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Show FACTS BEHIND THE PRESIDENT'S PRESI-DENT'S ECONOMY PROGRAM. "When the federal government closed its books for the fiscal year 1932, the American people were shocked to learn that total revenues from income taxes individual and corporate combined did not quite cover all the costs of the veterans' administration services for the twelve months just ended. Incredible as it seemed, the figures were indisputable. Income tax collections for the year, as officially reported by the secretary of the treasury, were $1,057,335,853, while the combined disbursements for veterans' pensions, hospitalization, disability allowances, construction, bonus payments, and administrative expenses came to the neat sum of $1,004,268,906. "If we may assume that existing laws will not be further 'liberalized' to use the word of pension lobbyists lobby-ists in Washington the grand total of all outlays for World War veterans veter-ans from November, 1918, to the end cf 19-19, will come to the magnificent figure of $35,000,000,000. Such a regiment regi-ment of ciphers defies the imagination. imagina-tion. "Let us, therefore, try to visualize it in a way that will convey to our minds just how much money that , really is. Picture a house costing 10,000. Very well; the sum would provide 3,500,000 of them. Spaced on fifty-foot lots, they would line a street 33,143 miles long; or, to put it another an-other way, that much money Would build eleven solid rows of such houses between New York and San Francisco, Fran-cisco, without allowance for street intersections. in-tersections. More than one-sixth of this imaginary Bonus Boulevard is already completed. "The job was done chiefly by the ex-service guild, a high-powered minority min-ority gToup which at its maximum membership in 1927 numbered considerably con-siderably less than 1 per cent of the population. What is more, this group represented a minority of the veterans themselves, for it has never included a3 many as one-fourth of the total army and navy enlistments between April 6, 1917, and November 11, 1918." From "The Veteran Racket," by Lawrence Sullivan, in the April Atlantic Monthly. |