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Show S Income Disparities "Real income" of wage and 'salary 'sal-ary earners continues to drop, while farmers' income still is rising, it has been revealed by a monthly Investors In-vestors Syndicate survey of purchasing purchas-ing power. "Real income" is the relationship re-lationship of revenue to the cost of living. Wage and salary earners now have only about 96 cents of buying power for each dollar a year ago, while farmers have approximately $1.09. At the same time, the biggest cause of the wage earners' problem is the sharp rise in the price of food. The average family now pays more than $1.31 for the same amount of food that a dollar bought a year ago. It also pays $1.06 for each dollar dol-lar on rent, $1.18 to the 1946 dollar for clothing and $1.23 for miscellaneous miscellane-ous expenses. "This continued divergence between be-tween farm and city buying power," the survey pointed out, "indicates that a serious unbalance may threaten the stability of our economy. econ-omy. A close balance is essential." RECOGNITION: Playing Safe Not as a gesture of arjriy&i but iifiiz'r us "a' means ti keeping m-formed m-formed of internal developments did the United States grant full diplomatic diplo-matic recognition to the Communist-dominated government of Bulgaria. Bul-garia. Robert A. Lovett, U. S. acting secretary of state, said that the action ac-tion meant neither that this country approved nor condoned "certain recent re-cent actions of the Bulgarian government." gov-ernment." Although he did not say so, Lovett obviously referred to Bulgaria's execution ex-ecution of Nikola Petkov, leader of the opposition to the Communists. Previously, recognition of the Bulgarian Bul-garian government was withheld on the grounds that the pro-Soviet regime re-gime had been elected unfairly, but now the U. S. felt that it was more important to have an embassy in the country to protect American interests in-terests there. LITTLE HOPE: Less Coal There is little or no hope springing spring-ing in the collective breast of official offi-cial Washington that the coal shortage short-age this winter can be averted. Current estimates place coal production pro-duction as running several million tons a month behind exports and domestic consumption, principally because of the coal car shortage. This has resulted in winter stockpiles stock-piles depreciating instead of growing, grow-ing, as they normally would. It was hoped at first that some relief re-lief would come when winter weather weath-er stops or curtails road-building and construction, thus permitting diversion di-version of sand and gravel cars to the coal fields. However, a railroad spokesman said the diversion of such cars would do nothing but off set a normal 10 per cent drop i' railroad efficiency in winter. |