Did Mr. Roosevelt Say It?

Strange news came out of Washington over the United Press wires. The President, U.P. declared, has become a great admirer of the policies of the late Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, and is making plans to pay off this war's debt just as Mellon started paying off the debt for World War I.

Mr. Mellon's mistake, the President is said to have told national leaders recently, was in removing the wartime tax load too soon, thus releasing a flood of surplus purchasing power which Mr. Roosevelt believes contributed to the 1929 stockmarket crash.

So, the President is reported to have said, heavy taxes should be continued long enough to pay off the national debt. He wants to go on collecting $20,000,000,000 a year in taxes, spend $10,000,000,000 to run the government ($1,300,000,000 more than in 1938) and use the balance for the debt.

The budget-balancing Wall Street Journal said it hoped U.P.'s informant had heard the President aright. But such henny-penny, Morgenthau economics must have been more than annoying to Professor Alvin Hansen, to Mordecai Ezekiel, to Lauchlin Currie, and to a lot of other braintrusters who are planning to prevent any post-war depression by bigger and better deficits. It may have cheered the National Association of Manufacturers, who have not heard the President promise to balance the budget for a long time, but it must have been a shock to those businessmen who still realize that rapid retirement of billions of dollars of debt would be deflationary. Has not every great war been followed by a depression? It must also have been discouraging to those who realize that such punitive taxes on business as are now being levied are almost sure to prevent the expansion of peacetime business activity needed for full employment after the war.

But, of course, it is still possible that Mr. Roosevelt will not be in the White House during the next reconstruction era.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.