Higher Prices?

Washington swarmed with lobbyists bent on lifting wartime price controls. In the Senate, they found many a sympathetic ear. As debate on extension of the present OPA law began, two hotly controversial amendments were proposed.

On paper, they seemed reasonable--but far too technical for the public to understand. The first, by Ohio's arch-conservative Robert Alphonso Taft, would guarantee to manufacturers and processors the same dollar margin over costs (i.e., profit) they received in 1941. The second, by Oklahoma's silver-haired Elmer Thomas, would allow processors of farm commodities to profit on virtually every single item instead of just on overall operations, as now prescribed by OPA's pricing policies.

But to Price Boss Chester Bowles the amendments spelled catastrophe. A onetime Manhattan adman, Chet Bowles works daily in front of charts showing that U.S. cost of living in World War II did not rise as sharply as during World War I (see cut). To him, Harry Truman's plea to hold the price line is an injunction. Cried he:

"Enactment of either of the two proposed amendments would mean the end of effective price control and would inevitably result in general inflation. . . . Senator Taft has picked out a profit standard which would raise manufacturers' total profits far above the record levels even of 1944. . . . Senator Thomas' amendment [is] write-your-own-ticket pricing which would be wholly unenforceable."

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