The Nome Nugget

BUGS IN THE BUDGET

Did you know that income of the federal government for the next fiscal year will be nine times, maybe ten times, what is was in the boom period of 1929? It will be at least seven times the receipts the federal government had in 1939.

Weak nation it would be, indeed that could not balance a peacetime budget with the receipt side of the ledger at enormous peacetime highs.

Just to balance the budget during boom times, however, is not enough. We must retire and reduce taxes. Looking at another angle, the federal government wants to spend more than four times as much as it did in any year of the Thirties, when deficit spending was in the habit-forming stage. Has it now become fashionable for our government to spend all it can get? Have we forgotten that the more we spend the more we shall have to tax?

Pet Projects

If we cannot, under favorable conditions of high employment and prosperous trade, get hold of ourselves long enough to retire our national debt and cut our taxes, at what future time do we expect to do so? Is our budgeting so out of hand that Congress cannot gain control over it? Or is the public thus unmindful of the trouble we're in for under a tax load required by the spending of $37,500,000,000 annually?

Both the President and the Congress have given evidence of honest desire to keep the expenditure side of the budget down. But the pressures that are applied from every direction call for spending more money. As a people, we shall have to exert great moral fortitude at this time if we expect an about-face in a spending philosophy grown almost traditional. We need not complain to the government for being spendthrift, if at home we insist upon being spendthrift about our pet projects.

Economy begins first at home.

Examine Everything

Although the war has been over nearly two years, your government wishes to spend more in the next fiscal year alone than was spent during the whole of World War I. Of course, this is a dangerous era, and no one wants to hamstring our national defenses. The whole nation wants the occupation program to succeed. But more efficiency and the least possible waste of manpower and money should be the order of the day.

As late as November the War and Navy departments were still employing more than a million civilians. Spending in every department, military or non-military, should be studied carefully. Everyone knows it is easier to keep on spending government money than to retrench. This is just as true of our national defense.

Despite warnings of what may happen, Congress will do well to examine these expenditures.

Embarrass Russia?

Soviet Russia is not likely to be changed in her course by the outcome of our budget. Fact that Russia's whole national income is very little more than our proposed national budget ought to embarrass nobody but Russia. And the fact that Russia plans to spend more than our country for military services ought to be embarrassing, in these times of peace, to Russia.

However, large expenditures for the sake of national defense may be necessary until the peace is sure. But we need not conclude that the habit of heavy spending is to be our full and complete offering to the dove of peace.

Trimming down expenses is not an easy task for Congress. Snail's progress will be made unless the people make themselves heard. A big and wasteful budget now, carrying with it a tax penalty upon the enterprise of our people, could do much to start us downhill toward the kind of economy Russia has. Most Americans, I believe would rather be allowed to spend their own money than have the government spend it for them.