"Full Employment"

With a big smile and 18 brown wood pens with stub steel nibs (which he passed out to friends), Harry S. Truman signed the Employment Act of 1946. It was only a shadow of the original "full employment" bill, which contained Government assurance of a job to everybody who wanted one. But it might still, with luck, become almost as important as Harry Truman seemed to consider it.

The new law sets up a permanent council of three full-time economic advisers to the President, at salaries of $15,000 a year. Their job is to help the Administration and the Congress decide what the Government should (and should not) do to help the U.S. economy function smoothly and prosperously.

The council will have no enforcement powers: it will have to stand on the prestige and good sense of its members. In setting it up, many a Congressman acted with tongue in cheek: the council could easily become a national cartoon subject.

Yet the Government, with or without advice, with good judgment or bad, is bound to be the most potent single factor in making or breaking the U.S. economy. Its tax methods and spending alone (especially if the postwar budget stays on the $25 billion plateau which Harry Truman has suggested) will shape the whole course of U.S. business and society.

If the new economic council became a respected voice of prudence and wisdom, it would well earn its $45,000 salary. And it could hardly do worse than the improvised, off-the-arm economics of such recent dilettante practitioners as Henry Morgenthau and John Snyder.

Last week, the President also:

P: Took a threeday, Potomac rest cruise on the White House yacht Williamsburg --a consolation prize for the Florida visit with Winston Churchill which he had to miss because of the steel crisis.

P: Appointed North Carolina's ex-Governor Oliver Max Gardner, longtime friend and New Deal aide to Franklin Roosevelt, to the little-publicized but important post of Under Secretary of the Treasury.

P: Prepared to attend a luncheon of the tired people who worked out the steel wage-price formula. Menu feature: a Missouri ham. Said one alarmed wag: "I hope he doesn't appoint it to something."

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