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Show III II I llll II I II I 111 III II B IM m . THE AMERICAN WAYl .. . 1 ITT I . it on June 2, 1938, one of our most able Senators, a man noted for his many years of excellent service to his country, a man beloved be-loved and respected by his colleagues col-leagues of both parties and by . the general public, stood on the floor of the United States Senate and declared he was of the opion that only about 20 per cent of the industrial dollar went to workers. work-ers. His name is not really important, import-ant, but if anyone is curious as to the indenty of this Senator, that curiosity can be allayed by looking look-ing on page 10,486 of Volume 83, 1 No. 113 of the Congressional Record, Re-cord, j What really is important and . what made it take on an alarm ing significance, Is that this glaring glar-ing mis-statement was made in the presence of 87 other Senators and that not a single one of them rose to challenge or contradict it, planly indicating a woeful lack of knowledge about that vital subject on the part of the members mem-bers of the nation's senior legislative legis-lative body. Of course, as is all loo often the case, there it just the possibility possib-ility that the other Senators were not listening when one of their number bespoke this pessimistic estimate of labor's participation in what it produces. On the other hand, if they were giving ear, it is evident that our Senior Legislators Legis-lators stand badly in need of education ed-ucation in fundimcntal economics. econom-ics. Government records, then-available then-available to the Senators, showed lhat for the decade prior thereto, about 80 cents of the industrial dollar wentto factory and office workers; 4 cents to the factory and managment executives; and the remaining 16 cents to owners for reserves and dividends. The learned Senator was very wide of the mark in his estimate. There is certainly a vast difference differ-ence between the 20 per cent he stated labor got and the 80 per cent it actually was receiving. If his estimate had been correct, cor-rect, the American worker, in-I in-I siead of averaging 81,200 a year I income, would have been getting only $300 per year which would have reduced the American standard of living to the low levels lev-els of Russia and China. Since that glaring inaccuracy was delivered on the floor of the United States Senate, the workers' work-ers' share of the industrial dollar has gone even higher and is now well over the 90 per cent mark. It is quite evident that the workers' work-ers' share has now almost reach-i reach-i ed a point where any further in-crease in-crease will discourage the investment invest-ment of capital in industry and : business; and that a large in-I in-I crease would put industry in the I red and out of business and the : workers out of jobs. No other nation gives its work-lers work-lers such a large share of what they produce. That is why we have the highest standard of livc-ing livc-ing the world has ever known. The idea of distributing the wealth among the workers is an American concept and is responsible respons-ible for our phenomenal ccomic growth. The policy of American in-dustryhas in-dustryhas been to give the workers work-ers an ever-increasing share of the wealth, thus enabling them to buy more and more of the products they help to produce, In so doing, the market for these products has been so increased that they can be manufactured in vast quantities, which in turn has made, them cheaper, further increasing the workers' purchasing purchas-ing power and creating more jobs. |