needless waste of pur energy and resources. Five and three-quarter three-quarter billions a year is a terrible ter-rible premium to pay to escape the reality of the moment. While necessary war expenditures expend-itures must be made, there is still much room for economizing. THE COST OF BORROWING If you ask a dirt farmer in Utah what's the worst thing about being in debt he'll usually say, "Getting out of debt, of course." If you put the same' question to the new G)I home owner, he'll probably say, "The interest. It's killing me!" Those are two bad tlvngs about private debt. A rising public debt has other bad features: fea-tures: It creates inflation, stimulates stim-ulates boom and bust, courts national economic breakdown, smothers enterprise, and dries up human freedom. Some of these latter effects of public debt are a little slower slow-er coming into clear vision, but there's nothing vague about the tax bill imposed upon all of us to pay the interest on our present pres-ent towering federal debt. If every federal government office of-fice in Washington and all those in the 48 states and our possessions were to be closed down . tight tomorrow, abolishing abolish-ing every federal job and stopping stop-ping every dime of federal expenditures, ex-penditures, the individual and all the businesses and industries indus-tries of America would still have to cough up as much in taxes every year from now until eternity as the total federal fed-eral tax bill paid in 1939 or 1940, just to take care of the interest on the federal debt! Debt Going Up The federal debt is approximately approxi-mately 258 billion dollars. That is about $7,000 for every family in America, and about $4,500 for every employed person. In the fiscal year which ended June 30, 1950, the taxpayers paid $5,725,000,000 in interest on the debt. And not a penny was applied to reduce the principal. prin-cipal. In 18 of the past 20 years, the debt has risen; the government has spent all tax icvenue and then bororwed to spend more, increasing the debt in each of these years. The additional military expenditures ex-penditures totaling 10 billioh dollars and upwards annually and the other proposed state-of-war outlays may be expected to boost the operating deficit to about 10 billion dollars a year in spite of the stiff increase in taxes unless domestic - civilian spending is curtailed. On the schedule the administration now seems to have adopted, the federal fed-eral debt barring big-scale war will be aproximately 300 billion dollars by 1955, and the |