Doctor's Dilemma

Bruised and battered, the Administration's price-control bill lay where it fell last week, in the dreary chambers of the House Banking & Currency Committee, but the prospect appeared that another simpler, stronger, more effective bill might come out to take its place.

Buried in the Banking & Currency Committee's files is a bill, introduced by Tennessee's bright, young (33) Representative Albert Arnold Gore. The Gore bill provides for a ceiling on wages as well as on prices and rents. It limits farm products to the price they fetched in the week ending Oct. 12, if not less than parity. It fixes a penalty of $5,000 and a year in jail (for both the buyer and the seller) for violation of the price code.

When handsome Albert Gore called at the White House, conferred with the President, a rumor spread that the Administration will send Gore's clean-cut price bill into the ring in place of the punch-drunk bill the committee had given such a beating.

And a cruel beating it had taken. It is hardly recognizable as the bill which the President recommended last July. Besides knocking out most of its powers to control prices, the committee had allowed the potent farm bloc to insert a wildly inflationary clause which Administration experts said might well bring on a rise of 20% in food costs. As for wage control, the Administration did not ask nor the committee grant any ceiling on wages.

Even the Administration had turned against the bill. Leon Henderson condemned it. From the White House came word that, if Congress passed anything remotely resembling the bill in its present form, the President would veto it.

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, financial doctor to the Administration, was worried by the growth of public purchasing power accompanied by a dearth of things to buy (see p. 87). One of his keenest Treasury advisers, Dr. Carl Shoup of Columbia University, told him that U.S. citizens will have anywhere from $5,000,000,000 to $8,000,000,000 more money in their pockets next year, and fewer things to spend it on. The Office of Production Management now figures that the national income of the U.S. in 1942 will top $105,000,000,000.

In January, President Roosevelt will ask Congress to appropriate some $37 billion for fiscal 1943 (a rise of nearly $13 billion over 1942's budget). Thirty billion of this fabulous sum is for defense. Raising the money will be Mr. Morgenthau's problem. The Treasury is in the midst of a campaign to sell Defense Bonds to labor unions and employes' organizations on a voluntary "salary allotment" plan. If that scheme fails, the U.S.

may resort to compulsory savings, now in force in Britain. Meanwhile, the Government must have some kind of price control, to keep the cost of defense from soaring so high that Mr. Morgenthau cannot reach it at all.

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