$100,000,000,000 Guess

Franklin Roosevelt's new budget may have been the wildest guess in U.S. history. He asked Congress for a whopping $100 billion, but what the Government would actually spend was surrounded by ifs, hedged by whens. The ifs & whens all depended on the month and year when Germany is beaten.

The invasion chief himself--General Dwight D. Eisenhower--had already said that S (for Surrender) Day will come for the Nazis in 1944. But Franklin Roosevelt was being deliberately pessimistic. His request for $100 billion assumed that Hitler would still be fighting in full fury at the budget's end in June 1945. Victory sooner might possibly mean a 30 to 40, or even 50% cutback in war production. This was what war planners guessed--but no one knew for certain.

Astronomical Nightmare. Mindful of the question mark, chastened by 1,005 pages of figures in fine print, the nation's editorial writers chewed their copy pencils and tried manfully to make the budget sound like something less than an astronomer's nightmare.

Franklin Roosevelt was asking for over twice as much as the U.S. national income in 1933. World War II's cumulative cost to the U.S. by 1945 would be $397 billion --a third of a trillion. The public debt would soar to $258 billion--ten times the highest debt of the 1920s. The interest alone would be $5 billion a year--bigger than any pre-New Deal peacetime budget. The President, in his twelve years as Chief Executive, was spending three times as much as all 30 of his predecessors put together.

These were mathematical immensities to joggle even a figure-jaded populace. But the truth was, Franklin Roosevelt's budget for fiscal '45 was down slightly from the actual cost of fighting in the first six months of '44. He was asking $90 billion for war expenses in fiscal 1945 (the other $10 billion was for nonwar expenses, debt retirement, and veterans' benefits which would be twice 1943's $600 million). A year ago, he had asked for $100 billion for war expenses alone, and had spent $92 billion.

Demobilization. Three times in his message the President suggested that Europe's war might be over earlier than mid-1945. Said he: "If hostilities end on one major front before they end on other fronts, large-scale demobilization adjustments will be possible and necessary. . . ." But he warned that the budget would not drop as quickly as production. There would still be tremendous sums required for mustering out pay, and contract termination payments.

To help pay these staggering sums, the President asked Congress for higher taxes. But he did not suggest what kinds of taxes should be laid--mention of a sales tax being notably absent. Said he: "Individual incomes will be approximately 40% higher in the calendar year 1944 than in 1941, after payment of all taxes. Corporate profits after taxes are running at an alltime high. . . . Let us face the fact-- the failure thus far to enact an adequate fiscal program has aggravated the difficulties of maintaining economic stabilization. . . . The estimates presented in this budget are based on the assumption that the wage and price line will be held. . . ."

If that line were not held, an even bigger question mark would curl around Franklin Roosevelt's fluid budget for fiscal '45.

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