would mean that the average wage earner would now have on hand war savings in the amount of $7,200, would shortly receive a tax refund of $1,200 from the U.S. Treasury, and in case of reduced earnings or no earnings during the next year or two, could call on the Treasury for additional payments up to $9,600. His total protection for the transition would add up to $18,000.

Instead of such a sum, each wage earner has on the average only about $300 backlog of savings. This includes the great majority who have nothing, as well as those who are lucky enough to have saved a $1,000 or more. Even if the full $25 a week of unemployment compensation urged by President Truman and the labor movement should be paid, for the full 26-week period suggested, the total amount would be only $650. This would not support a family adequately for a half

year.

I mention these matters of neglect and discrimination to show that certain people in and out of Congress are so shortsighted as to oppose purchasing power for workers. Why, I do not know, since the success of businessmen depends on their having a good market for their products.

WHO WANTS UNEMPLOYMENT?

Some of these same people have been raising objections to the full employment bill and the related legislation. I should like to be quite direct about this: Who does not want full employment? I have noticed in the financial and some daily newspapers an undertone of satisfaction that there will be masses of unemployed people again. Who wants to see a big float of unemployment, and why do they want it?

I take this occasion to put the question directly to every Member of Congress: Do you want to see unemployment of Americans? I am not satisfied to listen in reply to legalistic doubletalk. I am not interested in a sterile discussion about isolated phrases and whether the right to a job and a good income is an introduction of tyranny.

Here is a situation with respect to our economic welfare and the prosperity of our people which reminds me of a well-known statement of nearly 20 centuries ago: "He that is not for me, is against me." One is either for a full employment program with responsibility in the National Government, or he is for unemployment. This basic truth cannot be hidden in verbiage.

Can we look into the mind of a man who wants unemployment? What can the motive be? In this connection I am reminded of a remark attributed to Insull:

The surest guarantee of a contented working force is a long line at the employment office window.

President Truman's radio report to the people on the Potsdam Conference included a pertinent sentence:

The thing we have learned now, and should never forget, is this: That a society of self-governing men is more powerful, more enduring, more creative than any other kind of society, however disciplined, however centralized.

Self-government-that is, democracy-extends into the employment relationship.

All of this economic struggle we are now going through is part of a lesson we are learning that the common people are not primarily hewers of wood and drawers of water to accumulate wealth for others. In our technological society people are primarily consumers—and in order to consume they must have income. Consumption must be provided for in order to keep production and employment at the maximum. The long line we need to encourage must stand, not at the employment office windows but at the cash registers of the Nation, ringing up sales to keep orders flowing back to the factories and mines and mills.

ECONOMIC BLOOD CLOT

To date, Congress in its tax legislation and profit concern, has been driving the postwar economy toward a depression. The huge sums in the control of the wealthy can only clot in the circulation system of our economy. In contrast, there is a virile pumping of the blood of spending power through the system when the mass of wage earners have money to keep goods moving into consumption.

I am told discharged warworkers need not worry about being unemployed, because they have savings to fall back on. I am quoted the fact of $140 billion of cash reserves, with the presumption that this entire sum is in the pockets of warworkers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just one simple example will be revealing. Wage earners hold about $16.5 billion worth of the $165 billion in outstanding war bonds.

With these bondholders unemployed and without substantial unemployment compensation, this backlog will go to pay house rent, food, clothing, and utilities bills, insurance, and other basic costs of maintaining a home and family.

Automatic machinery in postwar production will have so high a production quotient, so much more can be turned out with fewer people, that it will become increasingly impossible to sell the output unless the mass of workers are continuously employed at high wages. The kind of society we have organized makes high income of the mass of people an economic necessity, quite aside from the ethical truth that common men and women should have a fair share of the good things of life.

This fact makes more apparent than ever the utter fallacy of the doctrine of "pouring in at the top," which was repudiated in the 1932 election when Herbert Hoover was turned out. In spite of the people's decision, there has been too much of the philosophy of paying business ever bigger profits with the idea that some of the purchasing power would trickle down. It does not do so; I have already shown how such wealth clots in the economic system. Perhaps the idleness of this wealth would not matter if the mass of workers in the Nation had guaranteed incomes. They would spend, which would create sales, orders, and production. But when corporations have the reserves and will not spend them, when workers have little or no reserve to spend, sales decline, orders stop, and production is held to that fraction of capacity which pays the highest profits at the lowest level of operation. This is the vicious downward spiral in operation.

Here, then, is the primary reason for the full employment bill, S. 380. Through this bill, it is proposed that the National Government shall step in with certain guarantees. These will reassure the individual businessman, and he will expand his production.

The proposal is quite moderate in the face of the situation before us. The realization that we stand on the threshold of the atomic age is beginning to dawn on us in fuller understanding. We must catch up with new concepts while as a nation we discard some of the old concepts-shifting, sorting, winnowing so that necessary change will mean progress, not merely change for its own sake. The better the matching of mental attitudes with technology, the better will be our new world.

A second gigantic World War in our times, at the end of which we midwived the atomic bomb, has forced us to adapt ourselves to new techniques even before our social and political institutions were adapted to the older era. The result is an even more rapidly extended technology, still further out of line with our institutions.

The gap has been enormously widened, just when we had begun to close it somewhat by the modern social-economic legislation once called the New Deal. A British columnist wrote recently in a London newspaper:

While the general election killed conservatism in England, the atomic bomb killed it all over the world.

There is time to speed up lagging mentalities, but not much time.

