$2,500 a Year

In the Department of Agriculture Dr. Mordecai Joseph Brill Ezekiel stands for pure intellect. Mild mannered, younger looking than his 36 years, he sits in a large office and thinks. In his mind, apt in higher mathematics, are formulated many of the more abstract ideas found in the speeches of Henry Agard Wallace, for Dr. Ezekiel is Economic Adviser to the Secretary of Agriculture. From this mind came last week a project which should make Dr. Francis Everett ("$200 per month") Townsend look to his reputation as an innovator of social security. Not only did Dr. Ezekiel propose a monthly income $8.33 higher than did Dr. Townsend, but he proposed it as the minimum income, not for oldsters alone but for every family in the U. S.

The Ezekiel proposal, published in book form with the title $2,500 a Year* gave little comfort to Townsendites. As a theorist Dr. Ezekiel can think circles around Dr. Townsend, and he devoted but three pages to a systematic demolition of his rival's ideology. On sounder economic ground he reared his own plans. He proposed no guaranteed bounty for idle pensioners but a better ordered economic society in which even the poorest could earn a living some 60% better than the average U. S. citizen.

The Means. To accomplish this Dr. Ezekiel saw that planning would be necessary. Boards would have to be set up in each industry to see how much it could produce. These figures would have to be adjusted to the public demand for each industry's goods. Wages would have to be adjusted up and prices down so that the number of dollars in the public's pockets would equal the value of all goods produced. That such a national blueprint of abundance could be drafted and carried out by voluntary agreement of industry, Dr. Ezekiel doubted. That it could be done even if the Government promised to buy up all surplus goods which industry could not sell, he also doubted. He thought his plan possible if the Government set up yardstick factories in every industry to pace private business with competition -- possible but politically impractical.

Best means, he concluded, would be to set up a great Industrial Adjustment Board to make contracts with corporations as AAA once did with farmers. These contracts would specify how much each plant should produce, how many workers they should employ, how high wages should be. what prices should be charged. For fulfilling these contracts each business would receive benefits (like AAA benefits) paid for by production taxes (like processing taxes).

The End. Although some of Dr. Ezekiel's best economic thinking was given to the formulation of AAA's crop restriction plans, restriction to his mind is but a stopgap remedy. Share-the-wealth plans are less than stopgaps to him, for he calculated that if all the income of U. S. citizens had been divided equally among all workers, employed and unemployed, each one would have had a wage of but $85 a month in 1934. To level up instead of leveling down men's incomes became his theoretical task. Basing his findings on studies by the Brookings Institution, he estimated that, if all the factories in the U. S. ran full blast, they could come within reasonable distance of producing enough goods to raise the standard of living of the poorest U. S. families to the equivalent of $2,500 a year. Like virtually every other trained economist. Dr. Ezekiel, therefore, came to the simple conclusion that the only road to the abundant life is to get U. S. industry to produce abundantly. He foresaw that there would be many difficulties in working out his great blueprint, but the benefits, he thought, would be great. From the profits of mass production stockholders could have reasonable profits while, in general, wages were being raised and prices reduced. Estimating that in two years of recovery industrial production has increased 10% a year, he concluded that under an Industrial Adjustment Act production might be raised 30% a year for several years in succession, with the underprivileged man getting most of the benefits.

As a postscript to his introduction the Department of Agriculture's professional thinker wrote: "The Supreme Court's decision on the AAA processing taxes . . . casts doubt on the constitutionality of one of my major proposals. . . . This book is primarily concerned with what is economically feasible; if that aspect... be sound, lawyers and statesmen may eventually find a way."

*Harcourt, Brace & Co. ($2.50).

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