Imperial Valley Press

by Willis Thornton ...

The Smell of Burning Brake Bands

Everybody who drives a car knows the pungent, acrid smell that means burning brake bands. It isn't pleasant, for it usually means a brake dragging or a brake too hastily and vehemently applied.

But right now the country would welcome such an aroma in the national economy. The price scale is getting up speed in its rise, and such brakes as we have to control the inflation spiral must be sharply applied now. Congress is now inspecting the brakes and attempting to furnish new linings and a pedal with a little stronger leverage. None too soon. Even the people who have been feeling that "a little inflation would be a good thing" will sit up and pay attention to Price Administrator Leon Henderson when he says that we stand at the brink of dangerous inflation, and that the cost of living, no matter what is done, is bound to go up.

Unless the most stringent controls are immediately applied, Henderson warns, a really destructive spiral of inflation is almost certain.

Nobody wants that. Perhaps younger readers do not remember it, but our own experience in the World War is still fresh in the minds of those who went through it. They remember and they know that there is no point at all in securing wage increases of 20 per cent if the cost of living in the meantime goes up 30 per cent.

When this sort of thing begins, it is human to blame somebody; somebody else, that is. And when everybody sits around blaming everybody else, the grim part of it is that they are all correct.

All share the blame. Payrolls being at an all-time peak, Henderson is probably right in saying that wages are "the most volatile and dynamic element" in inflation at present. But the farmers also want 110 per cent of parity in the prices for their products. That means that the city worker who has secured a 10 per cent raise finds that wiped out, and more, in the price of the food he buys. The farmer who has secured his 110 per cent of parity price finds that, in turn wiped out by higher prices of manufactured goods he buys. In the rush of this furious mutual tail-chasing, neither ever quite catches the other, while the fellow in the middle with the static income gets it where the chicken gets the ax, as usual. If it goes too far, all go down together in a common ruin.

Here, if ever, is a place for the stern application of a set of the best-lined brakes Congress can devise, together with the best patience we all can muster whenever the brake shoe pinches, as it will. When severe inflation threatens, all are in the same boat and every attempt simply speeds up the ride to all to a common destruction.