New Year

P: In Washington a 30-year-old married woman lost her job with the Interstate Commerce Commission. She went home in despair, turned on the gas, died. P: At Dayton a Spanish War veteran who had been drawing $60 per month was removed from the pension rolls, ushered out of the National Military Home. At midnight he called on Col. Vernon Roberts, the Home's chief medical officer, shot him dead. P: In Washington an aged clerk was turned out of the Senate. He took poison, cut his throat. P: In Philadelphia an ex-Army captain wrote to President Roosevelt: "Suicide is the only way I can provide for those dependent on me, by making available to them the miserable balance due me on my adjusted compensation certificate [$275] . . . Why have you not had the honesty to conscript the massed and hoarded money of the country and put it to work?" He killed himself with gas. Amid such circumstances the U. S. Government last week closed its 1933 ledger. It began a new fiscal year in which President Roosevelt was determined to break the Treasury jinx of a fantastically unbalanced budget even if he also broke hearts & homes. A balanced budget, he thought, will break fewer hearts than have been broken by the unbalanced budget of the last three years. Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House last March under a solemn campaign pledge to cut Government costs 25%, and to make ordinary Treasury receipts equal ordinary expenditures. Herbert Hoover handed him over the 1933 budget--a pale sick thing two-thirds gone and beyond salvation. But beginning July 1 President Roosevelt was master in his own financial household. Discharged employes might commit suicide but the President was prepared to economize as even Calvin Coolidge never dared to do. On July 1 more than 500,000 of the 1,418,853 pensioners were abruptly dropped from the rolls. These were veterans of the Spanish and World Wars who were being paid for ailments, real or imaginary, acquired in peacetime. President Roosevelt would weed out thousands more before Oct. 31 to bring pension economy up to $350,000,000. Of the 440,000 men & women who serve the Federal Government (outside the Army & Navy), about 20,000 were scheduled for discharge or indefinite furlough. Big droppings: Prohibition Bureau, 1,300: Coast Guard, 1,600; Navy yards. 4,700: Customs, 640; Commerce Department. 500; Public Health Service, 500; Interstate Commerce Commission, 600; Government Printing Office, 400; Internal Revenue. 580. Air mail contracts were being sliced 25%. 5,000 route miles eliminated.* The Army was ready to let out 5,000 civilian arsenal employes. Charlotte, Denver, Des Moines, El Paso, Galveston, Indianapolis. Milwaukee, Mobile, Salt Lake City and Wilmington lost Department of Commerce district trade offices. Behind all this general shakedown in Government service lay these cold facts: P: The 1933 budget deficit was $1,786,000,000 (receipts: $2,080,000,000; expenditures: $3,866,000,000). The 1932 deficit: $2,885,000,000. The 1931 deficit: $903,000,000. P: President Roosevelt proposes to reduce "ordinary" 1934 expenses to about $2,600,000,000 at which point he hopes they will meet rising revenues and thus balance the normal budget. P: This reduction will include: $350,000,000 from pensions; $100,000,600 from job and salary cuts; $450,000,000 from transfers of building projects to the capital budget (see below); $400,000,000 from the regular payment into the Public Debt Sinking Fund. P: His "capital" budget, to be raised by special borrowing, will include: $3,300,000,000 for public works; $500,000,000 for direct jobless relief, $400,000,000 to start the bank deposit guarantee fund. Domestic Allotment farm relief, home and farm mortgage relief, etc. Special taxes have been segregated to service this special budget. P: During fiscal 1933 the Public Debt increased $3,051,000,000 to $22,539,000,000 --high point since 1922. The incease in the Public Debt was caused by the deficit plus $1,258,000,000 advanced by the Treasury to Reconstruction Finance Corp. When Franklin Roosevelt promised in the campaign to cut costs 25% Republicans hooted him as a jester. Last week there was not a single Federal employe who did not realize that the President was and is in deadly earnest.

*But air business zoomed.

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