United Automobile Worker

Balanced Budget and Business

One cannot pick up a paper nowadays without reading an utterance by some politician or business expert to the effect that business and finance is straining every effort to plunge forward in a burst of prosperity but that they are frustrated on every hand by the fact that the federal budget is not balanced and that corporations are required to contribute too much to the United States Treasury through taxes.

We are not champions of unbalanced budgets but we are not impressed by the argument that balancing the budget would put business back on its feet. Neither are we inclined to believe that business and finance are smarter when it comes to curing depressions than they are in preventing them. As a matter of fact it wasn't until Roosevelt started unbalancing the budget in a big way that any turnover in business to speak of occurred. The relation between an artificial stimulation of business through government expenditures and the recent period of industrial recovery can be understood, but it is difficult to grasp any causal relation between cutting off this stimulation (balancing the budget) and giving the "go sign" to private finance to surge ahead.

The fact is that the trimming away of government expenditures has only served to expose the feeble and emaciated character of private capital which has so far shown no sign of being able to get along without the artificial respiration furnished out of the public funds.

The fact that the Roosevelt administration appears to have fallen for the phoney arguments of the financiers and industrialists indicates the amount of pressure they have been using and the fundamental uncertainty of the administration as to what to do in the face of another economic recession.

Reducing the capital gains tax or balancing the budget would not add a nickel to the purchasing power of the public. No fundamental upward trend of business can be obtained unless the steps taken to achieve this bring with them an increase to the purchasing power of the common people. If private capital is really interested in turning the tide of business upward let it launch a housing program commensurate with the needs of the population. No other single measure would be as fruitful of genuine recovery and business activity and no other measure would help labor as much.