Show cut spending or raise taxes eccles warning Wa rnino 0 to country roosevelt Is working to get more men to work by EARL GODWIN ASHINGTON A daniel washington W came to judgment and no mistake when marriner eccles chairman of the federal reserve board warned the country that safe borrowing was at an end unless we want to have diluted money money that looks like a hundred cents to the dollar but in reality would be only about forty cents or something like that roosevelt has been telling congress the same thing oft off and on now for more than two years and roosevelt is consistent he tells the spending power which is congress one dollar more than the budget and have to raise taxes congress goes ahead gaily and spends a dollar more several hundred million dollars more and goes home and leaves henry gen thau jr flat is is secretary of the treasury ry and to spend the money congress bids him spend in fact forces him to spend by acts of congress henry must borrow money eccles is closer to the sort of money you and I 1 have than gen thau who sits on the big cash drawer filled with the governments cash As chairman of the reserve board eccles has the same sort of job respecting the ebb and flow of credit and money that an engineer has at the throttle of a great engine he has the job of seeing to it that the financial channels of industry are filled with enough money and enough credit and that no congestion or scarcity occurs and he knows about the quality of money he knows that too much government credit is like a fellow who is carrying around a pocket full of his neighbors 1 I 0 U s to have a few of them is OK but if he exchanges his whole weeks wages for these slips of paper he cant get far at the corner grocery eccles looks at the budget and sees see s a couple of billions ticked off the there r e for federal relief next year he tells the world that he want the budget balanced at the expense of the poor folks who would have no job were it not for the government tern ment relief jobs and that il if the business world wants wanti to keep money solid and undiluted it must pay for this next years relief in hard cash raised from extra taxes or else money will not be worth as much as it ought to be the alternative is a drastic reduction in government expenses this is up to congress president roosevelt has been holding down relief expenditures as much as possible because he senses the same thing that eccles warns about roosevelt has been working day and night to get more men to work iris his stroke of statecraft in the steel business preventing a strike and helping to add a year to the steel payrolls aids in cutting down unemployment industry knows it must make more work tor for more employees else it will have to be taxed more for future relief all hands are agreed on it but there are serious difficulties in the way of executing this plan 0 0 there is a great aggregation of city officials and organized workers radical politicians and small time leaders who are beating the bushes to impress congress with the nieces necessity ity of keeping a huge army at work on government planned and govern government me nt paid for jobs this is is now a very solidly built element in the social fabric of the nation it thrives largely in the industrial cities and is headed by no less a character than mayor fiorella la guardia of the city of new york la guardia is a liberal almost a radical and he has his eye on the biggest political jobs in the land his recent outburst against chancellor hitler which provoked a wordy deluge from german newspapers seems part and parcel of his political propaganda la guardias voters are arc largely of the racial stock opposed to hitler therefore when la guardia takes a crack at hitler he is in the class with the picturesque william hale thompson former mayor of chicago who campaigned on a promise to poke king george in the snoot la guardia has thousands of adults in new york who have been supported for two or three years on projects paid for by the federal government like the same element in other towns of size this element is now solidly organized it looks to the government for support roosevelt knowing that the depression is over and feeling there should be enough to go around to nearly everyone has steadily refused to increase federal relief funds refused to OK increases in individual relief payments in spite of terrific pressure and mass movements organized marches on washington etc the president is seriously at work trying to make the budget balance and get the government off its emergency hysteria and back to businesslike business like administration everywhere but in the government are thousands of protes signals in tho the relief business who aloe are making considerable headway with their plea that we will always have the jobless with us and that federal relief or works progress administration as it is office officially ally called will become a permanent fl fixture x this will not occur under roosevelt unless congress runs away with the idea but it comes back to the warning by marriner eccles if you keep on with relief as it is now have to increase taxes all around A timely suggestion 0 0 despite the fact that the supreme court row overshadows washington official life like a dark cloud there has been an outburst of conversation in both major parties about the sums spent for election campaigns national presidential campaigns which cost the republicans at least eight million dollars and the democratic national committee at least three and a half millions congress has before it the suggestion of the campaign investigating committee headed by senator lonergan of connecticut to finance elections out of federal funds say a million apiece to the big parties that will not happen but it shows how far this business of tossing money away in campaigns has gone political campaigning is as much of an american sport as baseball and I 1 presume that it would be just as democratic to try to finance baseball with federal funds as it would be to take the zip out of national politics by making it a federal function but it seems to me common sense ought to suggest a bit of retrenchment trench ment on the part of the leaders of these parties whose topmost organizations are rapidly becoming professional organizations for the mere perpetuation of jobs the republicans have employed chairman hamilton at a year with a fairly expensive staff of experts and helpers chairman farley of the democratic national committee can accept no fee as long as he is postmaster general but nothing stops the republicans from paying their leader however it all looks entirely too professional to me it is an attempt on both sides to propagandize the american people to the point of extinction and to get them aroused to a state of frenzy on purely political matters the great costs of a presidential campaign are salaries and wages for workers huge rentals for temporary office space in expensive new york and chicago hotels radio printing advertising 0 and travel these are bona fide costs there is little or no graft but they do everything in the most extravagant and least effective way and generally pay the highest known prices when you think of the fact that these two great propagandizing izing machines are working more or less day and night all the year round the election of a president seems to me to lose much of its patriotic character and take on the guise of a professional athletic contest however the way americans like it and keep it that way for a time general hugh johnson who headed during most of its hectic career always maintained to me that agriculture was benefited by the blue eagle to the extent of a forty per cent increase in the purchasing power of the employees affected by the various codes of fair wages that sounds like an exaggeration ge ration but there can be no doubt that gave jobs to men and women who were out of work until the blue eagle spread its wings this fact has been rammed home again to congress in the final report of the doings of the old blue eagle and from what I 1 can hear with my ear to the ground in the capitol I 1 should say that congress would like to restore some of the better features of but leave out that loud ballyhoo which made its collapse so ridiculous when you go over the acres of figures left by you come to the conclusion that the wage increases were not so tremendous per capita and that all in all the best thing the old blue eagle did was to restore confidence and bring smiles in that dark era of apprehension and panic if we were not so hysterical a people we would have gone at slowly but the show off complex was always foremost in hugh johnson and he tried to take in all the territory between here and the rio grande the country just stand it I 1 think though that if we c can a n ever have a quiet national mom moment ent and quit the everlasting yammering hammering yam mering about this and that we could arrive at industrial peace and added employment by just the sort of agreements in the larger industries we had under the codes we could also do away with a tremendous lot of complex federal labor supervision per vision there is one organization here now which could handle it the federal trade commission I 1 think something may be done ere long to restore some of the best blue eagle codes without vit hout the indescribable ballyhoo of if the hugh johnson era C western newspaper union |