58,000,000 Jobs

How many jobs must a free U.S. industry provide in the postwar world if it is to save itself?

Studebaker's able, handsome President Paul G. Hoffman, who is also chairman of industry's Committee for Economic Development, tried valiantly to answer this question at the National Industrial Conference Board session in New York.

Said he: Industry will have to supply "something like 58,000,000" full-time jobs, a jolting 12,000,000 more than in the "good" year of 1940. That means a U.S. output of goods and services of some $145,000,000,000.

But industry must be ready to perform fantastic tasks. Warned Automan Hoffman: "The very toughness of the assignment makes clear the necessity of starting to plan now. When the fighting is over, ex-soldiers on street corners selling apples . . . people starving in one part of the country while food surpluses rot in another would be death rattles for private business. . . ."

As a start for any planning, Hoffman listed: 1) revision of tax laws to restore rewards for risk-taking (those who risk create the jobs); 2) restoration of competition to the "fullest possible extent"; 3) a solution for the special problems of small businesses which have found it "too tough to be born, even tougher to stay alive"; 4) recognition that "those who persist in thinking as isolationists are headed down a blind alley."

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