The Charlotte News

Friday, April 8, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Isn't This Where We Came In?" bears a pointed and even prophetic title considering its subject, mortgaging the future to 1988.

As it turned out, it was mortgaged even more under the tax-and-spend, trickle-down Republicans (taxing of all but the rich, spending for exorbitant defense, not social welfare) than by any previous Democratic Administration, in those very same 1980's when the New Deal debt, actually long since paid off by the postwar prosperity boom in the country, was to have been retired based on the overly pessimistic projections of 1938--(pessimism, that is, which did not account for the economic optimism, as always, generated by a world war).

And, punctuated by the 1990's reduction of government bureaucracy and waste, the tax-and-spend, laissez-faire Republicans are up to their old tricks again for any old booby who will stay around and listen to this tired old paroxysmal tale, cloaked in the starkest, most business-like rhetoric imaginable--blame it on the Democrats for coddling welfare programs, get the work-a-day, too tired at its end too much to care about facts, on their side emotively, lather up new fears in their minds (let's go to Europe and stir up things by talking about new S.A.L.T. to replace outmoded S.A.L.T., and the need for a new defensive missile strategy at the same time) with blandishments to generate huge new defense expenditures to rub the fat cat constituents' backs, too long ailing with all this eight years of peace and silicone prosperity--and all is well in High Heaven. Back to the Future...

That was August, mind you, 2001.

Isn't this where we came in?

We do Secretary Ickes the justice to believe that he hates, as he cries that he hates, fascism and communism, and we share with him the conviction that all this stuff about the dictatorship tendencies of the President is just so much stuff. "If there were a dictatorship here," declares Honest Harold,

Well and good, and for the zealous preservation of our civil liberties in the face of their usurpation all over the world, thanks. But we still don't recall voting in person or having our elected representatives in Congress vote vicariously for direct Federal competition with private power companies. Regulation, such as the holding company bill, yes; but the misuse of a vast fund, ostensibly for public works and the relief of unemployment, to make outright gifts to municipalities that they might manufacture electric power and sell it at less than an honest cost of production--no.

The chief threat to American democratic institutions today is nothing so foreign as communism, fascism, dictatorship, but that indigenous product, bureaucracy. And Harold Ickes, for all his many admirable traits, is the worst bureaucrat of them all.

Just as we predicted, Robert Rice Reynolds, in his talk last night about the dratted aliens, said the same old things. He commended his bill, which would send political refugees back home to be shot or beaten up daily in concentration camps, and tear families apart. This to us Tar Heels who have virtually no aliens in our midst.

And the chief grounds upon which Robert based his argument were:

1--That these aliens would most of them turn into spies and traitors in case we got into war.

2--That they are mainly responsible for the appalling crime rate in the United States.

As to the first, the World War is conclusive answer. The overwhelming great majority of all aliens here turned out to be willing to shed their blood for the United States against any other country at all.

And as to the second, the greatest concentrations of the aliens in this country are in the following groups of states in this order: Middle Atlantic, East North Central, New England. The smallest concentration is in the South Atlantic group to which we belong. But the Uniform Crime Report of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shows that in 1937 the rates for murder and non-negligent homicide per 100,000 people living in towns of more than 10,000 were these: Middle Atlantic, 2.57; East North Central, 3.64; New England, 1.47! And the South Atlantic? 18.14! Let Robert explain that one!

Whether that may or may not be what he has in mind doesn't appear. But certainly, under the new tax laws adopted by Mayor LaGuardia's New York City administration, the people are going to know very well who pays the bill for relief.

Business is to be soaked as usual; indeed, with the conduit companies kicking in about a quarter of a million dollars over and above all other taxes, and business in general coming through with about two millions in the shape of an extra excise tax.

But the biggest hunk of all--three million smackers--is to come out of the public at large. And here's how: to each package of cigarettes of twenty or fewer will be affixed a revenue stamp costing the purchaser one cent. And on that stamp each time he coughs up the purchaser will read in bold letters the inscription: "N. Y. C. For Relief."

Three separate spending attacks on Recession costing $1,500,000,000 apiece are said to be in the forefront of the Administration's mind. One would be the usual appropriation for emergency unemployment relief, now a fixture for the budget. Another would be the RFC's fund for loans to businesses which were unable to get credit from private agencies. And the third, a somewhat new departure, would be Federal loans to states in cities for public works. These loans would bear no interest and would be repayable over periods as long as 50 years.

And 50 years would take us to 1988. Hence, in a manner of speaking, it is 1988's income that the New Deal is mortgaging to fight 1938's Recession. The money would have to be borrowed to begin with, of course--borrowed on top of the $37,556,588,558.36 the Government owes already, borrowed in addition to the $4,870,451,763.82 the Government has taken in for the first nine months of this fiscal year (see latest Treasury report).

And the worst of it is, the more the New Deal borrows and spends, the more conditions compel it to borrow and spend. Nobody considers a balanced budget remotely possible anymore. Nobody looks for the shots in the arm to be anything than shots in the arm which will require more shots in the arm as soon as their effect has worn off. The New Deal has exhausted its ideas. It is completely out of new tricks. It is time to ring down the curtain on this act and ring it up on another.

The only hope for improving present conditions, restoring employment, affording permanent relief to the people, and bringing the nation back to its former proud position of domestic happiness and the financial, industrial, agricultural and commercial leadership in the world, lies in the drastic change in economic and governmental policies.

***

The paragraph above is taken verbatim from the Democratic platform of 1933 and is aptly descriptive, we believe, of the spirit in which the party took charge. It is more than that--it is descriptive of the manner in which the new administration set about its almost insuperable tasks, with a literal adherence to its written promises that was wonderful to behold.

But the first phase soon gave way to a second phase and a diametrical change in direction, and the second phase gave way to a third phase which, coincidentally, was the second phase all over again, with this difference--that in the meantime an intense opposition had sprung up and the President had lost in his power of leadership. It is this third phase which finds the country deep in a recession which is fully as severe, if not yet of such duration, as the depression which swept the Democrats into authority.

It is time for a fourth phase, which by a second strange coincidence is the first phase all over again. Happily, this would permit the salvaging of every one of the vital New Deal reforms, would entail no abandonment of positions taken and held. The one thing it would require is the admission, tacit or expressed, that fiscal legerdemain and share-the-wealth nostrums are getting us nowhere fast. Neither was envisioned in that admirable Democratic platform of 1932.

European uproars have so absorbed us in the last three weeks that the case of China has been almost forgotten. But with Europe once more marking time while Hitler makes up his mind as to Czechoslovakia and Mussolini grabs Spain, the really big spot news is in the Far East.

For eighteen days now, the Chinese armies in the central provinces have had the Japanese stopped dead in their tracks, have perhaps even made them retreat, and certainly have taken enormous toll in dead and wounded. So confident are the generals of Kai-Shek, indeed, that two of them have demanded to be executed if they do not destroy the Japanese forces in front of them.

It would be rash to risk the guess that the Chinese are going to win this fight. Nevertheless, they are obviously giving an excellent account of themselves, and they have a tremendous incentive to drive them toward victory. For "face" is far more important to continued Japanese success than military force. Let Japan lose this campaign in central China, and even though she still holds the North and Nanking and Shanghai, she is likely to be on her way out.

It would be sardonic if the despised Chinaman, and not the lordly white man of the West, were the first to smash a hole in the fascist front.