AN UPSIDE-DOWN APPROACH

I say these things soberly because of the bill before us. This bill is not conceived for an atomic age; it is a bill which should have been law a decade ago-certainly 2 war years ago. It does no more than direct the President to gather certain information, embody it in a national budget message, and recommend action to Congress.

Even while I support the bill, there is a certain word in it which alarms me. "When there is a prospective deficiency in the national budget ***" it says. The bill gives private enterprise two chances to make good-once under its own steam, and once with a stimulating injection by Government. When private enterprise then fails, it calls for making up the deficiency. This is not the vision we should have of the brave new world we hope to build.

The concept of the CIO unions is not that Congress shall benevolently step in when private enterprise is found wanting and give the people something to keep them from starving. Our idea is Government planning and preparation of a national program which will permit the American people to achieve the full potential of what they can do for themselves. We say that the Federal Government is the instrument through which we can all work together to accomplish full employment and a high annual income. We do not like a deficiency approach which presupposes failure to reach our full capacity and assumes that the duty of Government is nothing more than to shore up deficiency.

"Deficiency" thinking is an upside-down approach to the potentialities of today. Now, for the first time in our history, all Americans can have abundance because with our gains in science and technology

we can create abundance. This is not talk against private enterprise; rather it is a plea for a program that will permit private enterprise really to do its stuff. Especially, we conceive of it as a plan to give private enterprise vast new markets for goods and services their most imaginative sales managers never dreamed of.

Senate bill 380 provides the machinery for the planning, the estimating, the calculating of our full potential. We do not look upon this and related legislation in the manner of a vice president in charge of sales trying to figure out how many units of his company's product he can sell in a market where only a fraction of the people are employed, and where those who do have jobs have incomes so small they constitute only a trickle instead of a river of purchasing power. We are approaching the question from the other side.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING FOR ABUNDANCE

We need to determine not how many people can normally buy shoes or afford houses with plumbing, but how many pairs of shoes the American people need a year and how much plumbing. We need to gear our economy to an overall full employment plan of that kind, industry by industry, with some governmental guarantee that the individual businessman will be able to dispose profitably of output expanded in accordance with such a plan. This is the concept set forth in the CIO reemployment plan adopted in Chicago last year.

At the beginning of the atomic age we need to make an entirely new approach to the question of production and consumption. It is a problem in social engineering, more complex that designing a bridge or computing stresses in a skyscraper because people and their feelings and desires are involved. The job can be done; it must be done if our institutions are to survive.

We know we can produce abundantly; we have done it for war. This bill will be a first step toward doing it for peace. Only such full production will keep healthy our agriculture, labor, industry, and business.

There are people in the Nation who are afraid of a program of full employment and production. Even in Congress, there are those who have village minds in a cosmopolitan society and manage to hold a penny so close to their eyes that they hide the whole blazing sun. The existence of these timid and frightened souls make more imperative the energy and devotion of the rest in advancing this constructive and progressive program.

The last point I want to make is the urgent necessity for speed in the passage of this bill, and of the supporting legislation as well. If the bill were law tomorrow, it would not be applicable until the new fiscal year which begins July 1, 1946.

On the situation we confront the most important fact is this: Counting the 12 million men and women in uniform, we have employed 64 million people in the war effort. Allowing that some 5 million will leave the employment market and that 2 million will remain in military service, there remain 57 million who need jobs. To them there is added an annual increment of half a million young people of employable age.

Congress, like the rest of us, needs to rise to the challenge of these times and match its decisions and its performance with the opportunities of the atomic age.

[From the American Political Science Review, December 1945]

MAINTAINING HIGH-LEVEL PRODUCTION AND
EMPLOYMENT: A SYMPOSIUM 1

I. A PRACTICAL APPROACH

(BY JAMES E. MURRAY, U.S. SENATOR FROM MONTANA)

I

America has triumphed in the greatest war in all history, but we have yet to face the major enemy at home-unemployment and all the tragic waste and misery occasioned by it. By now it is hardly necessary to stress the grim fact that unemployment is a real threat. We have seen the first impact of demobilization and reconversion in many areas of the Nation, especially in communities where aircraft and shipbuilding industries boomed in wartime. Some measures have been taken to cope with these shortrun difficulties, and others are now under consideration. But the real danger lies beyond the present demobilization period. Fear has been creeping into the heart of all Americaour returning soldiers, our war workers, our young graduates facing an uncertain future, our older and handicapped workers a fear that relates to what will happen as things get back to "normal." The dread lies in the word "normal."

We know, of course, and we are constantly being reminded, that for a while one may expect activity of boom proportions-that those who have saved during the war will be purchasing the cars and radios and refrigerators that they have gone without for years, that agricultural and other exports to the devastated world abroad will be at a record peacetime high, that producers will be spending feverishly to restock inventories and replace wornout capital equipment. However, these are temporary factors which will end all too soon. Nobody has forgotten that they quickly petered out after the last war. When backlogs at home and abroad have been filled, the postwar bubble will burst. Meanwhile there are basic difficulties in our system that will emerge just as soon as we get back to "normalcy." It became apparent in the last depression-and the experts all agree that there is something wrong with the distribution of income in our economy. Purchasing power tends to become clogged and to pile up in idle hoards. Not enough of the income created by production gets into the hands of those who will spend it back into production. The results are less output, fewer and smaller incomes, à decrease in jobs, slowing down of the wheels of industry, depression, mass unemployment.

1 Planned and arranged by Fritz Morstein Marx, Queens College.

2 Chairman, Senate Committee on Education and Labor and Senate Special Committee on Small Business; senior sponsor of the proposed Full Employment Act.