Vote Catcher

There were no fancy curlicues in the postwar picture that Reconstruction Minister Clarence Decatur Howe painted for Parliament last week. Conservatively com posed, the Liberal Government's economic canvas looked like a vote-catcher.

If re-elected June 11, the Government would have no truck with radicalism. Said cheery, aggressive Minister Howe: the emphasis of its plans would be on the unfettered operation of free enterprise. War time taxes would be eliminated or at least reduced as soon as possible, to provide plenty of opportunity for private profit. There would be no splurge on public works. Private investment would be encouraged by low interest rates, and by loans from Government lending agencies. Wartime anti-inflation controls would be kept only for "a smoother, more rapid transition to a prosperous peacetime economy." Minister Howe named specific aims:

P: About 4,600,000 jobs after the war (compared with 3,693,000 at the start).

P: Annual exports of $1,750,000,000 (up 60% in dollar value from prewar years, 15% in volume).

P: 50,000 new housing units in the first full year after V-E day.

One project the Government had designed to promote postwar prosperity, the five-month-old Industrial Development Bank, made a progress report last week. The bank, a kind of little-business RFC, has thus far made 33 loans totalling $1,340,500--to 20 different kinds of manufacturers (including paper, textiles, ceramics, glass), in most cases for expansion of plant or for new machinery.

The total loans were not large. But there was an indirect benefit evident in increased loans by other banks: they have had to shed some of their timidity rather than lose business to the IDE.

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