Critics Damned

To businessmen who have been screaming for relief from taxes, to the Republican Party-which has been crying for reduction in Federal spending, to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce which wants to repeal the Wage-Hour Law--to all these and sundry other critics Franklin Roosevelt this week boomed his answer. In his best oratorical form, before the friendly American Retail Federation, he virtually defied all critics, announced that the New Deal would not give them an inch.

On the public debt: "Our national debt is after all an internal debt owed not only by the nation but to the nation. If our children have to pay interest on it they will pay that interest to themselves. A reasonable internal debt will not impoverish our children."

On cutting expenditures: "I sit in my office with a business man who thinks the surest way to produce customers is to balance the Federal budget at once. I say to him--'How?' Sometimes he says--'How should I know? That is your job.' Sometimes he says--'Cut the budget straight through 10% or 20%.' Then I take from my desk drawer a fat book and it is apparent at once that he never has seen or read the budget of the Government of the United States."

On straight relief as opposed to work relief: "I tell my visitor that never so long as I am President of the United States will I condemn millions of men and women to the dry rot of idleness on a dole. . . . I do not have to be told that 5% of the projects are of questionable value. . . . I am proud of the fact that 95% of the projects are good. . ."

On cutting taxes: "There is a hullabaloo for the repeal of the undistributed earnings tax. You would think that this was the principal deterrent to business today. Yet it is a simple fact that out of $1,100,-000,000 paid to the Federal Government by corporations, less than $20,000,000 conies to the Government from the undistributed earnings tax--less than 2% of the total. . . . I am wholly willing to have this $20,000,000 tax . .. repealed on two simple conditions, which are based on principle. . . ." (The two: raise it from the big corporations, find another substitute for taxing private holding companies.)

On those who would take Government out of business: "That school is eager to gamble the safety of the nation and of our system of private enterprise on nothing more than their personal hunch that if Government will just keep its hands off the economic system customers will just happen. . . . They are actually the wildesteyed radicals in our midst. . . . We are conservative New Dealers. . . ."

On priming the pump: "Consumer buying power is the milk in the coconut of all business."

Solution: Leave things alone. "At $80,000,000,000 [national income] the income from the present taxes will be sufficient to meet expenditures on the present scale--and actually to reduce our relief appropriations."

> While Mr. Roosevelt was slapping at his critics, Congress was taking cracks at him. The Senate again killed his old love, the proposed Florida Ship Canal. Both

Houses ruled that the Navy could buy no more foreign canned beef--after Mr. Roosevelt had stung Western Congressmen last week by declaring that the Argentine brand was better than the U. S. brand.

> Rather than trouble himself further with disputes over designs proffered by rival companies, the President told the Navy to abandon its plans, announced last fall with much gusto, for a new dirigible (TIME, Nov. xx)

*The G.O.P. have just announced that they would celebrate "National Debt Week."

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